In the past half-century of Canadian avant-garde cinema, the nation’s filmmakers have often used the camera apparatus and its paraphernalia as tools for visual construction. At a time when avantgarde cinema was elsewhere developing an overtly romantic sense of the eye of the operator, Canadian artists such as Michael Snow and David Rimmer were using the same tools to explore uncharted territories, in an adventure of perception built upon the mechanistic properties of the camera.
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Cyprien Gaillard’s most recent 3D video installation Nightlife (2015) is a riveting visual and auditory experience. Moved by gusts of wind, the elongated branches of Hollywood Juniper trees sway in slow motion, dancing ecstatically as though rejoicing in their emergence.
According to @ArtHouseTrump, Wavelengths—the typically excellent experimental programs at the Toronto International Film Festival, were a mess this year. “TIFF couldn’t even get the latest Dorsky films! Pathetic! Make Wavelengths Great Again!”
Begin to Google “are we breathing …” and the most popular search finishes the statement with “the same air as Jesus.” Shared realities, coexistence, and collapsed time and history are some of the primary, existential inquiries of humankind. There’s an affirmation and fragility in knowing that we share our physical spaces, even on a molecular level, with people and events both past and present. Curator Ana Paula Cohen considers Yael Bartana’s practice through theoretical notions of cohabitation, aptly outlining Bartana’s non-linear and slippery depictions of time, space and the state of being.
The act of representation is a process of mediation, of formalizing ideological frameworks, of exercising power dynamics, and of producing relationships between subjects and objects. An apparatus for self-imaging, representation both permits and precludes the naming and seeing of ourselves and others in the public realm, often resulting in dissonance, differentiation and exclusion.
Leslie Supnet began creating animated films in 2008. Although her films have screened at festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival and Oberhausen, she is particularly fond of the camaraderie offered at artist-run spaces and micro-cinemas. After studying in Toronto, she has recently returned to her hometown of Winnipeg, a place that has been pivotal in the formation and expansion of her practice.
In the more than forty years since the artist and theorist Lucy Lippard announced the dematerialization of the art, it has become apparent, particularly to Lippard herself, that this proclamation may have been premature.
PAVED Arts, the new media artist-run centre born out of the Saskatoon Photographers Gallery, has been a longtime advocate and supporter of local artists with contemporary practices in photography. PAVED brings a conceptually rich addition to the 2016 festival with an exhibition of local Saskatoon photographers working in film photography, “Resolution,” curated by artistic director David LaRiviere.
Since the advent of the Portapak video recorder in the 1960s, the tools for video have been increasingly accessible to artists. The images taken by early video equipment were markedly imperfect; faint and ghostly records of flat grey forms. New movements were pushing toward conceptual and performative art, and many artists would use video as a tool to bear witness to, and give evidence of, this newly evanescent art.
In-Between Worlds is an ongoing series by Ottawa-based artist Meryl McMaster that grapples with complex questions of identity; addressing the ways contemporary Indigenous and cross-cultural identities are represented.
The exploitation of Indigenous culture has a long and fraught history in Canada and abroad. The donning of headdresses by hipsters at music festivals and the appropriation of Indigenous patterns in luxury fashion lines, like Canadian designers DSquared2’s “Dsquaw” collection, indicates that the commodification and misappropriation of Indigenous belongings continues to occur in contemporary Canada.
