Keep the Faith

Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw has long been interested in cinematic trips, most often of the psychedelic variety. Across a number of film and video shorts, installations, performances, and photo works, as well as a notable parallel career as a musician, Shaw has repeatedly returned to questions of altered states and euphoria, whether chemically induced or otherwise. Born in North Vancouver, Shaw has lived and worked for the past decade in Berlin, and recently completed the final instalment of his since-dubbed Quantification Trilogy, three films that stand as the artist’s most ambitious and conceptual body of work to date. The Quantification Trilogy brings together several overarching concerns that have emerged throughout Shaw’s career, most notably an interest in science, faith, documentary, dance, and euphoria.

Dynamic, enigmatic, complex, and beautiful, Shaw’s works inhabit a distinct stylistic realm. Frequently indebted to vintage aesthetics, technology, and genres, his earlier films, as well as the Quantification Trilogy, are too slippery to ever remain in the realm of pastiche. Instead, clever writing, talented performers, and unexpected influences—including music videos, the National Film Board of Canada, the films of David Cronenberg, and rave culture, to name a few—bind and elevate the artist’s work into something unique and uncanny.

Shaw’s oeuvre “speaks to a fundamental longing for in particular, Shaw tends to avoid the present, instead employing an impressive and technically accomplished mix of retro-futurism and speculative imaginings informed and executed, at times, by vintage technology.