fifty3 Magazine:

Mark Templeton addresses the intertwined issues of the mortal body and the immortal soul using a plurality of voices, instruments, and imagery to create a cohesive rumination on death and what comes after--a moving meditation on the finite versus the infinite, while subtly challenging the constructs of belief along the way.

Templeton, a teacher and electro-acoustic multi-instrumentalist (guitar, banjo, laptop sample manipulations, etc.) collected field recordings during a visit to Europe's WWI and WWII battlefields and from interviewing his grandmother and terminally ill grandfather. Coupling these samples with guitar themes he was working with, he assembled colleagues to help him build music around these elements, recording live off the floor in a church - making the whole thing one giant field recording, with a warmth and depth that may have been lacking in another environment. (Access to a pipe organ and the literalness of recording in a place wholly preoccupied with the soul's destiny were presumably side benefits.)

The visual end of the project was a collaboration with filmmaker Sean Corbett, who trained at the Vancouver Film Institute. Corbett has an eye for the spectacular moments in everyday life, with most frames reading as almost painterly. Composition, colour, and light conspire to transform the banality of video into a real work of art, and he exploits the limits of the medium - the weird crispness, the flatness of certain perspectives, the in-camera digital effects - with a cinematic flair that is truly laudable.

The first screen of the DVD is a still of an ancient family photo of a couple in front of an Alberta field. Selecting "play" launches you into the journey that is fields awake. Darkness fills the screen, accompanied by a sustained note, otherworldly and faintly eerie. The blackness languidly resolves into a grey dawn, seemingly midwifed by plucked acoustic strings. Layers of sound cascade over imagery, which grows ever more lush. The sonic movements are punctuated by the spiritual conversations of subjects, which bookend different musical and visual themes. Much of the video initially is purely landscape, identifiably Canadian prairie. The man-made slowly asserts its presence, at first within a rural context, and then later purely urban vistas show up. These are treated exactly the same way as the trees, fields, and celestial phenomena in the rest of the video, nicely underlining the question of whether all things spiritual (the soul, an afterlife, a creator) exist independent of mankind, or whether they are a variation on the anthropomorphic principle - if they exist, they do so because we are here to believe in them.

After gorgeous explorations and gently melancholic meanderings, the piece intensifies. The pace of the images accelerates, the music becomes more aggressive, even angry. The loftiness and grandiosity of the piece gives way to the intimate and human-scale, trailed by a sense of bewilderment and fragility. A series of family photos, encompassing several generations, and some broader cultural signifiers, seems to talk about the kind of personal events that occur within a lifetime that shape our faith and the legacy of religious belief bequeathed to us by our family members and our social experience.

fields awake is hardly an unbiased work - by the final theme Templeton comes down firmly on the side of the existence of anafterlife. Big questions, however, merit big answers. The hopeful answer in the case of this piece is, quite literally, the proverbial happy ending.

Christa O'Keefe
Winter 2005 volume 6 issue 4