Filmed in a South Bronx high-school, Tabula Rasa explores the ambiguousness of appearances cultivated by institutions, the clues taht tells the history of objects, colors, textures, architecture and ultimately, psychological states of minds.

"Many works in this year's selection began life on film but were completed as videos, but most of them, sadly, evinced no cognizance of this formal hybridity. Grenier's tape is the exception, and as such was one of the absolute standouts at Views From the Avant Garde (NY Film Festival) 04. A stark, observational portrait of a public school, Tabula Rasa begins by exploring the empty halls of the building and setting those images off against a fragment of voiceover. A man, at this point apparently insane, explains that the wall is staring at him and threatening his safety. Later, we hear the interview fragment again, this time in its entirety. (A teacher is actually describing a technique he uses to disrupt potential aggression between students. ) This example encapsulates Grenier's strategy throughout the piece. Portions of audio-visual material are layered to form quizzical, disjunctive, poetic moments, whose basis in documentary reality are clarified only later. On the purely visual level, this is largely accomplished through his graphlike, vaguely De Stijl spatial compositions and his subtle video blending of color and tone, creating articulations between spaces that reveal otherwise unobservable experiential facts. In this way, Grenier proffers the truth value of his work only after is has been refracted through his gentle, exacting lyricism. In its tranformative, non-doctrinaire representation of the mundane, Tabula Rasa recalls the work of Bruce Baillie, films like Tung and Valentin de las Sierras, work that I had previous considered without equal." -- Michael Sicinski, The Academic Hack website.

Second Prize Winner Media City 11, Windosr, Ontario; Black Maria Festival, Jury's Citation (2nd Prizes), Views from the Avant-Garde, New York Film Festival; Onion City Festival, Chicago; Images Festival, Toronto; San Francisco International Film Festival, Festival International du Nouveau CInema de Montréal; Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany.