Canmore artist Dan Hudson departed April 8 for a year of residency and exhibitions in Berlin, Germany.
“Right now, Berlin is the centre of the art world and that’s the reason I’m going there,” said Hudson in an interview April 7.
“Germany is really open about artists coming there to live and work.”
Multidisciplinary in his work, Hudson is a photographer, sculptor, painter and video artist. He first came to the area in the mid-1980s for a residency at the Banff Centre and then returned to live in Canmore in 1989.
“Spending the time (at The Banff Centre) is what compelled me to come back and live in the mountains,” he said.
Originally from Ontario, Hudson studied fine art at York University in Toronto and anthropology in California.
“I’ve also had an entire career as an action adventure photographer, and I’ve had photos in pretty major publications all over the world,” he said. “That whole career took over my life for quite a while and I’m now just getting back to being a full-time career artist and things seem to be going really well.”
In Germany, Hudson’s residency will be at the Takt Kunstprojektraum, an artist-run initiative, where the main goal of the residency program is to provide artists visiting Berlin with an environment that will foster their creative energies.
His work will be on display at Berlinerlist and the Meinblau Gallery in Berlin, Nordart in Budelsdorf and Jour de Fete, The Private Space Gallery, in Barcelona, Spain.
The Nordart show, though, is what Hudson is most looking forward to.
“To be an artist, you have to have people come see what you’re doing and Canmore is so far out of the way from the main art world,” he said, noting his conceptual contemporary art can be a bit out of place in Canmore, but will be well received in Berlin.
The central work he will display is Around The Sun, a three-part video installation. For these videos, Hudson takes short video clips filmed in set locations at different times of the year and then pieces them together in a continuous loop, with accompanying music.
“I don’t quite like the look of a time lapse video,” said Hudson. “Clouds look cool moving fast, but the ground is all jerky and trees blowing in the wind won’t look smooth, so I decided to try this idea.
“I wanted to do something more fluid and over a longer period of time, so I committed to this for a whole year before I knew if it’d even be possible to put this together.”
The videos are wall-mounted and displayed in frames, to appear like paintings.
“Some of the early paintings I did are three panels that are different times of the day, or times of the year, and I’ve worked with that theme quite a bit,” he said.
The first segment, News, Weather & Sports, has previously been shown in various places, including the Art Gallery of Calgary and the Visual Voice Gallery in Montreal. The second and third segments, River and Time Traveller, will be seen for the first time.
“All the individual clips are shot with video and I lined them up as best I could, so when you watch it you’ll see a whole year go by in three minutes,” he said. “Ultimately, for someone to watch it, it’s about the realization of time going by in your own life.”
Around The Sun will have its local debut at the Whyte Museum in Banff in 2013. To see the first segment online, visit Hudson’s website at www.danhudson.ca
