Kevin Schmidt, Wild Signals, 2007
video
9 m 42 s
Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, purchased with support from the Audain Foundation, 2008

Kevin Schmidt’s video Wild Signals presents a vast snowy landscape, devoid of people, that is occupied by a concert stage. As the fog machine fills the stage with mist, concert lights flash and a melody begins. The song that repeats itself is based on the theme for the 1977 film by Steven Spielberg, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Schmidt has reworked the call used to communicate with extraterrestrial life in the film into his own rock rendition, and as we expect more to happen, the music fades, the light flashes for the last time, the fog slowly dissipates, the stage darkens. Wild Signals subverts expectations of a traditional concert and performance, making the landscape into a character and holding it in place within a moment that is not stable.

Kevin Schmidt is an installation and lens-based artist who is interested in examining the nature of spectacle associated with cultural production and interventions into nature through mediations that often traditionally belong in more urban or staged settings. Wild Signals, produced while in residency in the Yukon Territory, was original commissioned for the Belkin exhibition Exponential Future (2008) curated by Scott Watson and Juan Gaitán. The exhibition included the practices of eight Vancouver-based artists who considered the contemporary art landscape of the city at that moment. Wild Signals emerges from the enquiry of the exhibition into the contemporary imaginations of its time that also offered a look into possible futures.

As the days darken, we are reminded of our deep relationship to the land and cultural celebrations of light and a new year ahead. In a culture consumed with celebration and spectacle, what does Kevin Schmidt’s Wild Signals offer as an alternative, a “do it yourself” in how to think about our cultural landscape? As we think about a frozen lake in the Yukon and a performance for no one, how might that frozen lake resonate now, seventeen years in the future, in our rapidly changing climate? A changing season, a changing landscape, a changing world, all these are at the forefront of our minds.