Genres: experimental

  • 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.

  • Pieces Within

    A poets’ muse calls on his inner child to save their relationship.

  • 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…

  • Scenes from ‘Deseret’

    2-Channel video installation (2x4k, colour) Festival premiere: Ann Arbor Film Festival Designed as a 2-channel video installation for projection at large scale. Both channels are combined here in one widescreen image for streaming purposes. When watching on a computer, headphones are recommended for proper sound reproduction. “Scenes from Deseret” was initially inspired by two sources: the ever-changing landscape of the state of Utah in the US, and James Benning’s film about the state, “Deseret” (1995). The history of Utah recounted in Benning’s film ended in 1992. A lot has happened since that time, and I wanted to capture some of…

  • Harrowing, The

    A hand-painted film which has been photographically step-printed to create varieties of tempo in mimic of sparking and molten rock. The recurrent centrality of certain painted forms, and the exploding magma-like flickering of all that surrounds the forms, suggests a harrowing process. Note: Must be rented with “Tryst Haunt.” Rental price includes both films.

  • 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…