A reflection on the evolution of photographic art, since BlackFlash’s 1983 founding
Articles
I recently had the pleasure of talking with Jordan Bennett about his art practice, the revitalization of Mi’kmaq visual culture, international travel, Indigenous ink, and being a multidisciplinary artist.
Like cryptophasiac twins who speak a tongue that only they can understand, Jason Cawood and Colby Richardson, as the collective Phomohobes, have created a specific but ambiguous lexicon of images, arranged in adherence to the grammar of their shared visual language.
Out of the international underground film movement of the 1960s, an alchemical avant-garde slowly formed. It formed in the home darkrooms and studios of artists who imagined a new cinema, an altogether handmade thing, wherein the conventional processes of the photochemical lab could be reshaped, the recipes refigured, to transmute the film strip’s latent image into something nobler than an image merely processed.
I first met Québécois filmmaker Guillaume Vallée in Percé, Quebec, at Les Percéides: La Grande Rencontre des Arts Médiatiques. At the festival, Vallée presented Le bulbe tragique, 2016, a film which was awarded Best Canadian Work at the 2016 WNDX Festival of Moving Image, and performed Promenade Éphémère, an expanded cinema collaboration with filmmaker Charles-André Coderre and musician Charles Barabé.
Jeff Bierk is a Toronto-based photographer and visual artist whose documentation of his closeknit group of friends has garnered national and international media attention (and consternation).
Kyler Zeleny’s “Found Polaroids” (2011– ongoing) is a project that began with the collection of a few Polaroids at various flea markets in Canada.
Philippe Deneault: What have been your most recent projects, or what have you been currently working on?
Throughout much of the 15-minute duration of Manuel Piña-Baldoquín’s 2015 video work, Naufragios, the viewer’s focus is directed towards the liminal visual space where an anonymous body of water meets the sky.