58min 3-channel HDV video projection, NTSC; 1 lightjet print on Fujiflex Crystal Archive paper, 48” H x 30” W (framed in white tropical wood); 20 lightjet prints on Fujiflex Crystal Archive paper, 28” W x 21” H (framed in white tropical wood); wall drawings, various dimensions; 8 drawings, ash on paper, 28” H x 21” W; assorted printed matter
Canaries (the bank and the treasury), is an installation consisting of video, photography, wall drawings, and works on paper. The project is an idiosyncratic and speculative research that attempts to link two seemingly disparate belief systems and cultural practices that have deep roots in the city of Hong Kong — the banking industry and Taoist funerary rituals. The bank in the title refers to the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (now the financial services multi-national HSBC) an entity that was founded in 1865 several years after the colonization of Hong Kong in order assist British merchants engaged in regional trading of various commodities including opium. The treasury refers to the Taoist concept of a spiritual “treasury” run by bureaucrats from which individuals obtains a loan at birth and must repay when they die in order to pass into the spirit realm. The bank and the treasury blur into one another in the context of Hong Kong through the shared language of transfers, debt, and currency or when Taoist practitioners burn paper effigy money at funerals emblazoned with the HSBC logo (in Hong Kong commercial banks print currency instead of a central monetary authority).
These types of interactions are explored in a three-channel video component of the installation that focuses on the HSBC headquarters building in Hong Kong, an iconic skyscraper completed in 1985 by the British architect Norman Foster located in the historic core of the former colony on the original site of the bank’s previous two main branches. The tower’s large stacking, modular components and signature structural beams were prefabricated by firms from across the world, shipped to the port of Hong Kong and assembled on site. Foster’s extravagant ‘global production model’ is mimicked in a set commissions I initiated, approaching effigy artisans in Hong Kong, London, Vancouver, and Toronto to reproduce sections of the HSBC tower, which were then shipped to my studio in Toronto, assembled and burnt. This performative sequence is documented and weaved into the video along with historical and contemporary footage that reveals the bank’s ubiquitous presence in the Hong Kong and London and its oblique connections to Toronto and even London, Ontario (footage shot in the world's leading wind research laboratory at the University of Western Ontario that did wind testing for Foster's HSBC tower in Hong Kong).
The video’s three channels are stacked in a vertical formation adopting the compositional principles of traditional Chinese landscape painting that splits a single vertical pictorial field into three seamless perspectives: a bottom third that grounds the image with an establishing element that bring the viewer into the image; a middle section that is dominated by a bold vertical element that thrusts the eye up to the top of the picture; and a top third that functions as a distant and more ethereal zone. This composition strategy combines numerous perspectives on a single subject, creating collages that mix locations, time, figures, structures, and landscapes.