Eric Gaucher’s work lies in the abstract place where different forms of art—music, poetry, painting, and filmmaking—intersect. The local artist made the film Steve and Dan Shoot Each Other as a result of the many different creative endeavours he has embarked on over the last 20 years, endeavours that include being in bands, making documentaries, and more recently, creating experimental films.
“I began by making music videos and then moved on to making documentaries,” says Gaucher, “and I would say within the last seven years my practice has been dedicated to experimental filmmaking and abstraction.”
Gaucher says his own creative process often begins with him enjoying someone else’s paintings and taking influence from them.
“I’m an advocate of painting,” he says. “I’m a fan of painting. I consume a lot of painting, and what I mean by that is that I look at a lot of painters’ work and how they can inspire me within my own work.”
Gaucher says imagining how those paintings could move is the beginning of the inspiration for him; that inspiration then results in many different emotions.
“It could be from joy to hate to transcendence to whatever the painting will evoke within my emotional scope,” he says.
Gaucher says his background in other forms of art—such as music—complements experimental filmmaking well.
“It completely lends to it, because I approach the work as if I’m composing music,” he says. “I don’t compose it through some kind of narrative, I compose it through feeling and emotion and juxtaposition and rhythm.”
Gaucher says that people who enjoy noise and experimental music might enjoy the film; through filmmaking, he provides that noise-based sound with a visual representation, using a hybrid of digital and classic animation, drawing directly onto film. The process of constructing and executing the work for this show took two years, and it was a challenging but rewarding process, says Gaucher, who’s interested in pushing experimental filmmaking to new places.
“I thought making a hybrid digital version of direct animation would enable me to do that,” he says.
Steve and Dan Shoot Each Other
Saturday, July 29 to Tuesday, August 12
Flux Media Art Gallery
medianetvictoria.org/flux