User:Simonewharton/Sandbox14

Circle is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Description
Circle (1969) is a conceptual film by the Canadian artist Jack Chambers. Filmed over the course of a year, it is the culmination of 4-second daily exposures of the exact same spot in Chambers’ back yard. Chambers’ constructed a peep-hole for the camera lens in the back wall of his house. The camera remained undisturbed on a small box built into the crevice. Every morning for the whole year, Chambers would turn on the camera for 4 seconds resulting in a 28 minute film. He never changed any of the camera’s settings instead being more interested in a view of nature that had not been manipulated by the artist. The subtle changes in light are dictated by shadows, the changing seasons, the time of sunrise, and the weather. Circle is just that – the life cycle of one specific natural place.

'''“…there was no sense of nature having performed for an audience. It was neither making up nor touching up like an actor in the dressing room at curtain time.”''' – Ross Woodman

Chambers is probably best known for his manifesto on perceptual realism and his paintings done in this manner. His film, Circle, however, is probably one of the best examples of this philosophy. With Circle, Chambers was stepping away from all the interference of artistic conventions. He believed that life should be able to speak through art with out our perception of it being changed to achieve a certain aesthetic quality. Together, art and nature can demonstrate a “creative Energy”, as Chambers described it, but only if the artwork is true to the subconscious natural energy that unadorned nature gives off. Chambers’ technique of collaging his films by splicing, editing, and layering film strips is his way of removing any distinctive qualities from the image so that all that remains is the unconscious energy of nature.

On another level, entangled further in Chambers’ theory of perceptual realism, is the evidence of the “life-death-cycle.” Not just literally in the changing seasons, but also in the artist whose life force is intrinsically tied to an imageless source – the essence of nature itself that is beyond the level of consciousness.