Culture

The Seattle Art Museum is the first U.S. museum to survey the work of Flemish filmmaker and visual artist Nicolas Provost. The installation comprises five video works, showing the range of approaches Provost has brought to his filmmaking since 2003. Provost’s work is a reflection on the grammar of cinema and the relation between visual art and the cinematic experience. It walks the fine line between dualities, balancing fiction and fine arts, the grotesque and the moving, the beautiful and the cruel. His phantasmagorias provoke both recognition and alienation and succeed in pulling audience expectations into an unraveling game of mystery and abstraction. In some videos, filmic memory is stimulated through the use of short fragments from classic films by Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais or Russ Meyers, but Provost is as likely to utilize obscure B-films, contemporary cinema or thematic platitudes.

Provost has also written and directed several short and half-length fiction films. His work is broadcast, screened and exhibited worldwide on both visual art platforms and film festivals and have earned a long list of awards and screenings at prestigious festivals as among others The Sundance Film Festival, The San Francisco International Film festival, Cinevegas, The International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Viennale, and The Locarno Film Festival.