Crashing Skies

2012/6 channel installation/5:02 min looped/experimental/16mm transferred to HD 

Collection of the Ottawa Art Gallery

Like a performer, the landscape transforms before us; it keeps us restless. In her video Crashing Skies (2012), Ottawa-based artist Penny McCann transforms the ordinary rural landscape of Mount Forest, Ontario, into an otherworldly dreamscape. She unravels the “empty land” as a farmhouse stands in a copper field of scratched emulsion and split-toned horses amble dreamlike across the frame into inky, underexposed blackness. The hand-processed 16mm imagery creates an elliptical inner world of nostalgia that is heightened by atmospheric sounds, both natural and manufactured. There is the faint air of an alien historical discovery of lost footage from some kind of an apocalyptic future.  - Ola Wlusek, Curator, Expeditions, Ottawa Art Gallery

“Brilliant… show stopping.”    Paul Gessell, Ottawa Magazine