HAPPY HOUR

Gallery B-312 hosts Happy Hour, an installation by Alberta-born Montreal artist Nelson Henricks, in his small room. In Silent Film, a film that Nelson Henricks directed in 1994, a voice-over says, "You asked me why this film is silent? I said, 'Because there's no way to record that scream. Let silence be the scream, at best, let the viewer hear his own scream. Let terror be so close. "I'd like to inscribe Happy Hour in the lineage of this talk, where terror is another word for "anguish". In Happy Hour, Nelson Henricks evokes this anxiety by playing on the comic form of resemblance and banality. Amusing from a particular point of view, the work revives an inexpressible confusion, an unspeakable discomfort. -The immense study that Gilles Deleuze made on cinema published in 1983 and 1985 inspired the philosopher to make a series of metaphysical remarks, one of which seemed to me to be on the verge of describing this discomfort.  Here it is without further explanation: "The daily attitude is what puts the before and after in the body, the time in the body, the body as a revealer of the term. The attitude of the body puts the thought in relation to time as that which is infinitely more distant than the outside world. Perhaps fatigue is the first and last attitude, because it contains both the before and after [...] the immense fatigue of the body, [...] which proposes to the mind "something to incommunicate", the "unthought", life. "-Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. L'image-temps, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, Collection "Critique", 1985, p. 247.

—Translation of a text by Jean-Émile Verdier