Film Categories: Ecology

  • Negative / Positive Film

    Negative / Positive Film is a hand-made, camera-less collage film composed of layers of erotic 16mm films from the 1920s, 1940s, and 1970s, intermingled with nature documentaries and layers of organic materials. This visual abstraction merges together both positive black-and-white film and its negative black-and-white counterpart – on the same film base. This allows the film to exist in two versions, one positive and, the other negative. The film is an abstract remediation of female bodies dislodged from their original erotic context and ripped away from their male co-protagonists. The man is removed from the picture, while the female body…

  • Self-Portrait in Hell

    Self-Portrait in Hell is a hybrid film that combines analog and digital film manipulation techniques. Multiple layers of 8mm films and disparate fragments are amalgamated to create a self-portrait of the director. A singular self-portrait, since ironically the subject of the film is not the director but the image found in abandoned film archives, the image of another, unknown woman. The first layer is from a 1970s 8mm home movie titled Woman Dancing with Dog and was found in an antique shop. The second layer is an 8mm film belonging to an unknown archive, which the artist buried for a…

  • Motus

    Using the long take and still framing, this film evokes the movement of Montreal as a city rapidly changing through massive construction projects while also experiencing a housing crisis. Not so much a city symphony, “Motus” seeks to create a sleep-like state through abstract lines, muddy grain, and other forms of frame and shutter movement. An homage to the prog-rock scores of the Italian horror films of the 1970s, the music harkens back to the era when I discovered cinema in Montreal movie places such as the Imperial. Utilisant le long plan et le cadrage immobile, ce film évoque le…

  • Crushed Between Ocean and Sky

    An unexpected event on a tall ship headed for Antarctica incites passengers to reflect on life, death, adventure and irony against the vast ocean backdrop. Crushed Between Ocean and Sky speaks to the transcendence of exploring new places, the power of nature and life’s brutal tendency to catch us off guard.

  • Feet in Water, Head on Fire

    Along the San Andreas fault line in Southern California, Indigenous palm trees and date palms imported from West Asia flourish. The people who tend to them reflect a landscape of frictions and affections shaped over generations by agriculture, luxury real estate, and border politics. Like the infinity storytelling of The 1001 Nights, stories fold into dreams and back into stories, a constellation of voices settle over mountains and into the earth. Intertwining color 16mm with textural black and white film hand processed with the dates leftover from harvest and plants native to the valley Feet in Water, Head on Fire…

  • Positive Transparencies

    ‘Positive Transparencies’ captures the tensions arising from the destruction and reconstruction of 17 individual 35mm analog slides. Using Hornby Island as its focal point, the film explores the methods of observing, transforming, and transmuting the natural world through technology. Employing analog deconstruction, the project repurposes the island’s landscapes, creating dynamic motion sequences that emulate a process of artistic disintegration.

  • Research Garden: A Compendium of Lost Moments

    Full of lush shapes and vivid hues, this film loop was handcrafted using the techniques of phytography and optical printing. Raw visuals drawn from the artist’s garden over a period of two years bathe everything and everyone and confront us with silence. Vibrant leaf-prints, fingerprints, scratches and tape marks on celluloid work with the various phytographic offspring to evoke human entanglements with nature. With every touch of the hand or lamplight, these botanical image-traces are simultaneously illuminated and deteriorated. (text by Lesley Loksi Chan from the curatorial notes from Research garden: a compendium of lost moments)

  • As Grey Falls

    4k, colour, 22′ What touches us when we are amongst wild animals like the birds of the Fraser River Delta in British Columbia? They do not touch us physically. They seem, at best indifferent to our presence; perhaps they are annoyed. Do they even look at us when their gaze seems turned our way? We cannot know. Nonetheless we love these creatures, and hope that they will persist. “As Grey Falls” wanders delicately in the places these birds call home, wondering where a human’s place is in their worlds. “As Grey Falls” is a film of current urgency, now that…

  • Wanderings through the delta

    2 x 2k or 4k video installation. Alternately available as a single channel program with both image tracks in one file. Colour. Run time 22′. Presented here with both channels combined into one stream. Ideal projection size: 2 x 8’x15′ or larger. Exhibition setup is flexible: ideal scenarios are a single long wall or two hanging screens either aligned in straight line or at an angle of approx. 120 degrees to each other. NOTE: This film has NO voiceover. The subtitles stand on their own and do not correspond to any recorded voice track. A film of current urgency, now…

  • AfterMath

    AfterMath describes a time when there was a wide spread belief of some grand global plan when in reality there was no plan of any kind, only competing interests constantly jockeying for a dominate position. Sequences in order of appearance: Soviet computer scientist just prior to the dissolution of the USSR – Another Soviet computer scientist just prior to the dissolution of the USSR – Semi-Trailer Truck with Trans Mountain gas line pipes resting at a Travel Center in BC – The Poplar River coal fired electrical power plant during a period of record rainfall in Saskatchewan – Abandoned car…