Film Categories: art & artists

  • Husbandry

    Mary Imrie (1918 – 1988) and Jean Wallbridge (1912 – 1979) operated their architecture firm—the first run by women in Canada—at Six Acres, the home they built for their work and life together overlooking the North Saskatchewan River in west Edmonton. When Mary Imrie passed away, she bequeathed the records of their remarkable architectural practice and adventurous life, along with their home, to the province of Alberta. With a title borrowed from a telegram in the collection, GLAD YOU CLOSER HOME / NEW WHITE WHISKER MARY is Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer’s immersive exhibition that playfully imagines and speculates in…

  • Trajectories of Now

    Over an 18-month period, 18 racialized and gender diverse artists took part in creative research to develop artworks and activations responding to the guiding question “What change do you want to make with your art?”. Their work culminated in their group exhibit Trajectories of Now: An Anthology. Through visual, audio, and tactile works, Trajectories of Now documented critical narratives of relationships to identities; both personal and collective. In this short film, eight Trajectories artists discuss their artworks and processes for voicing, surfacing and amplifying creative advocacies and resistances for social change.

  • Iconography of Venus, The

    A look at private and public images of women and their “place” in society. The act of being placed on a visual pedestal of unrealistic proportions and its accompanying expectations. The operatic soundtrack written by the filmmaker is performed by Suzanne Palmer. “Photographs of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, the Venus de Milo and Venus of Willendorf achieve their stunning resolution in the Louvre where a crowd waits for the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa to break into speech, to recover the distance betweeen her sitting and the time of our approach. What we watch with the filmmaker is not…

  • Iskowitz

    “Iskowitz” is a rare and intimate view of the life of the late Canadian painter Gershon Iskowitz. Born in 1921, in Kielce, Poland, Iskowitz began painting in 1941. At a time when most young men are exploring the world and discovering themselves, he was interned in the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. To preserve his sanity he continued to paint, bribing guards for the coffee grounds he then used to create his ink. When the camp was liberated at the end of the war, Iskowitz retrieved his artwork, which had survived by being stashed under floorboards. It took…

  • It’s a Party!

    “It’s a Party!” was shot with a stationary camera facing the hallway and living room of a small apartment. Actors continually move in and out of the frame, while three sound units capture every word of deathless dialogue about those perennial party topics: art, politics, and sex. Chaos begins with the arrival of the first guest just as the hostess finishes washing her hair; subsequent guests crowd into any room but the living room, and a riotous conga line attempts to incorporate an irate neighbour. As the party winds down, some uninvited guests arrive and chaos reigns again.

  • John Nesbitt – Sculptor

    John Nesbitt is one of Canada’s greatest sculptors. Born in Montreal in 1928, he became prominent in art circles in the 1960s. After living in New York for a time, he returned to Canada in the 1970s to live on Cape Breton Island. Since the 1960s, Nesbitt has chosen to avoid public exhibitions in favour of producing a huge body of work outside the commercial environment. However, in the 1980s he is once again exhibiting his work and gaining recognition. “John Nesbitt – Sculptor” is an intimate portrait of the artist at home and at work. The film explores Nesbitt’s…

  • Life Force

    “Life Force” is a documentary on the life of the late Canadian artist Jack Chambers. It is a film that interweaves art and reality, recreating the significant moments in the artist’s life. Like Chambers’ own work, it is about the universal themes of life, death and transcendence.

  • Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists

    What happens when a dedicated husband and father quits his job, adopts the persona of a Western-Movie Singing Cowboy, takes on the entire art establishment (including Christo and Andy Warhol), and refuses to accept money for his art ? Meet Gerry Gaxiola, AKA The Maestro, an ex-wage slave who gave up everything to make art for art’s sake. The Maestro’s story could inspire a whole new generation of Van Goghs. With: The Maestro Rides Again! (30 min. 2005)

  • Mashiko Village Pottery, Japan 1937

    Produced by a pre-war cultural organization in Japan, the film is a work of great clarity and beauty which follows an entire pottery-making cycle as performed in Japan for centuries. Mashiko ceramic manufacture is said to date back to 1853. Also shown at work is the great painter of teapots, Masu Minagawa, an itinerant, illiterate painter of patterns who travelled amongst the kilns in villages. It is said that she decorated up to one thousand teapots per day. Some of her very rare drawings on paper are now held at the Fogg Art Museum in Massachusetts. The film was restored…

  • midst

    “In ‘midst’, Barbara Sternberg has made a lyrical film about attachment, integration, belonging. Many of the familiar elements of Sternberg’s work are here: speed, pulsing rhythms, explosions of colour, light and shape, images of nature and the built environment. But the conflicted situations and turmoil of earlier major films like ‘Through and Through’ and ‘Beating’ are gone. Instead, ‘midst’ focuses dramatically on an understanding of the world through art, specifically painting, especially abstraction, here translated into filmic terms. Abstraction becomes the vehicle for taking on complexity, putting it all together in heightened moments of intense vision characteristic of ‘seeing into’…