Blue Tape Around a City Block, 1969
9 m 51 s
16 mm film converted to digital

Forest Industry, 1970
2 h 6 m
16 mm film converted to digital

From January 9 until April 13, 2025, the Belkin’s outdoor screen will show Glenn Lewis’s films Blue Tape Around a City Block (1969) and Forest Industry (1970) daily between 9 am and 9 pm. See below for screening times.

Lewis’s two early experimental films Blue Tape Around a City Block and Forest Industry, examine the mapping and documentation of land in urban and rural contexts. These films follow Lewis looping surveying tape around points in the cityscape / landscape, as the film loops around the reel. Lewis has participated in moves from the city to the country (specifically from Vancouver to the Sunshine Coast) beginning in the late-1960s, along with other artists such as Carole Itter, Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov.

In Blue Tape Around a City Block, Lewis uses blue surveyor’s tape to demarcate a downtown city block in Vancouver, delineating the urban grid used by planners to establish spatial and financial order on the land. The area is bound by Homer, Pender, Hamilton and Dunsmuir Streets. Dressed in workers overalls, Lewis moves intentionally around people and corners, all the while wrapping the tape round the built landscape, across the empty spaces of parking lots, overtop of storefront signs and around the corners of stone buildings. He begins and ends in the same place, the rectangle complete.

Forest Industry follows Lewis marking, again with blue surveyor’s tape, a one mile by one quarter of a mile section of land on the Sunshine Coast. Like Blue Tape, Lewis starts out dressed in overalls, cutting through the forest, across roads, golf courses and under powerlines. The film is complete when he returns to his starting spot, no longer dressed. Critic Joan Lowndes writes, “In the end he is bare, natural man in nature, slender as the cupbearer of the gods, advancing towards the accomplishment of his mystic task; the joining of the tape to the starting point to complete the square.” (Vancouver Sun, July 3, 1970). When shown at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1970, the film, which was shot by David Rimmer, was projected to slowly rotate around the gallery at the same speed as the film; the corner was turned in the room when the corner was turned by the artist. It was presented with live music by Martin Bartlett and created an immersive experience.

Lewis’s use of survey tape was also employed in the work Taping of the Critics (1972), which is not being shown here. In August 1970, on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Lewis with Michael Morris taped up a group of visiting international art critics with blue tape and filmed the event.

Screening times