It’s no secret that I’ll take any opportunity for a dance break. I also love people rockin’ out in home videos. So my friends, I just hit the motherload. Here’s what artist Margaux Williamson had to say about this video that she made mainly of clips of “teenagers dancing in their basements”, all taken from Youtube:

A friend first directed me to Youtube in 2004. The first thing I looked up was “whales”. I really had a craving to look at some whales. And like everyone else, I went on from there. It all looked so much to me like a palette – just like the “real” high quality palette of pigments you get from the ground that I was at first so suspicious of. After years of thinking about small human gestures, I was able to see a bigger portion of that rainbow – completely undirected by me, and completely of our world.

My long-time friend and first collaborator, Ryan Kamstra, read a book by Jeffrey Sachs called The End of Poverty. Then he wrote a song called End of Poverty. Ryan’s song has a line in it that goes: You struggled so hard for a petty theft of affection / only to find – you’re totally ordinary. That line, and everything else about the song, made it clear that it was time to try out this new palette of ordinary human gestures. I focussed on basement hues and teeangers.

The video is playing on a loop at the Harbourfront Centre Gallery in Toronto until November 9. Check out more of Williamson’s work here, and more of Ryan Kamstra’s band Tomboyfriend, here.