In the installation “100,000,000 bushels more” (2023), Simon S. Belleau explores the teleprompter as an object of study. The artist repurposes the teleprompter’s screen from its intended function of aiding speech delivery to employing it as a substrate for text-based, quasi-imageless, videos. Three video channels are distributed across as many tele-prompters situated so that viewers can move around them. The work revolves around a significant event in television history that predates the teleprompter’s invention. In 1947, the president of the United States Harry S. Truman delivered a live televised speech, announcing to Americans measures for food rationing to aid Europe in recovering from the post-war economic crisis. Before this, filmed government announcements were only shown in movie theaters as news-reels, with various delays. While reading the announcement from a sheet of paper, the president’s head moves back and forth between the page and the cameras. The broadcast was deemed a communication failure and subsequently an apparatus was developed to enable politicians, as well as news anchors, to deliver their scripts more smoothly. Initially, it featured two display units on either side of a podium with vertically scrolling paper strips. However, it still required the speaker to turn their head slightly from left to right and from right to left. This paper scroll was later replaced by a mirror placed directly in front of the camera lens, reflecting a video image of a text projected from another horizontally-slanted screen. The setup allowed the speaker to create the illusion of making eye contact with a remote audience in a direct address. In a segment of the work Belleau overlays the faces of several presidents from 1947 to 1997 like a palimpsest. Closing the parenthesis opened by Truman’s speech, Bill Clinton is shown as having attained complete verticality, minimizing head movements while reading with the help of a teleprompter. Besides a historical survey, Belleau is focusing on a repertoire of gestures that can’t be compressed in time and space. The work investigates the historical relationship of the teleprompter to biopolitics in the period leading to the late nineties.

Simon S. Belleau is a Canadian artist and filmmaker based in Rome, Italy. He completed in 2015 an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was the recipient of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Fellowship. Belleau has participated in multiple exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Europe, notably at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montreal, the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Italy, and the Sculpture Center in New York. Between 2019 and 2021, he was an Artist-in-Residence and Lecturer in the Concordia University Sculpture department, and he is also one of the nine laureates of the Fonderie Darling’s 2019-2023 Montreal Studio Program. His work is in the collection of Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal as well as private collections in Canada, the United States and Europe.

Founded in 2022, Eli Kerr represents an intergenerational program of artists working from critical and experimental positions across mediums of sculpture, drawing, photography, painting, moving-image and installation. Located in Montréal, the gallery is enmeshed in the unique cultural context of being the third largest French-speaking city in the world while also being situated in North America. The gallery recently opened its new location in a 140 square meter storefront on Boulevard Saint-Laurent in Le Plateau- Mont-Royal, where its exhibition program focuses on advancing the practices of its represented artists and creating discursive encounters with their work. Eli Kerr regularly participates in international art fairs including, Art-o-rama Marseille, The Armory Show, NADA Miami, and Liste Art Fair Basel.