Part of Winter 2010
New Toronto Works 2010
High Spirits
Curated by Yuula Benivolski, Victoria Cheong and Jimmy Palferro
Sponsored by Vtape & CFMDC
Join us Saturday March 20th for a selection of experimental films, videos and installations. This year’s new Toronto works are keen and perceptive; intimate and uncanny. High Spirits takes us on a journey into strange other worlds finding beauty, pleasantries and comfort there.
Programme:
The Passing, Sarah Pupo, 3.5 min. The Passing is an attempt to tell an almost-story, an every-story (inspired by ritual, folktale, fairy-tale, dream) through a combination of pre-meditated and improvised imagery. Thematically, the work addresses themes of memory and history, their malleability and how they lend themselves to mythmaking. It reflects on questions like: How does an individual identity fit into a collective identity? How does one move forward under the weight of collective histories (when you are haunted by a past that is and isn’t yours)? Can one represent collective histories through the individual? What is it to represent a memory physically (how do we make visible something so essentially ephemeral)?
Sarah Pupo was born in Toronto in 1983. She currently lives in Montreal, Quebec where she is attending Concordia’s MFA program. She paints, draws and has made recent forays into animation.
Lungful Lustre, Becky Ip, 3 min. Alongside images of manoeuvred metal, the filmmaker’s father recalls the grandmother she never knew and the consequences of tarnish at the family’s Hong Kong metal factory, pointing to the promise and limitations of magnetism, manufacture, memory and the body.
Becky Ip is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is attentive to the ghosts of memory, history, territory, landscape and objects. Originally from Toronto, Ip received her BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies at Concordia University.
From Here to There (excerpt), Aimée Dawn Robinson 6 min. From Here to There is an episodic, durational dance performance and a travelogue filmed in July/August 2009. To make this work, I drove solo from Toronto to St. John’s, Newfoundland (and back), dancing and filming myself en route. The complete work is 56 minutes long and was made using in-camera editing only. Here is part of the whole, with original chronological order and edits intact.
Aimée Dawn Robinson is an improvising dancer, musician, landscape gardener, writer/researcher and visual artist/video maker. She has performed, studied and taught dance in Canada, the United States, Malaysia and Japan.
(11-18-9-14-7), Brad Tinmouth, 6 min. Organic digital manipulation, (11-18-9-14-7), explores the natural tendencies of the unnatural pixel and exploits it for all its worth. (11-18-9-14-7) was created using 16mm, VHS and Digital Video, and running this footage through several codec’s and key frame editors. What remains is a burst of uncontrollable video fighting for the foreground. With painterly watercolor washes, haunting digital ghosts and pixels struggling to bleed through, (11-18-9-14-7) reveals what drives digital video, what lets us stream files to the world, and, most importantly, what happens to video if you remove its self-imposed boundaries.
Brad Tinmouth is a fourth year student graduating at York University’s Film and Video Production BFA with honors. Focusing on alternative techniques, editing and a with passion for video art Tinmouth creates new media works for the screen, installation and the internet. He is currently acting as the co-founder and co-director of Butcher Gallery and the co-director of Films In Bloom film festival
U Don’t No What Pain is, Davida Nemeroff, 3 min. In the archaic language of texting, U don’t no what pain is is a split screen video piece that plays off of cinematic tropes. The piece appropriates footage from both The Silence of The Lambs (1991) and a Norm MacDonald movie, Screwed (2000). U don’t no what pain is. Maybe you do.
Davida Nemeroff was born in Montreal in 1981. When she was 19, she left to attend Ryerson University, School of Image Arts in Toronto. After graduating, Davida gallivanted around the city photographing local bands and doing editorial work for magazines. Three years ago she left Toronto for the Big Apple to get her MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. She graduated in May 2009. Currently Davida is working on a project in Los Angeles called Night Gallery. She is awake all night.
