Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Draw down the sun. Dig up the gold. The urge to relieve a winter valley of permanent shadow and find fortune in alluvial gravel are part of a long history of desire and extraction in the far Canadian north. Cancan dancers, curlers, ore smelters, former city officials and a curious cliff-side luminous disc congregate to form a town portrait. Shot in location in the Yukon Territory. The disc that appears in the film was part of "Augural Pair", a set of public sculptures created by Stratman and artist Steven Badgett by invitation of the Klondike Institute of Arts and Culture "Natural and Manufactured" series. The works responded to ways value and speculation are connected to landscape and acts of removal.

Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes work that investigates power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Her themes range widely, as do the mediums she uses to question them. Recent projects have addressed freedom, expansionism, surveillance, sonic warfare, public speech, ghosts, sinkholes, levitation, propagation, orthoptera, raptors, comets, exodus and faith.  She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.