…the beginning is a 16 mm film of a 3/4" video of a 1/2" video of slides and photographs of paintings of a landscape - it is sort of a documentary. It is a film which satirizes art as product and advocates art as process

The film satirizes art as product and speaks for art as process. The artist is captured on film taking her painting "Trapped Under Glass" up the Prince's Island Bridge in Calgary. As she throws it off to a new beginning, she pays tribute to an immigrant woman, who in despair, threw herself and her children off the bridge and to their deaths.. The demise of her painting is the beginning of her film.

REVIEW

"Evans 2-1/2 minute video "The Beginning" was inspired by her inability to store a large painting she had made on heat-sculpted plexiglass. In her frustration, she recalled a day at the end of grade 11 when she and a friend threw all their school books over a bridge.

"When you turn this piece on its side (Trapped Under Glass), it looks a lot like wings" says the artist. "So I put it on my back, carried it to the Prince's Island Bridge, sort of like a Calvary trek, and threw it off. And I had Ellis Bartkiewiecz videotape it....Edmonton poet Mary Howes wrote a piece of text to accompany the videotape, "talking about beginnings, endings, bits left over from women's lives...art as process rather than product." Another collaborator helped Evans mix photographs of other of artworks into the production. She transferred the half inch videotape to three-quarter inch videotape, and shipped that copy off to the National Film Board to be translated onto 16 mm film." - Kate Zimmerman, Calgary Herald, November 1989.