Softcore Lumbermen, Iris Fraser-Gudrunas, 12 min. Softcore Lumbermen is a loose statement about hetero dating politics. The perimeters for making the video was for a group of fresh faced young men to dress as “real men” and act how they thought “real men” would think that “real women” would want them to act. The result is some bearded boys and girls getting sensual.
Iris Fraser-Gudrunas is a video artist, filmmaker and curator. Her works and curatorial programs often have to do with using low impact processes to encourage laissez-faire aesthetics.
Put One, Laura McCoy, 1:45 min.
Laura McCoy lives in Toronto. she works in drawing, video and performance. some of her work can be seen at lauramccoy.blogspot.com.
Intermisssion
Kool Cops, Randy Gagne (produced by Exploding Motor Car), 2.5 min.
Sunset Vignette, Randy Gagne, 2 min.
Randy Gagne a.k.a Man Made Hill likes to get down. He currently spends most of his free time in a messy makeshift studio inside of a narrow closet hunkered down over his synthesizer. “Kool Cops” and “Sunset Vignette” are two cuts off Side A of his new LP “Puzzle Answers” (2010: Bennifer Editions/Healing Power). Both videos find Randy Revelling in the spectral emptiness of dance music cliches, or “existential disco” as he likes to call it. He remains vibed out at all times. Current mood: aghast.
What Comes Back (shadowplay), David Hanes, 5 min.
David FM Hanes is a multi-disciplanary artist/curator living and working in Toronto Canada.Utilizing his interests in the most expanded sensibility possible, David creates performance, images, installation, and drawings that describe a world, which is at once so familiar and yet so bizarre. His obsession to learn and experiment has allowed him to push boundaries that he once thought never existed. Hanes has exhibited at a number of respected gallerys and spaces including: Mercer Union (Toronto), Xpace (Toronto), The Smell (LA), and The Great Hall (Toronto).
Commute, Renée Lear, 11 min. Commute is a layering of five rides home from work as experienced from the front window of the subway car. The result is an ambiguity of space and time that is immanent—but not readily present—in the commute itself, an atemporal synchrony of experience, more concerned with the journey as it exists in the present than a future destination.
Renée Lear is a Toronto based visual artist currently working with video and video mixing in live environments. She got a BFA from Ryerson University in New Media and an MFA from York University.
Horizon Lines, Morley Shayuk, 3.5 min. Horizon Lines was filmed inside a Cineplex Odeon on Hwy 7 just outside the Toronto City limits. The colours and images you see are the painted recesses of a ceiling, lit by fluorescent tubes. “It was my intention to make an abstract film that felt suspiciously blockbuster, retaining the texture of the multiplex, and mirroring the spirit of a contemporary North American landscape.”
Morley Shayuk has traveled on foot throughout North America and lives in Toronto. He is currently filming a new video for Summer 2010 in which a Tim Hortons becomes the “Perfected Stone” of spiritual and artistic transformation achieved by Canadian painter Lionel LeMoine Fitzgerald.
Gifs, Stephanie Davidson, 7 min.
Stephanie Davidson is an artist from Toronto who is interested in new media. Most of her work involves taking digital ephemera out of context and seeing what kind of emotional connection the viewer makes. She works in painting, collage, and video. “I am interested in the gif format because it is very limited and immediate. While it is already mostly a dated format, it can exist indefinitely because it is data, and in this way has it’s own contradictory timelessness. Through producing short gif animations with found photos, new meanings are created between those subjects. It is up to the viewer to add their own meaning to these animations.“
Zenith, Geoff Pugen, 6 min.
In 2007 fourteen artists journeyed to the Zenith Retreat to discover their inner animal character and ceremoniously perform it – a metamorphosis resulted. With theatrical absurdity, Pugen explores the relationship between performance and the artificial, the natural and the virtual through altering and manipulating media.
