Extracts From Patience

Every work evolves a form. In this presentation, launching a new series at Green College featuring Canadian and World Writers, multi-media artist Daniel Canty attempts to untangle some of the threads that course through his works. Mapping imbricated orbits, tracking transformations of scale, he will endeavour to expose the lines of force of his poetics, which takes the wonders of the written word as its starting point, and modulates their wavelength into a host of living forms. There will be talk of the fidelity to images, of mise en livre and electric art, naïve science and chains of chance, of the aesthetics of friendship and a very loose doctrine of cycles. He will try to expose how the poetics of language, of taking one thing for another, and coming up with something else, can lead one back into the thick of things, to touch the texture of time, and achieve the work of patience.

Daniel Canty is a writer, director and artist living in Montréal. Since the end of the 20th century, he has made books, films, interfaces and installations and was the dramaturge of numerous stage works. He sees writing as an agent of invention and metamorphosis, capable of creating “hosts of living forms” (Darwin), and that fiction is a part of reality.

His works of fiction and nonfiction, and all shades in between, include Wigrum, The United States of Wind, VVV, Mappemonde, La Société des grands fonds and the online serial Costumes nationaux.

Daniel studied literature and the philosophy and history of science in Montréal, publishing in Vancouver, and film in New York. He has taught event design at l’Université du Québec à Montréal and writing at the National Theatre School of Canada. In 2014, he was artist-in-residence at the Studio du Québec in London and was elected to the Québec Academy of Letters in 2017. He has many projects.

(www.danielcanty.com).