Genres: experimental

  • City Streaming

    This is a film made in Toronto, in memoriam, so to speak – a memory piece, a “piecing-together” of the experience of living there. The consciousness of the maker comes to sharply focused visual music – not to arrive at snapshots, as such, but rather to “sing” the city as remembered from daily living…complementary, then, to an earlier film, “Unconscious London Strata.”

  • Film Scroll

    “This Super 8 film was first presented as part of a ritual performance where I am naked and pull a white piece of fabric out of myyoni, pin it up and project the film onto it from reverse, while speaking the words on the film. The performance was part of a collective recreation of Carolee Schneeman’s ‘Interior Scroll.’ Each of us did a personal variation based on her 1975 performance. Schneeman’s piece included a letter to a filmmaker who criticized her work. My ‘letter’ is to an ex-partner who criticized me and my work, leaving me with feelings of inadequacy…

  • Freeshow Seymour Compilation

    Freeshow Seymour is the collaborative effort of Allyson Mitchell and Christina Zeidler, who came together to explore their mutual crush on film-craft. Individually, they have been making work since 1994. In 2003 they both attended the Big Rock Candy Mountain residency at The Banff Centre, where they joined forces to highlight the work they are doing on candy and consumption and to explore their love of film. The basis of Freeshow Seymour is process. The two artists meet and see what evolves out of being together – whether it is films, music, crafts, performance or just thrift-store shopping. Their artworks…

  • surfacing

    “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…” – W. Wordsworth Our busy comings-and-goings, on the move, working at life are pictured. Layers of images and scratched emulsion make viewing through the depths an effort, but glimpses of other states suggest we can surface. “A beautiful film. A new way with colour. But more and more epiphanic.” – Barbara Godard

  • Triple Booked

    “Triple Booked” is an innovative combination of three genres of dance: flamenco, modern and break dancing. One by one, and then intercut so they seem to be alternately in concert and in competition with one another, these three dancers interpret a remixed piece of music that starts with flamenco, flirts with pop and buzzes into a club beat.

  • Walnut Grove, mon amour

    After the death of his mentally ill father, artist RM Vaughan attempts to come to terms with the event by reconstructing his father’s emotional responses to the maudlin 70’s television program “Little House on the Prairie.” A blackly humourous meditation on death and grief, punctuated by crying scenes from the famously teary, famously cheesy television classic.

  • Hate

    Using his own lumpy body as a template, artist RM Vaughan explores differing reactions by various audiences to the blunt reality of having a non-commodifiable body in the age of supermodels. Alternately scathing and self-deprecating, “Hate” dishes out (and takes) some unhappy truths about “beauty” and art.

  • Rx

    A young gay man in a tiny Toronto apartment experiences a nervous breakdown, causing him to obsessively arrange and re-arrange his large knick-knack collection. Based on a true story, “Rx” is a bittersweet, funny chronicle of a mind turned frantic by fear, worry and novelty paperweights.

  • Cityscape

    “Cityscape” is an impressionistic documentary film intended to create a social awareness of the need to design safer cities and urban environments for women.

  • object / loss

    “object/loss” addresses themes of physical loss, memory, sexual identity and the didactic divides that shape the fabric of our social existence. Ghostly images collide and fragment as traces of memory resurface and disappear. The title refers to the work of Julia Kristeva on the melancholy/depressive position which occurs through object loss, and the contingent aggression towards the lost object. At the same time the film attempts to examine the consumption of the male figure and its objectification from a feminine heterosexual position.