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Cold Morning, Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

The Canadian Pavilion exhibition, ‘Cold Morning’, presented three new films extending Lewis’ research in the fields of artists’ moving image and the broader culture of cinema and its changing contemporary forms. His invitation to represent Canada at the 2009 Venice Biennale and the 160-page catalogue reflect the significance of his contribution to these fields.

The project for the Pavilion consisted of three new works: ‘TD Centre 54th Floor’ (2009), ‘Cold Morning’ (2009) and a rear-projection based film, ‘Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter's Night, Skating’ (2009). These were presented in the context of an earlier rear-projection work, ‘The Fight’ (2008), and accompanied by off-site screenings of his 2009 documentary on the pioneers of rear-projection, titled ‘Backstory’.

Rear-projection is understood by Lewis as the moment when film became modern through its use of a ‘film within a film’. His use of the process today reflects on the critical juncture within contemporary filmmaking: as celluloid is replaced by High Definition Video, and new techniques eclipse this earlier form. Lewis’ hybrid combination of both technologies makes apparent the spatial and temporal strangeness at the heart of the montage effect.

Lewis’ practice is distinct in its rigorous cross-examination of the technologies of cinema through use of the full-scale technical apparatus of commercial film production, and its concerns with the complications of cinematic representation and its part in the formation of our relationship to the world. The consistent concerns of his research are ‘bits of cinema’ – seemingly pragmatic or incidental techniques (tracking, focus-pulling, the zoom or the crane shot) which in themselves contain, if re-contextualised through isolation or relocation, extraordinary phenomenological, optical or affective complexities.

Works from the Canadian Pavilion, seen by an audience of 365,000, have been exhibited in solo shows, Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver (2009); Museo Marino Marini, Florence (2009); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2013).