‘Public Domain’⁣⁣
Patrick Etherington and Jiayi Jacob Zhang⁣⁣
Opening November 15th








Beyond the ‘Public Domain” of copyright. Lays where we want to be: Kubla Khan's stately
pleasure-dome.1

In the NFB documentary The Summer of '67 by Albert Kish & Donald Winkler, the
filmmakers review two older Toronto films that followed the shifting and “turbulent”
landscape of 1967’s “social and cultural revolution”, following up with participants of those
films two decades later.2

In a scene of a young couple embracing along train tracks in a
sunlit field, participant Doreen Foster “objects to” the documentarians invasive filming of
something “terribly personal”, twenty years later Larry Frolick who was also in that scene
reflects on the “horror” and “issue” of being a documentary filmmaker where “personal
things are probably the only things worth filming and they are painful for a lot of people... or
private...[lost in thought] I sure can remember the smell of sunlight on her hair though.”3
What are the subtleties of these dynamics of power where does authority hold between the
observer and observed, the binary of public and private?

In > Jiayi Jacob Zhang’s “Mayday!” the invocation of the image of the (fallen) celebrity in all
its violence and fantasy is quartered and restaged to an “intimidating scale”.4 Following the
boom and bust of public perception, do we cannibalize the formerly venerated Star? Totally
consuming the public scandal? Both in its descent and return?

In > “for mothers” Patrick Etherington has taken three photo transfers from 511on.ca to
depict snapshots from the roadside cameras used to help Ontario commuters monitor
traffic flow, weather-related road conditions, and accidents.5 The images are ephemeral,
updating and replacing older ones, one might see in brief: Midnight on an empty strip of
Highway 6 near Tobermory; an hour later an “incident” the pixelated de-rendering of a
crashed car; in the morning the light streams of speeding traffic.

  1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan, or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment., 1816,https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43991/kubla-khan.
  2. The Summer of ’67. Canada: NFB, 1994.
  3. Ibid, 49:18–50:42.
  4. From a conversation with artist Jiayi Jacob Zhang, where when describing his workmentioned a “restaging” of the image to an “intimidating scale”
  5. “Ontario 511.” 511 Ontario, n.d. https://511on.ca/.



Written by: Isaak Fong