KATHLEEN HEARN

Song 1: Sky/Clouds/Birds is a score for music.  Over several months, I photographed birds floating on a canopy of wires in the sky while walking along a path under the hydro field close to my home. Miming sheet music, the lines within the images are rotated horizonal and centered to the page.  Birds become notes.  Clouds and sun indicators of tone.  The pace of pages and the pause between images become moments for breath. Referencing Satie, the landscape turned music is to be played in free time without measure, or bar divisions. The score is an open invitation for the player to create their own rhythm.  I intend a depiction of time and the relationship of sound to landscape. - 2023

Made across a two season residency in Dawson City, Night Walk [Cassidy], 1:23:48 – 2:14:11 AM is a book work comprising of images of hiding places popular amongst local youth for private and group gatherings function as intimate portraits and a mapping of place, time and nature as site for narrative possibilities. Intentionally cinematic, the images are lit with a single flashlight to reference the threat of nature in teen horror films and nature seen as site of liberation in coming of age stories. Grouped and spaced the images imply with the pace of walking.

This work was made with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and as part of a two-season residency project with the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, Yukon.

The Crossing is real time video of the landscape and ferry connecting East and West Dawson.

The camera observes the passing time of the river, the time of the land, the time of the day, and the time of the ferry.  Rocks quietly stand still, the river moves, the light fades and the ferry goes back and forth.  We wait while watching.  In the work I am interested in time, time’s plurality, and our awareness of it.  The work is part of an ongoing investigation into the use of time, soliloquy, and landscape as interlude in Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves.

This work was made with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and as part of a two-season residency project with the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, Yukon. 

Imagined Landscapes are a series of images generated from a workshop on portrait and landscape at Factoria in Havana Cuba (2018). All drawings were drawn by the photographed participant.

PORTRAITS

Los Chicos is part of an ongoing series of portraits made in the San Agustin community.

2014 - Ongoing

Los Chicos de 250 is a four part short film, formatted in the fragmented style of tele-novella story telling. It is the culmination of a year long project in San Agustin, Cuba where I worked with nearly 50 youth to tell their stories. San Agustin is a community on the outskirts of Havana constructed post-revolution to house the displaced. The film interweaves the stories of a group of teens, living on or near the main road Street 250, as they reenact moments of their experience as they enter adulthood. In the work we encounter the stories of Karla, Sahara, Melissa and Angel along with their friends, confidants, co-conspirators and antagonists told within the context and frame of the San Agustin landscape. The stories range from confronting sexuality, loss of innocence, gender and the desire for agency in a politically complicated context.



2015. HD Video, Run Time: 30:00

This series of encounters and collaborations are part of a two year residency project in Ndar (St. Louis) Senegal with a focus on local youth. Working with NBS (New Black Scorpion) dance group, teen musicians and skaters from Kronic Roller Family a series of images, sounds, projects and performances were created with support of the Institute Francaise, The Factory and WAAW residency.

The Warriors explores globalized youth culture as it plays out in the streets of Saint-Louis. Focusing on the Inline Skate group KRONIC Roller Family, the work, choreographed by members, records Abrame, Abou and Theirno and their peers as they perform against the backdrop of the city. In the video, members of KRONIC circle the island, looping through the streets as they mark out their territory while sounds of the city mix with sounds of their wheels cutting against the road. The sounds fluxes between the opposing forces of closeness and distance by playing back and forth between the sounds of the performers and those of the landscape. In their performance, the group blends elements of local and imported culture to perform their hybrid identity and sub-culture that is uniquely Saint-Louisienne.

2016
HD Video. Run time 5:30.

Shot in Skagastrond, a small town of 500 on the north coast of Iceland the photographs and videos depicts local youth performing themselves for the landscape. The work plays with notions of documentary by recording of teen rituals (often car based) and teen performances in the landscape. Part portrait, part landscape, part cultural commentary the work observes and collects experiences of youth living in a remote community.

In Argentina, age 15 is the year of Fiesta de Quince: the year that young girls become young women, a point in time when their “coming of age” is recognized. My interest in this transition led to 15 a collaboration with students close to the age of Quince from La Plata, Buenos Aires Home Institute. Starting with the questions: what does it mean to be an adult?, what are some the struggles of being a teen?, and how are these situations represented in media?, teenage girls Giuliana, Milagros, and Valentina selected a television character and situation they felt embodied characteristics and circumstance that paralleled their own. The selected scenes highlight Rachel from Glee dealing with loss and disappointment, Mar from Casi Angeles (an Argentine teen soap) dealing with the ups and downs of love, and Mora from Solamente Vos (also an Argentine teen soap opera) struggling with her family and her desire for autonomy.

2014
HD Video
Run Time: 8:15

The Boys interweaves conversations from iconic coming of age films (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Stand By Me, The River's Edge, Rebel Without a Cause) into a new teen drama. Taking a closer look at male bonding on screen; the film's characters struggle with identity, their place in the world, and what it means to be an adult. Josh wants the girl and Chris wants out. Over the course of the day Chris dishes five and dime advice to Josh who so desperately wants to be grown-up; in the end though it’s Josh who guides Chris towards the man he wants to be.

2014
HD Video
Run Time: 13:30

The photographic series The Detectives references classic Hardy Boy novels to look at male bonding and the role of fictional bildungsroman stories in the shaping of what it means to be a man.

2012.
30 x 40" Digital Prints

So Long… repositions scenes from the 1993 cult classic film Dazed and Confused into a contemporary context. Using non-actors born approximately at the time the original film was made, the new work creates a contrast of then and now. The borrowed scenes highlight the similarities and differences of the past thirty years to create a strange déjà vu and feature the ongoing awkwardness of teenage life and the struggle for authenticity.

2011
HD Video
Run Time: 5:00

In Eat ‘Em and Smile three young artists translate the 1984 chart topper Jump from rock anthem to a nostalgic love ballad. Performed in audition style, the work highlights the tensions between performer and public and reflects the culture of fame and stardom in our youth obsessed culture.
2009
HD Video
Run Time: 12:30