The new project from British conceptual artist Jamie Shovlin is a fabricated documentary about the imaginary exploitation film Hiker Meat, which Shovlin created by splicing together 1500 separate sequences from myriad low-budget slasher films from the last thirty years.
Hiker Meat may be a horror exploitation film, a low-rent iteration of the type David Cronenberg was making in the 1970s. And Jamie Shovlin may have created it by reassembling 1,500 film sequences from generically relevant films. Those fragments contributed to an assembly of sixty scenes, presented in an order that apparently addresses the iconic character of this highly structured cinematic form. Shovlin has never shown this creation in a cinema and has no plans to do so. Instead, he has taken a number of oblique approaches to defining what Hiker Meat might be and how it might have been created without his intervention, for example by presenting seventy-six feet of possibly archival blackboard storyboards. The project has now reached a new level of ontological uncertainty with Rough Cut (Hiker Meat), a gallery-based combination of a newly reconstructed “ making of ” documentary, an exact re-enactment (or unearthed archival fragment) of the film's opening and closing sequences, plus an original trailer and a few “ magical objects ” from what might have been Hiker Meat's production location.
NOAH COWAN
Presented and organized in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen Street West. Runs daily, September 5-15. Exhibition continues until December 29. Co-curated by Noah Cowan and David Liss.
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