Working with video, film, and photography in the digital realm Pugen renders situations that examine our perceptions of how history, documentation, and simulation intersect. He is a graduate in both Theatre Arts from the University of British Columbia and in Integrated Media from the Ontario College of Art And Design.
Pestilent Existence, Neelam Kler, 1:20 min. “Right now, my life is baneful. It feels like I’m reaching an end. I believe there will be no more turns on this road. There is a definite darkness approaching from behind, looming, in that invisibly apparent way that emulates a mystery. The error is as simple as a tide or a cup bound to overflow. teeter on a razor in themiddle of nowhere. ”
Neelam Kler born in Vernon, BC is an installation and new media artist currently based in Toronto.
Installations:
@ Tranzac Club
Cone Bags, Stan Krzyzanowski, video projected loop, silent.
Soak pinecones in water. When completely closed, pack cones in strong plastic mesh bags and tie shut with a secure knot. Place bags in a warm location with good air circulation – on top of floor heating vents in winter is ideal. Set up lights and a camera for about a week and make time-lapse videos of the bags expanding. Loop video back and forth.
Stan Krzyzanowski is a multi-media artist living in Toronto and teaching at OCAD. He first noticed that pinecones expand and contract with water in 2004 and has been working with them ever since.
White Nights/Drone Fields, Aidan Baker, Naomi Hocura and NADJA, video on 2 monitors
Six hours of experimental audio & video
Two live concerts by NADJA & Aidan Baker inspire, refract and coalesce with video by Canadian filmmakers, projectionists and experimentalists. The project was curated by Naomi Hocura, Aidan Baker & Leah Buckareff, and the DVD is forthcoming on Beta-lactam Ring Records. Featuring video by (in order of appearance):
White Nights:
Aidan Baker & Leah Buckareff, Keith Urquhart, Naomi Hocura, Winston Hacking, General Chaos Visuals, Victoria Cheong & Allison Peacock, Jeff Garcia, Brandon Hocura, Iris Fraser-Gudrunas, Brian Joseph Davis
Drone Fields:
Tess Girard, Naomi Hocura, Ataxia Films, Tasman Richardson, Rebecca McClellan & Jakob Thiesen
After-Party 11pm @ Double Double Land, 209 Augusta Ave. $5 or Free with ticket
Installations, Projections, and DJs Chrissy and Jeremy
Cosmic Bodies 1, Zeesy Powers, Single channel video on monitor. Cosmic Bodies 1 was made as part of the Palomar5 Innovation Camp, a future-oriented think-tank sponsored by the largest telecommunications company in Europe.
Zeesy Powers is a young interdisciplinary artist whose primary materials are watercolour, animation, the internet and people. She has exhibited and performed internationally, and continues to make work with an eye to crossing borders and cultures.
Hologram, Allison Peacock
Allison Peacock is a Toronto-based artist, working primarily with dance, performance and video. Her work has been presented at Movement Research at the Judson Church, Extermination Music Night, the Yukon Arts Centre and the Canada Dance Festival. She holds a B.A. from the University of Toronto, completed training at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre, and pursued international training projects through the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
1 3 5 7 5 3 1 3 3 5 5 7 7 5 5 3 3 1 1 3 5 7 5 3 1, Matthew Dunn, Super 8 on video with live performance
Matthew Dunn, or DOC, as he is better known in hip musical circles, is a string king among the moat of axemen cometh and goneth. His grails never cease to overflow with spontaneous riffage whether in dronespeak or hyperspace fluency, and the tongue he talks in is a most human lovetone. born october 26th, 1979 in north york he comes unarmed with fessenden pedal steel, hagstrom six & ersatz chainmail nails. dig the colloquial grace of his fingerstyle, dig the sustainable harmonic architecture of his smoke. you will be within the sweetsound which has graced units like the transcendental rodeo, all under heaven and the canada goose wing of the golden road. dig it. that’s 3 digs in one bio, class. That’s cos it’s deep and there’s a lot there.
Live Video Mixing, Renée Lear
