Video works by Kyle Canterbury

The avant-garde dilemma: claim it art, you’re pretentious; claim it trash, you’re ignorant. It surprises me how an entire novel of ideas can be built in an image, a flash of unmoving images, or a movement of flashing images as detailed by Fred Camper in his interpretation of Kyle Canterbury’s experimental pieces collectively called Redefining Video. Squirming grains like wiggling worms in a thousand flickers of blinding grey light, patches of indistinct figures in a faint strobe of computer monitors, geometries glowing in gloom then metamorphosing into acute polyhedrons of diffused anger, plummeting pixels and patterns of puddles and Dubya Bush in castrating ocular madness, dark spots forming glandular fickle shadows of unknown origin recklessly dissolving into subterrania, branches of trees and swaying leaves over prehistoric architectural masonry (that’s what it looks like) and houses replete with polite mix of prodding silence and drab existence  – - all seem nonsense to me, but then nincompoopery is a handsome trait. Gazillion possibilities in video, even our MMDA has its own display of mockery, and whoever claims to anything these days? Words do not own us; we own them. The amiable access to video turns a nobody into a peabody; Canterbury’s hip and critic-friendly works know no boundaries – - it is an imposing subliminal torture to sit through a succession of his works but he can go on and on and on and on to examine the varying textures of his chosen medium and still come up with the same proof: an iconoclast never stops, he just keeps on destroying.

*3rd .MOV International Digital Film Festival, Bacolod, Dumaguete, Iloilo, Manila (Robinson’s Galleria), September 20 – October 7, 2008.