CHRISTOPHER McNAMARAis a film and video artist based in Windsor, Ontario. His work has been shown in galleries and museums throughout Canada including Western Front in Vancouver, YYZ and Mercer Union in Toronto, Galerie B 312 in Montréal, the Khyber Art Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia and recently at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. He collaborates with Dermot Wilson (a Hamilton-based artist). Together, they are known as machyderm. McNamara also belongs to an audio art collective known as Thinkbox. Recent projects also include working with electronic music producers to create hybrid sound and visual compositions and a short video poem produced for Bravo Television. McNamara is now a Lecturer in Film and Video Studies at the University of Michigan.

"When we were all together" speaks of the real or perhaps mythic time when cinemas were one of the central meeting places of a community. Specifically, this single channel projection (or monitor) piece is an abstract treatment of the former Michigan Theatre in downtown Detroit. Having been turned into a parking garage many years ago, it still has many of it former palatial references. A proscenium here, a torn velvet curtain hanging out of reach of the commuters who park there, a carpeted stairway that would lead to a sealed-off balcony, a darkened projection booth all would be ironic if they were not so sublime.
The effects of sprawl and the deaths of downtowns hardly faze us anymore. It is a fact of capitalist life. Yet, for many of us, even if we are not old enough to really know when the movie palaces were shiny and filled with its revellers, there are the narcotic effects of nostalgia to fill our hearts with warmth and wistfulness In the book Silent Screens, Molly Haskell writes of this kind of abandonment: "The closing down of small movie theatres across the country signaled the passing of a way of being together."

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