Storm
Paul Wong, 2009
exhibited as video loop with sound, variable dimensions
and available as a single channel video with credits, 7 min., colour, stereo
also available as a photo series (2011) and as an editioned flash key (2015)

Storm, quite simply is a video recording of a car ride at night in hurricane forces. This is visual art that delivers us from the purely visual back to the world of the physical experience with all our senses awakened. Instead of bringing us the installation photographic image – or the digitally enhanced photographic simulation – these artists direct us from the world of images to the world of things, inviting us to grapple with them at first hand.

The éminence grise of the show is the video artist Paul Wong. However you may view his work (and it can at times come across as enfant-terrible affectation), there’s no denying that – when it comes to singing the body electric – he’s the go-to guy, for more than three decades making works that explore, among other things, race, human sexuality and the occasional foray into drug abuse. (One work here, titled Perfect Day, extols the pleasures of ice cream, heroin and cigarettes.) His most powerful work in this show, though, is Storm (2009), quite simply a video recording of a car ride at night in heavy rain. We look forward to the road ahead, while the noise of the slapping windshield wipers and water hitting the roof surrounds us in a deluge of lush, percussive sound. What you see and hear, you also come to feel in the body: the delicious pleasure of being inside a warm, dry place while all about you nature rages

-Sarah Milroy, Globe and Mail Review – How Soon is Now: Contemporary Art From Here

Distributor: V-Tape, Winsor Gallery

Credits:
Videographer: Paul Wong
Driver: Brian Howell
Post-Production: Brian Gotro
Produced with the assistance of: B.C. Arts Council
Canada Council Media Arts
National Film Board of Canada
Recorded in the U.S.A.