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Prof creates murder mystery in an art gallery

Still from ‘Knock’ by Lance Winn and Simone Jones, 2006

5:02 p.m., Feb. 27, 2007--There is an unusual murder mystery presentation going on at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta, Canada. Entitled Knock, the mystery is a roving, moving art film installation, projected on walls, ceiling and floor that reveals a fictitious murder taking place beyond the camera's eye.

Lance Winn, UD assistant professor of art, has teamed up with Canadian experimental artist, Simone Jones, assistant dean and associate professor of art at the Ontario College of Art, to create Knock. Curated by Sylvie Gilbert, Knock will be exhibited until March 4 before moving to Montreal.

In making the video, a robotized camera was mounted on a tripod that moved side to side and up and down, Winn said. Three actors from the Banff Center portrayed persons involved in a love/murder triangle, who continually die and reappear in the cycle so that the murder mystery is never solved and the viewer never quite knows who is dead or alive.

Knock gets its name from knocks on doors in the film. The knocks activate the video projector by sound to change direction, leaving the action that was going on suspended.

As the curator, Gilbert writes, “We typically look at thousands of images and camera movements on a steady screen--and rarely do we experience the movement of the camera in such a theatrical way.”

Winn currently has another work, ‘Life on Mars,’ in an exhibition, “Art in Place,” at Space 301, a contemporary art venue in Mobile, Ala.
Winn and Jones, who met when both were teaching at Carnegie Mellon University, have teamed up on other installations as well. Truncated focuses on a three-dimensional view of the trunk of a human body, and Projektor is a work underway, taking place in a prison tower setting with a sweeping light searching for and finding a prisoner.

Winn is an explorer, as well as an artist, pushing the boundaries of art by combining modern technology and materials with more traditional media. In a statement about his art, Winn writes, “As my work moves between different methods of production and reproduction (drawing, casting, performance, film, video, robotics), I am trying to test both the possibilities and the limitations of our various modes of communication.”

Winn currently has another work, Life on Mars, in an exhibition, “Art in Place,” at Space 301, a contemporary art venue in Mobile, Ala. Using a finger to make repetitive drawings on his computer (a bad drawing tool, he said, so there are mistakes incorporated in the drawings), he then had the drawings lasered onto 100 stacked plexiglass sheets to achieve the three-dimensional effect he was seeking, representing Mars, as an escape from life on Earth.

A collection of his work will be shown in the Freeman Gallery of Albright College in Reading, Pa., next Fall.

Winn has been busy at UD as well. This summer he accompanied visual communications students to London, and he curated the “InWords: Art of Language” exhibition currently at Old College.

Trained as a painter, Winn is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and has a master's of fine arts degree from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.

Article by Sue Moncure

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