ARTERY
ARTERY with music by Rezz
ARTERY chronicles Nolan's 3 month stay with his muse and includes music by Rezz.
After three years apart, the Canadian artist reunites with Sebastian at his home in Bavaro, a beachside resort town in the Dominican Republic. Sebastian’s departure from Buenos Aires was sponsored and documented by Nolan’s previous book project: Argentine Boys For Sale with music by Xiu Xiu.
Sebastian lives on the ground floor of a service building inside a gated community that caters to vacationers. Hidden from the adjacent villas by hibiscus shrubbery and palm trees, the apartment building mainly houses Haitian gardeners who service the surrounding grounds. Nolan finds the building’s stained walls and muddy floors difficult to tolerate and sets up a project. Paying Sebastian as his assistant, Nolan sets about painting the interior.
After two weeks, friction sets in and Nolan begins working with another building resident. A triangle develops. They embark on what seems to be a series of insidious cycles of purification and escapism as Nolan moves between the other two. Bodies, aesthetics, and natural resources are employed in a frenetic process of creation and destruction. Strobe-speed edits that call to mind the payoff of a slot machine invite the viewer to consider how they are shaped by the ideas of beauty, art, and hope.
In a rapid audiovisual experience that veers between heightened expectations and loss, ARTERY continues to demonstrate Nolan’s priorities and themes as an artist: complicity, privilege and theatre.