For Immediate Release

Gareth Bate, Penance Performance

Gareth Bate, Penance Performance

Onlooker during Penance Performance

Gareth Bate's Penance Performance video debuts on YouTube.

Watch Video on YouTube...

An anonymous blog commenter has come the closest to the essence of Penance:

"If he had attempted to cross the street and succeeded it would have given us hope. If he attempted and failed he would have been looked upon as a martyr and inspired others. But to make no attempt at all to cross the street, and to actually retreat displays the reality of contemporary thinking about our environment, ie, it's not worth taking the chance."

The performance video Penance is intended to represent a bizarre act of self-punishment and humiliation for the guilt of environmental destruction. Gareth crawled on his stomach with a reconstructed field of grass on his back along Toronto’s Queen Street West from Soho Street to Spadina Avenue. He then crawled backwards. After two hours he had to give up. It was painful and tiring. The piece captures a sense of helplessness in the face of the overwhelming accumulation of problems facing the world. What can I do? Gareth sees this act as half serious and half ridiculous.

Reconstructing the body piece out of grass gleaned from the countryside was itself a reflective act. Agnès Varda’s beautiful film The Gleaners and I was an inspiration for the gleaning process. The Penance video moves back and forth between the agonizing performance, the bewildered response of onlookers, and contemplative scenes of gleaning grass in the countryside. The public response seemed to be mixed between considerable curiosity, confusion, indifference and hysterical laughter.

This body of work was created while using The 401 Richmond Career-Launcher Prize. Penance is usually exhibited along side the "Lament" painting series.

Reception: Penance has had over 5000 views on YouTube. When it was first uploaded it became the 12th most discussed video for its category in Canada. It has been reviewed in the Toronto Star, Xtra, the climate change magazine Checkerspot, Things of Desire Blog, L’Express , Glendon Campus paper, Globe and Mail, Snap Toronto and Metropolitan among others. It was hotly debated on a prominent Canadian political blog by Garth Turner

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