Currently at the Visual Voice Art Gallery, Montreal artist Bettina Forget plays with the concept of semantic tension in her series of videos titled Forever – Change | Change – Forever. The artist is screening her videos like a series of election campaign ads and is turning the Visual Voice Art Gallery into a voting office. Visitors to the gallery are invited to cast their vote for either ‘forever’ or for ‘change’ – leaving it entirely open what these evocative words mean to each person who participates in this poll.

Two of the gallery’s walls are lined with small prints of stills captured from each video – one wall features the word ‘change’, the opposite wall the word ‘forever’. The words are spelled out in matches (which are then set alight), in popcorn kernels (which are allowed to pop in a frying pan), in metal shavings (which are then pulled around by an invisible magnet), in cinnamon floating on top of bath water (which is then drained), etc. There are nine videos in all, and each time the artist utilized a natural force to either destroy or reveal the words – asking the question: is change forever, or are we forever changing?

Visual Voice Art Gallery
space 421
Bettina Forget
Forever – Change | Change – Forever
February 27 – March 20, 2010
www.visualvoicegallery.com