Genres: experimental

  • Engine Complex: Bridge/Seed

    A fraught passage of the camera’s eye through fantastical architectural and psychological spaces. Somewhere between a body and a building, the lens tumbles and lurches through time and space, caught between observation and escape. Themes of construction blend with surgical examination while the joys and pains of discovery rattle with a search-and-rescue-like urgency. Where are we? Co-directed by Bryan Morello and Matthew Endler, this work emerges from a multi-level structure (called the Engine Complex) built in their shared studio. It is a playground for collaborative overlap and hosts a wide spectrum of playful set design and experimental performance activities.

  • P L U M E

    Fingers pluck fallen evidence of flight; placed and traced to make avian light.

  • Pinhole Park

    “Pinhole Park” was created using a 35mm film tin modified into an outward-looking 59-pinhole camera that registers images on a single film loop mounted in the tin. Each loop is exposed in one moment with 59 pinhole “lenses” to create as many distinct images that, when presented in series, create a panning of the landscape in various directions. The work was exposed on outdated black-and-white 35mm print stock acquired from Archives Canada discards, and processed by hand in Caffenol chemistry, a less environmentally impactful developer made with coffee, vitamin C, and washing soda. The film and photographs document a city…

  • A Nice Big Zero for You

    Doughnut destruction that started as a lark but got a bit grim. Also an ode to the JK Optical Printer, and a meditation on human cruelty and expendability.

  • Field Trip

    “Field Trip” is a travel diary on the American social landscape. The images consist of visual research for future film projects and were accumulated during my many location scouting trips to the United States between 1980 and 1995. Over time, I have come to regard this photographic archive as a collection of works of historical and personal value. Over the years, I began to rework the photographs. The more I handled and touched them, the less I thought of them as photographs and the more I saw them as something that could be hand-shaped, altered, transformed and re-imagined. With three…

  • Shadow Nettes

    The Shadow Nette is a traditional fishing device that projects the silhouette of the fisherman. The “fishr” assumes archetypal (and secret) poses of virility that display their strength and ability. It is these projections that attract the innocent prey, drawing them close to be captured in nets. “Shadow Nettes” is a 17.25 minute film that follows one Shadow Nette Fisherman as he attempts to teach the operation of the device to his teenage son. The film crew were given special permission to track the fishing family and witness the strange rituals, capturing them on film for the first time. Some…

  • fuck

    A short solo film made in quarantine, “fuck” is part silent meditation, part protest, part magic spell for a better world.

  • Glimpses of My Mother in the Garden

    Through a rapid montage of mirror reflected images, I introduce my 72-year-old Mother. Sitting in a flower garden, putting on lipstick, my Mother watches the world quickly go by. (GM)

  • RETRODREAMING

    “Retrodreaming” examines the common phenomenon of ghostly, abandoned schools due to demographic change in the countryside of Japan. Empty schools in deserted villages tell their own story – whether during the pandemic, after a nuclear catastrophe, or just due to depopulation. The film references the Japanese tradition of telling “Kaidan “(ghost stories/scary stories) and the multiple school-themed “Kaidan” (Gakkō no Kaidan, Japanese for “Scary School Story”) in Japanese mainstream culture, which encompass the idea of entities and memories remaining in these architectures. The film focuses on the visual quality of the Showa-era architecture of the abandoned Sawada School in Nakanojo.…

  • Events in the Tunnel

    Drawn from Super 8 films in the artists’ personal archives as well as found amateur 8mm footage, “Events in the Tunnel” presents an absurdist abbreviated retelling of Canada’s colonial history as defined by that great colonial trope, the cross-country train trip. In the transitional void of a train tunnel, we witness familiar 19th and 20th century paradigms of white middle-class conformity as represented by images of travel, amusement, and domesticity, with Canadian culture embodied by a chimeric portrayal of the early 20th century painter Tom Thomson.