Candid camera

Whether depicting the peaceful beauty of Ontario's Algonquin Park or the bustle of commuters in a British train station, video artist Mark Lewis is interested in the landscape of everyday life.

'I think of [my work] as going back to the beginnings of film, when there was no cinema at all. It was just a way of capturing movement, and motion, and time.' —Mark Lewis

This year, the 51-year-old artist will represent Canada at the Venice Biennale (June 7-Nov. 22), the world's most prestigious contemporary art fair. Along with British artist Steve McQueen, Lewis is symbolic of a growing number of video artists exhibiting at major shows. As a longtime resident of London, England, Lewis also represents a more nuanced trend in the increasingly globalized art world: the expatriate artist. 

Lewis, who moved to London in 1997 to take a teaching job at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, pursues his fine art in his private studio, a lofty room in a former industrial building in South London. When I visited him back in March, one wall was lined with art books, films and DVDs; another was pasted with storyboards of the four films he plans to show in Venice, which he was in the process of finishing. Amongst the tapestry of loose-leaf paper, I recognized a Toronto street scene. Lewis, who was born in Hamilton, Ont., tells me that three of the films were shot wholly or in part in Toronto, where he regularly returns to shoot films and visit his family. He is reluctant, however, to describe his work as "Canadian."

"I don't think that anyone ever thought of my work as having a Canadian character, even though [the films] do have Canadian scenes," he says. "My films — I wouldn't say that they're generic, but at some level they have a universal character. But I still feel Canadian. Isn't that weird?"

Lewis's films are short, usually around three or four minutes long, with relatively little action. The movement of his camera, if there is any movement at all, is deliberate and slow, and suggests a heightened version of still photography, a medium in which Lewis used to work. His scenes are familiar — street corners, airports, building sites, the countryside — and they're sometimes beautiful and sometimes not.

"I make films of everyday life," Lewis tells me. "But I tend not to use the word 'cinema,' because it refers to the building where films are shown, which I don't use, and to a kind of narrative with a beginning, middle and end, which I don't do. My films invariably have no story at all. And I think of it as going back to the beginnings of film, when there was no cinema at all. It was just a way of capturing movement, and motion, and time."

Lewis's videos illuminate universal and contemporary themes: modernity, architecture, urbanity. The Toronto street scene in question was shot from the 54th floor of the Toronto Dominion Centre, an internationalist masterpiece designed by the architect Mies Van der Rohe. The film consists of a slow pan from inside the building across the large windowpanes, looking down toward the street. The camera moves rhythmically across the panes. A subtle reflection of the interior can be seen through the glass, as if suspended high in the air.

"The experience of looking down from 54 storeys inside one of the great modernist buildings is something quite spectacular. It changes the relationship of things to each other. Gertrude Stein once said, when she first flew in an airplane, 'Now I understand Picasso.' That's a modern experience, seeing things from above."

Lewis has an interest in cinematic history, though he claims to have no interest in making feature films. The Lumiere Brothers, often credited as the inventors of cinema in the late 1800s, are an important influence; Lewis has more than 15,000 of their films in his collection. He's particularly fond of the ones that document mundane street scenes.

In Lewis's work, there are also traces of a painting tradition where the foreground was typically occupied by images of church and state and the background of landscapes and scenes from daily life. In some films, Lewis gives his backgrounds a life of their own, using a now-obsolete cinema technique called rear projection, where the background is shot on a separate film — think of driving scenes in old black-and-white movies. Two of Lewis's Venice-bound films employ this technique. In one, the background is a film shot in January of the busy skating rink in Nathan Philips Square, part of Toronto's modernist city hall; the foreground, which features two actors pretending to skate, was shot in a Los Angeles studio.

"I love that old-fashioned technique," says Lewis, who is set to make a documentary about rear projection in conjunction with the National Film Board. "It literally creates the separation between the idea of church and state and scenes of everyday life, both metaphorically and materially. You've got the background as a flat surface and the foreground actors, and the two are working to create an illusion of integrity. Nevertheless, they're separated."

At the Biennale, Lewis will step into a world that is still very much governed by nationality. (Ironically, the previous Canadian entry, sculptor David Altmejd, was also based partly in London, England.) Since the Biennale's inception in 1895, participating countries (of which there are now about 30) have been tasked with building their own permanent pavilions around the city's famous Public Gardens. Over the years, the Canadian Pavilion has housed the work of Emily Carr, Patterson Ewen, Alex Colville and, more recently, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.

"When [curator] Barbara [Fischer] told me she was going to propose me, I told her I thought it was an unbelievably long shot," says Lewis. "I know that those decisions are often political: ‘What's your gender? What part of the country are you from? What's your age? Why don't you live in Canada?' I thought there were so many strikes against me, I didn't think it was likely."

While grateful for the opportunity to show on such an international stage, Lewis is wary of the attention. The phone has been ringing with all sorts of requests, he says, including people from Italian men's Vogue, who are set to arrive in days to put him in an expensive suit for a photo shoot. "I'm so terrified of the hype. No artist can survive the expectation," he says. "I know artists who turn down opportunities like this because they're worried about how it will disrupt their lives. I have to say there are many times this year that that might have been a good idea."

According to Barbara Fischer, who nominated Lewis for the Biennale to the Canada Council and who will curate the exhibition, showing internationally is critical to sustaining Canadian artists, as most of the buying power is still outside Canada. Many of the international curators and buyers who will flock to this year's Biennale will be familiar with Lewis's work, which has shown consistently in Europe and America over the past decade. His support from Canadian institutions, Fischer says, only came later; he now has work in the National Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal.

As the next tenant of the Biennale's Canadian Pavilion, Lewis is unclear what the outcome will be. Already, he is set for a small retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, a show at University of Toronto's Barnicke Gallery and an exhibit in conjunction with the Toronto International Film Festival.

"The expectations are high," says Lewis, beginning to crack a wry smile. "The constant attention is not necessarily on the work, it's on the idea of you being there."

Jakob von Baeyer is a Canadian writer based in London, England.