Common Collective is a group of artists who design and build multi-sensory environments using video, sounds, and sculptural elements to document transformations in the physical environment, exploring rural landscapes and post-industrial spaces. Controlled Burn is a site-adaptive video and sound installation that documents a barn burning that took place in the small town of Listowel, Ontario in 2018. While most barn dismantling is done by specialized demolition crews, another way to raze a barn—to erase it from the landscape entirely—is to burn it to the ground. This burn, conducted for research purposes, was attended by the Listowel Fire Department, academic researchers, the press, and cordoned-off members of the public. With a background in documentary and commercial filmmaking (Simon Brothers and Luke Mistruzzi co-founded Powerline Films), the collective compiled a comprehensive digital archive of the event including videography, ambient audio, interviews, and borrowed infrared thermography. They even planted a sacrificial microphone at the centre of the burn which became part of the 5.1-channel soundscape designed by Nick Kuepfer. The installation provides an immersive experience which envelopes the viewer in the events of the day.

As you enter the Reid Gallery, a large single-channel video is projected onto and through a netted screen, spanning the width of the gallery. A silhouette of the barn hovers in the middle of the screen, defining its absence with the negative space. Past this entry sequence a video projection of the blaze wraps seamlessly around a suspended scale model of the barn. The three-channel video, fixed to the geometry of the barn, has been meticulously synchronized by editor Mark Preston using an augmented reality technique known as projection mapping. Floating in the center of the gallery, the model (constructed by theatre and set designer Jeremy Cox) simultaneously serves as a three-dimensional projection screen, a virtual effigy of the barn, and a symbol of agricultural consolidation. Using video and sound from the day, Common Collective have created an immersive space that documents a specific event but touches on larger agricultural, climate, and resource discussions of the changing rural landscape. 

Originally conceived as a reflection on urban development and agricultural consolidation, the context of this exhibition in Grand Forks raises the frightening flipside of an uncontrolled burn. As climate change extends and intensifies forest fire season across our region, this work captures the magnitude and turmoil of a building engulfed in flames, a cautionary reminder of our vulnerability. The Controlled Burn viewer, who may be accustomed to passively viewing audio/visual media as the intended, stationary bystander, must now actively move through the installation – never quite able to grasp everything at once. The disruption of a linear narrative and distortion of a singular event is a recurring element that detaches the work of Common Collective from the conventions of documentary and commercial filmmaking; it is this calculated chaos that allows their work to thrive in the experimental proving grounds of contemporary art spaces.