Film Format: Super 8

  • Vertières I, II, III

    The Vertières battle was the last battle before Napoleon’s army withdrew from Haiti, which became the first independent nation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Botkay presents three filmic incursions into the Haitian historical, social and political process. Exploring aspects such as discipline/control, nature/tenderness and the ruin/resistance. this piece investigates the levels of domestication and enslavement resulting from the post-colonial processes that marked the history of the country. This film was selected by Nicole Brenez on the 10 best films 2015 list in Artforum.

  • Forward Motion

    Forward Motion examines commonalities between natural and mechanical movements that serve to propel us through time and space.

  • Aturquesada

    Aturquesada is a performance-based project playing with the colour tealquoise, a word coined by the artist to describe a greenish colour that exists in between turquoise and teal. This performance takes place in a snowy landscape that is typical during Canadian winters. The violence inflicted upon the main character and her demise is absurd and humorous. This performative project is inspired by the artist’s connection to the winter Canadian landscape as an immigrant, as well as the emotionally violent nature of a brutal cold winter. This symbolic death by tealquoise is also part of a larger body of work that…

  • Spermwhore

    This short film is a queer, feminist and experimental work that began in 2009 and came to fruition in the spring of 2013. Spermwhore is a queer experimental film about unwanted childlessness in a world where normative heterosexual relationships dictate who can become parents and in what way. When it comes to reproduction our merciless bodies reduce us to merely a set sex or given gender. But the longing for children is not limited to our bodies, and the possibility of pregnancy can be gifted, shared and undertaken together.

  • Midway

    Electric reveries forged from the pulsating lights on the Canadian National Exhibition.

  • Fashion

    “In ‘Fashion’ the form-fitting, black-and-white striped dress, shot originally in video and re-filmed off the screen, doubly references popular culture, the sixties of the dress style, and its reinstitution in eighties’ Black Label ads. “The fashion of the title is not only that of clothing, surface, but the stuff of which we are fashioned, our formative contexts, submerged, internalized mindsets. Belying the flat surface are layers. Text voices one layer of desire, ‘I want to make myself a victim, to be passive,’ as image resists it. She lies on her back, fists clenched. We don’t always want what we desire.…

  • Stars Above (Part 1 of Trilogy: Sleep Cycles)

    Super – 8 filmstrips laid down the length of our long, dark hallway. Giggling as we fumble in the shadows. One flash and it’s done. While children sleep, in the tiny, fleeting window of time that we share, alone at last, the mystery and energy in these whispering, tiptoeing moments feed us.

  • Diving Aces (Part 2 of Trilogy: Sleep Cycles)

    Super – 8 filmstrips laid down the length of our long, dark hallway. Giggling as we fumble in the shadows. One flash and it’s done. While children sleep, in the tiny, fleeting window of time that we share, alone at last, the mystery and energy in these whispering, tiptoeing moments feed us.

  • Apparent Wind (Part 3 of Trilogy: Sleep Cycles)

    Super – 8 filmstrips laid down the length of our long, dark hallway. Giggling as we fumble in the shadows. One flash and it’s done. While children sleep, in the tiny, fleeting window of time that we share, alone at last, the mystery and energy in these whispering, tiptoeing moments feed us.  

  • Parhelion

    An elemental study of refracted light within the multiple states of water (solid, liquid, gas). Also known as a ‘sun dog’, a parhelion is a halo formed in the sky by the interaction of sunlight with atmospheric ice crystals.