Film Categories: environment

  • Pressure & Release

    Pressure & Release is a multi-layered story drawn from memories of my paradoxical sleep, a sub-conscious response to the recognition that we are amid the “Anthropocene period” and the “Holocene extinction.” Certain ideologies combined with well ingrained cultural practices are driving this rapid transformation into something we may or may not yet imagine as this era’s lasting presence unfolds.

  • Turbulence

    Turbulence is a meditation on various places in the Canadian Prairies, places that are part of an ancient Precambrian seabed rebounding from the last ice age. This is a region that once had a dynamic range of plants and wildlife supporting ancient cultures that flourished here for millennia.

  • No Rest for the Restless

    Some stories appear complete, while others do not. Some stories are remembered, while others are forgotten. Some stories obscure, while others reveal. Even though somewhat different in shape and form “No Rest for the Restless” is in some ways a subconscious re-imagining of an exhibition I had many years ago of the same name. At that time, I found the human project to be astounding and baffling. I continue to be astounded and baffled today.

  • Nautilus

    Unlike its close relative the octopus, the Nautilus has a poor memory and yet it has managed to exist for half a billion years. Our ancestors have been on Earth for about six million years, while modern humans evolved in the last 200,000. Civilization as it is generally understood today began approximately 6,000 years ago, and the industrialization of the natural world began its accelerating trajectory in the past two centuries. According to fossil records the chambered Nautilus has remained fundamental unchanged for about five hundred million years. What I wonder will the records show of our presence on planet…

  • Isolated Gestures

    With Isolated Gestures I am primarily concerned with exploring the interplay of sunlight and shadows with weather as the narrative. The story for me is in how light contrasts the absence of light in shaping forms within a given frame of time and space. I generally gravitate towards places that reveal the many layers of time, stimulating reflections on all the different life forms that may have existed in a particular location where I have set up my camera and tripod. This is when I imagine worlds that have passed, worlds that are present, and worlds that are yet to…

  • The Sun comes out at Night

    During a severe thunderstorm in Saskatchewan, Canada Buckminster Fuller* appears, disappears, then re-appears in a gas station parking lot discussing World War I, the shift from animal/human power to the machine, as well as the law of thermodynamics and evolution. If I were a futurist, I would predict that the world Buckminster Fuller describes in the 20th Century, or the world we are familiar with today in the early 21st Century will be a very different world in the 22nd Century. Acquiring energy is the core concern of all living entities such as photosynthesis, or vegetable/animal matter. Along with water…

  • Sightings

    During my childhood I spent countless hours daydreaming. Often about boarding an alien spacecraft where they would ask me about life on Earth. I would enthusiastically tell them my thoughts and observations about this or that, which the space aliens always seemed to find interesting. In retrospect I was engaging in a transference of my frustration that no one on this planet seemed particularly interested in my opinions. At that time, I was a voracious reader of science fiction novels, in particular Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov. After watching Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” I was certain…

  • Shadows from Magnets

    I not only want to locate my place, but I also want to discover where my place is in that place. I desire to experience the illuminated moment, moments which for me can only be perceived when one calms the memory to pierce the shadows and to lift a veil. The story for me is in how light contrasts the absence of light in shaping forms within a given frame of time and space. The presence of shadows for instance on a landscape is largely determined by three factors: wind speed, the distance of the clouds from a particular location…

  • Fire & Water

    For many years I lived near the village of Volcano, Hawai’i in a native Ohia rainforest. My house was about ten kilometers from the entrance to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park so I would go there whenever I could. Here was a place that displayed the essential forces of earth, air, fire and water, the very elements that form our existence. This had quite a profound impact on me, especially when new land suddenly appeared when only moments before it did not exist. Once the new land was established, birds, insects and seeds would establish themselves beginning with Hapuu ferns (a…

  • Air & Earth

    There are certain places that sustain me. Places where the elements of nature are so evocatively displayed, that my desire to return and experience them again never loses its hold. The Big Island of Hawaii is 20 degrees latitude north of the equator giving it a climate with a narrow range of temperatures along with continuous prevailing winds. Above 30 degrees latitude north and 30 degrees latitude south of the equator cold air from the Arctic and cold air from Antarctica mingles vigorously with hot air from the tropics. It is largely this interaction of cold air from the poles…