Film Categories: Abstraction

  • Four Winds

    Four Winds Wellness Association presents a fictional documentary on Dr. Miles Bennell and Dr. Patricia Lunbed, the founders of Link 8. The video tells the story of how Miles and Patricia meet and form a new technology that influences science and culture called Personality Sharing.

  • Ritual

    “Ritual” is a non-linear video piece that explores cosmic mythmaking. As the video loops, a cyclical story of birth, separation, transformation, purification, death, and rebirth is told through provocative imagery and lyrical text.

  • Ocean I

    Ocean I is part of a series of films loosely connected by a similar process of cinematography that sees the operation of the camera as a kind of intuitive performance; specifically the way lenses, filters, and camera are maneuvred in a single long take to create an impression of a space, while also frequently abstracting it.

  • Semiotics of Sab

    This experimental film essay explores the poetics of identity through an oblique portrait of gay Japanese American actor Sab Shimono. For more than five decades, Shimono has performed on stage and screen in over 150 roles as warlords, bus boys, and businessmen. Shimono asks, “How is it that we know who we are?” Recalling early structuralist works by Hollis Frampton and Martha Rosler, Semiotics of Sab displays the grammatology of queer Asian American masculinity through conflicting lexicons of race, representation, and selfhood.

  • Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights

    Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights is an expressive documentary composed with footage of a Spanish bullfight, that iconic imagery of highly decorated masculinity and violence masked as nationalism. The footage was drawn from Jacques Madvo Collection material filmed in Spain between 1976-1978. Madvo shot this footage at a time when Spain began its difficult and flawed transition to democracy in the years following dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. The film consists of 16mm footage that has been decayed in soil, contact-printed and laboriously re-photographed and these abstractions of light and darkness ground the inquiry surrounding why citizens…

  • It’s Not Me, It’s An Image Of Me

    To make an object based on a photograph means adding dimensions such as space, time and continuity. Roasting skewers, hairpins and nails were the tools of self-liberation in the photo series Zerstörung einer Illusion (‘Destruction of an Illusion’) by Karin Mack, which was produced in 1977 with a self-timer and her hand processing work in the darkroom. Forty years after its creation, it is a new perspective that transforms and sets into motion the examination of the self-image and role as a woman into a three-dimensional object. Light and rotation create an illusory horizon of perception inherent in filmmaking and…

  • Exhumation

    Peeling back the shrouded image, “Exhumation” is a reanimation of long-lost desire. A response to news of a celebrity paternity suit and the mythology adhered to it, “Exhumation” obsesses over buried memories to create one’s own monster from memory. Re-composed of images chemically treated to disintegrate, the figures peel their identities away to remain as ghosts of what once was. At once a diary of a death mask and of speculative hope, “Exhumation” dives through years of hurt feelings to find that although the body was here, you vanished.

  • Inventory

    Often the very things that appear to enable a sense of security, stability, and status can be disrupted, or rendered obsolete, destined to become a memory, or simply just forgotten. On the other hand, things that frame our passions while informing our dreams have the very real potential of retaining their meaning, regardless of any actual or imagined externalities. Before leaving home last July to begin an artist residency I went to pick up a couple of things at a nearby big box store only to discover that it had been closed. A crew was removing all the signs on…

  • Velocity

    I generally gravitate towards places that reveal the many layers of time when deciding on a particular location to set up my camera and tripod. This is when I like to imagine worlds that have passed, worlds that are present, and worlds that are yet to be. In 2009 Johan Rockström led the team which developed the “Planetary Boundaries Framework,” a set of 9 boundaries that they define as a “safe operating space for humanity.” These scientists assert that once certain thresholds or tipping points are passed there is a risk of “irreversible and abrupt environmental change.” In 1976 a…

  • Utopia

    The purpose of this or that, or its role in enabling a sense of security or status is ephemeral, depending on factors that may or may not be readily apparent. As systems shift from one emphasis to an other, or as one system supplants an other, the meaning of something can be altered to such a degree that a new description may be required to understand its context. Various intersections in downtown Vancouver including the Trump Tower looming over the other buildings – Fishing Boat approaches Ucluelet after some time out at sea – Afternoon clouds, Crowsnest Mountain – Lonely…