Film Categories: Abstraction

  • Farewell Transmission

    The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation opened the doors of the CBK Transmitter Station in 1939 to serve the prairie region of Canada. “Farewell Transmission” is equal parts an indexical record of the demolition of CBK in 2015 and a subjective response to the residual media documenting the event. The building is framed with tension preceding its destruction: emulsion pulsated as if with decades of radio transmission, creating an unsettled eulogy for a cultural institution. Selected screenings: Dobra Festival Internacional de Cinema Experimental (Brazil, 2017); Festival du nouveau cinéma (Montréal, QC, 2017); Antimatter Media Art (Victoria, BC, 2017) Best Short Film, Saskatchewan…

  • The Burning Desire in a Dollar Bill

    The Burning Desire in a Dollar Bill shows how the special interests of media conglomerates and their parent companies mould our latent desires at a young age, later leaving us confused as to whether we are lusting after the sexually charged imagery or the products being advertised. The film argues that the act of purchasing is the strongest aphrodisiac in a capitalist society, leaving open the possibility that a solution to toppling capitalism is to shift our sexual desires from consumerism to personal freedom from the state. The film was created during a residency at Signal Culture using a modified…

  • FOREIGN QUARTERS

    My mother’s lost Chinese heritage was a point of departure in this film which investigates the process by which an image is constructed in places foreign from that of my own. The condition of distance genetic to the ethnographic image traces the elusive qualities of her past and persona.

  • Schèmes Arbitraires

    Four choreographies in a continuous narrative working through themes of struggle and beginning within conformity and control. Five Dancers as part of a larger group of dancers, and then exploring freely in the past before being moved into the conformity space, finally they are allowed periods for competition and then play both of which inevitably reinforce, and lead them back towards, the conformity space. This project is very much a collaboration between most notably Gelymar Sanchez, a montreal choreographer, Sebastien Lavoie, an Oxford experimental musician, and Sean C Dwyer, an actor and filmmaker. Each of them have had interesting, exciting…

  • Viloma

    Kalpana is a young artist from the Indian state of Kashmir, who is blessed with an unusual talent that she has painstakingly learned from her aging guru. As her hand creates an artistic image on paper, a second meaningful picture miraculously materialises when the picture is rotated, depicting the antithesis of the first image, and invoking an ancient Hindu belief that life is full of dualities. Urged by her guru to share this talent and its underlying message with the world, young Kalpana enters her “reversible creations” in an international art contest … with surprising results. The story is told…

  • The Spectre Watches Over Her

    A reaction to the seminal text by Swiss anthropologist Paul Wirz entitled Exorcism and the Art of Healing in Ceylon, this high contrast hand processed film considers a history of colonialism and ethnographic practices in South Asia. At my mother’s village, I re-staged an exorcism once performed on her in the early 1960s when she was a little girl. Possessed by the lecherous entity known as the Kalu Kumara, the Sanni Yakuma healing ritual was performed over a 12-hour period.

  • 8401

    8401 is a moving-image and light landscape painting depicting a multi-layered, fragmented view of Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile. Now a memorial park, Villa Grimaldi was a clandestine detention, torture and extermination centre during the Pinochet regime (1973-90). The image is built of hundreds of images extracted from five years of Google Street Views of the address and site, Avenida José Arrieta 8401.The sound is composed of fifteen audio loops of ambient sound and voice, deconstructed from a field recording gathered during a 2016 tour of the facility. A multitude of shifting perspectives give the impression both of deprioritizing time…

  • Ghost Copy

    A flock of birds; an airplane; a soldier turns his head; a child sprints towards the camera. These four settings, and the many that follow in the next two-and-a-half minutes, each last a split second, a handful frames – just long enough fo rmoving forms to become perceptible as shapes, gestures, artefacts. in-between is darkness. The form of Ghost Copy is owed to a double work with the archive: The moving images are taken from Austrian amateur films from 1935 to 1965. The staccato of clips and black frames is sythesised with the compositional principle of the 8 mm film…

  • Noema

    Audio-visual notes on the encounter with 93-year-old painter Tatjana, who is losing her eyesight. Gestures gently observed through the tips of her hair interfere with thoughts about the sense of time and a dreamlike reality. Moving images follow the painter’s alignment relying more than ever on her experienced hand and imagination and exploring sensory perception beyond seeing.

  • Potamkin

    In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world’s most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness. At the Odessa steps, trampling gives breath to the child. The bullet miraculously reforms the face. The Cossacks march backwards, retreating unseen into their…