J. Andres Ruiz, Concept image, 2009

Garde-temps
by Tania Ruiz Gutiérrez

Under the Cambie Street Bridge at West 2nd Avenue
(by Olympic Village Canada Line Station)

Paris-based artist Tania Ruiz Gutiérrez’s imaginative open-space video art installations and programmed digital works have gained her considerable worldwide recognition. Garde-temps, her lightbased sculptural work under the Cambie Street Bridge, traces the geometric abstract forms of weaving to the fabrication of modern film and photographic images. Using a camera that captures heat, movement on the walkway under the bridge is revealed on a large colourful vase located beside the pedestrian path.

The literal English translation for Garde-temps is timekeeper, but it is more commonly used in French to denote a timepiece. In the case of this artwork, it infers the notion of time capacitor or time condenser, if such a thing was possible.

The idea for this artwork was inspired by fragments of a poem by Rosario Castellanos, A word to the heir:

“I will remain where I am, like those receptacles whose
plug-holes got clogged...
Time…slowly swamps over me.
It moves and does not elapse,
It swirls and lingers”

This artwork is a vessel for the distorted appearance of the place and the passersby, and emits moving pictures oscillating between the abstract and the figurative. Its surface alternately shows images captured by the nearby close circuit thermal camera and a series of pre-programmed patterns obtained by transforming these images.

I have been exploring different subjects for years, amongst them the spatial dimension of motion pictures, cities as living organisms, early cinema apparatuses, and weaving techniques. This light-based work represents in a certain way the encounter of these disparate yet alongside paths. It is my intention that this object retains the dynamics of the place, much like a weaving work conserves the memory of its fabrication. Garde-temps, more than a sculpture, is a fountain — a fluid source of variations on a theme.”

-- Tania Ruiz Gutiérrez, 2009

Artist Biography

Tania Ruiz Gutiérrez lives in Paris, where she has worked as an independent artist since 1999. Born in Chilé and raised in Bogota, Colombia, she directed several award-winning fiction and documentary films before turning to openspace video art installations in 1997. She received her PhD in art from the University Pantheon-Sorbonne in 2004 and continues to lecture extensively on film and art.

Ruiz Gutiérrez was artist-in-residence in the International Artist Studio Program in Malmö, Sweden in 2004/05. In 2006, she was commissioned to create a monumental installation for the new Malmö ‘Citytunneln’ Central Station, the biggest permanent video art installation ever commissioned in Europe. She has also produced a number of temporary commissions as well as multi-media installations for exhibitions at the Centre for Contemporary Images, Geneva (2008) and the Fifth Seoul International Media Art Biennale, Seoul (2008). Garde-temps is her first North American commission.

Picture It