VIDEO

Katheryn’s artistic vision is in large part inspired by her exposure at an early age to the magical musings of Laurie Anderson. The idea of bringing worlds to life by combining Visuals, Word and Music has been the blender in Katheryn’s motivational kitchen ever since and she has been experimenting with video concoctions now for over two decades. What she lacks in budget, equipment and training, she makes up for with imagination and determination. She edited her first videos by hooking up two VHS machines, using the pause button on one to ‘import’ clips from various source tapes onto the other. However, the pause button on the VCR only held for six seconds before it released so the process involved a lot of VHS source tape cueing. Suffice it to say that process had to start more than once. Although her equipment is marginally improved now…her methods continue to be…unconventional to say the least.

From 2019-2021 Katheryn developed a fascination for working with cameras and screens in portrait orientation. She built a sideways TV which she has used in performance for a couple of shows including a 2019 screening of live/recorded version of Giant Tree and more recently as part of her theatrical work “Alley Flowers” in 2021 at the Cumberland Weird Church. At the bottom here are are a few samples of that work.

Bjornekaeden Revisioned (released Dec 2018) was shot in the back alley of the Alsco Laundry Service in Vancouver. The portrait style point of view reflects the relative stillness of place and how it absorbs impressions of the people who inhabit it. The music is a variation on an old Danish folk tune Bjornekaeden which roughly translates to baby bear. The musical duo Teapot in the Tuba is Katheryn on accordion and Mike Allen on clarinet. The video was shot and edited by Darcy Muenchrath of Hinge Video.

 

A haunted jellyfish out of water finds itself having to navigate it’s way through the city streets. This video was made and edited within a day. No crew…just Katheryn with an umbrella hat, a piece of fabric and her antiquated video camera on a tripod teetering alone on various street corners.

Ursula is a down and out woman taking refuge in a parking lot. A shadow of her former self, she is like a fish out of water or a polar bear without a place to land. Like a fading mother earth she is faced with her own eventual demise and she drinks to forget that she is indeed a mother.  Yet despite the hopelessness of her situation, her true and elemental self still shines through in fleeting moments of connectedness. The story is told with simple, surreal visual imagery and is accompanied by an audio track that mixes natural, urban and spoken sound bites.

This videopoem was developed in a collaborative process with two dancers, Maia Love and Autumn Young and an actress/singer, Lara Doucette. It playfully investigates a contemporary relationship between beauty and death. In as much as beauty is a mask that can empower its wearer; beauty has a deadly face that has been capitalized on by marketers and which draws on mythical roots. The cool ethereal detachment that magazine beauty evokes can easily be interpreted as an imitation of death and also a connection to something primal. In this video, the Deadgirls, who are very much alive, take this concept to their own extreme in a game where they assume questionably glamorous poses of beauty-in-death at home and on the streets.