How Will I Know I’m Here

The audience enters a large dimly lit gallery. The floor is covered with cedar chips and sounds of crickets fill the space. In the middle of the room a ten-foot wooden moose stands facing the far wall. At the end of the room is a 15 x 20 pool of water with benches along the sides. Surrounding the moose are tree stumps. The audience takes a seat on the tree stumps or on the benches around the pool of water, where they can dangle their feet in the water.

When everyone is seated, I enter the gallery, walk to the moose and open a small door in the side of its body. A projector sits inside the chest of the moose. I reach into the chest and thread the 45 minute 16 mm film, How Will I Know I’m Here, into the projector. The lights lower further and the sound of crickets stops. I turn on the film, close the door to the moose and exit the gallery as the film projects onto the far wall above the pool of water. As well, the film images reflect in the pond of water and mingle with the feet of the sitters.

…“MacLennan’s film describes a paroxysmal moment at which a psychic and/or physical “dam” breaks. We are asked to rethink the connection of body and psyche, not as a hermetic unity, but as a porous field conducting intense levels of energy.…MacLennan’s fractured narrative evokes sensorial experiences so powerfully that they are, in affect, revalued. We may look as far afield historically as Maya Deren to find a filmic precedent for MacLennan’s descriptions of feminine space and relationship to time.”

Parachute Magazine, Annie Martin

Venues

Gallery Articule, Montreal
Art in General, New York
Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver
Ottawa Art Gallery, Ottawa

Reviews

Next Magazine, Rome, Italy
Parachute Magazine, Montreal
Accent on the Arts, Ottawa Cable TV