For the past 40 years, Vivo Media Arts Centre has been a hub for independent artists who intersect audiovisual and performance mediums in a groundbreaking fashion.
Located at 1965 Main St., Vivo operates as an education and training centre, a production studio and an international video distributor.
"We provide opportunities to experiment and we bridge the gap between emerging and established artists," said Emma Hendrix, a sound designer and general manager at Vivo since 2008. "We don't just focus on established artists, and that is unique."
While video art doesn't necessarily have a plot or narrative, it's not the same as experimental film. The art form explores the boundaries of the medium itself and often challenges the viewers' expectations of video shaped by traditional cinema. Today single-channel or installation is the most common form of video art seen in galleries. Single-channel video is a projection of a single image onto a wall or screen, and an installation often consists of several video pieces mixed with other mediums such as sculpture or live performance.
In the 1960s, video artists used multi-channels or several screens to project multiple images all at once. One of the more notable pieces at the time, Ira Schneider's 1969 installation "Wipe Cycle," combined live images of gallery visitors, found footage from television and pre-recorded tapes.
Vivo's roots go back to 1973 when more than 160 international video artists gathered at the Vancouver Art Gallery for The Matrix Video Conference. The conference resulted in the collection of 80 video tapes gathered by multimedia artist Paul Wong and marked the beginning of The Satellite Video Exchange Society and Video Inn, which became Vivo.
Vivo's publicly accessible video library, originally located on Powell Street, exposed artists to video art from all over the world and armed them with equipment such as the Sony Portapak, one of the first portable video cameras that allowed users to edit and modify images and instantly play back what was recorded. Prior to this new technology, film production was expensive and not readily available to the average consumer.
According to Hendrix, when video art first emerged it wasn't considered an art form and many video artists faced felt shut out of the established art scene.
"They felt it was a closed system, [so] they wanted to open up spaces because there were no alternatives to established traditional curation," Hendrix said.
To mark its 40th year, Vivo is developing an online media library and archive that will include photographs and video clips from the collection of more than 6,000 tapes. Vivo also plans to launch an exhibition later in the year that will include interviews with key Vivo participants over the years. One of those people is longtime artist and Vivo archivist Crista Dahl, whose exhibition Crista Dahl: Life Rhythm, a Retrospective opened on Thursday.
Born in Seattle in 1934, Dahl moved to Canada with her four children to avoid her son being drafted into the Vietnam War. Since then she has participated in performance works, art education at the Vancouver Art Gallery and now takes care of Vivo's extensive archival materials.
Curator Elisa Ferrari says the exhibition "will look like Dahl's living room with filing cabinets and bookshelves displaying her archival system she has constructed for herself." Through audio fragments, interviews and portraits, the exhibition will also explore Dahl's fascination with visual language and how the brain works.
According to Dahl, Canada isn't usually known for being number one when it comes to artistic innovation, "[But] video art is the only art form where Canada ranks first."
And Vivo has thousands of tapes to prove it.
More details at vivomediaarts.com. [email protected]
