Steve McQueen: A Hunger for Art

UK-born, Amsterdam-based artist Steve McQueen has received much media coverage this spring; his award-winning feature film Hunger, which ended up on several 2008 top ten lists and earned him the first-director prize at Cannes, went into wide theatrical release in March.

Yet to the art community there’s even bigger news ahead for McQueen—he’s representing Britain at the Venice Biennale, which opens in June. The biennale seems a rather fitting way for the artist to mark the tenth anniversary of his Turner Prize win. It’s also a way for him to indicate the next direction in his varied career, which has also included being an official war artist.

As the mega-events add up for McQueen, the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff is opening a small but important exhibition: a look at McQueen’s 2002 work Once Upon a Time.

In keeping with McQueen’s eclectic oeuvre, Once Upon a Time focuses on a set of images that NASA sent into space on the Voyager 1 in 1977. The images, chosen by popular astronomer Carl Sagan, were inscribed on a disc called the Golden Record, and they were intended to provide extraterrestrial life with some introduction to life on earth. Also included on the record are the sounds of thunder, birdsong and spoken greetings in dozens of languages.

For the artwork, McQueen takes those 116 Golden Record images—which includes everything from plant close-ups to cityscapes, but excludes images of war and death—and sequences them using a slide projector. The sound of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, is also projected into the space. (This latter element has a Canadian connection, as it’s derived from recordings made by University of Toronto linguist William J. Samarin.)

The overall result ponders human life both as it might be seen by aliens one day and as we might experience it right now, whether famous or not—dizzyingly, simply, absurdly, optimistically, minimally, richly or all of the above. (107 Tunnel Mtn Dr, Banff AB)