Part of Winter 1997
The annual New Toronto Works Show presents Toronto’s newest innovative, experimental and risk-taking film and video. Curated by Pleasure Dome members Larrisa Fan and Hamansu Desai, this year’s program promises to reveal the hidden and unveil the cutting edge in Toronto’s avant-garde — guaranteed to lift your winter blues.
Notes:
New Toronto Works Show
Curated by Larissa Fan & Himansu Desai
Frostbite, Wrik Mead (12 min., 16mm, 1996)
An isolated lighthouse keeper finds a body on the island’s icy shore. He drags it home and enacts a strange ritual, spinning a dreamlike tale on the razor edge of tenderness and danger.
Movietone, Robert Kennedy (6 min., video, 1996)
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Postcard #2, The Soft Shoulders,
Tell Me What You Want to Hear, Jinhan Ko (1.30 min., 6 min., 3 min., video, 1996)
Postcard #2 is a video postcard, a shot of a hotel room in the west, a bed is neatly made and I believe it is now time to go to sleep. Dedicated to Dean Adams, an amazing artist who never slept in his bed. The Soft Shoulders is Jin’s Banana House’s follow-up of Jin’s Banana House on the road… about more road trips, being a bad driver, personal theories about the west and Jackie Chan.
Tell Me What You Want to Hear. A Jin’s Banana House performance for the camera, everything is so great…
Chimera, Philip Hoffman (15 min., 16mm, 1995)
Made over three years, Chimera is a patchwork picture of several places, peoples and spaces. The splayed visual ‘documents’ inner fluctuations and explosive exteriors during a time of terrific change. (P. Hoffman)
Intermission
Bangs, Carolynne Hew (8 min., 16mm, 1996)
Bangs is a comedy about a young Chinese Canadian girl obsessed with her large egg-like forehead. Her fixation leads her from the daily battleground of fancy hair products to the world of an overpriced Chinese face reader until she finally faces her own demons. (C. Hew)
What Do You Fear?, Barbara Sternberg (5:30 min., video, 1996)
A pastoral scene in autumn, the leaves are falling, dog and two cats are playing. Just what is there to be afraid of?
…yet blooming purple, Julie Wilson (12 min., video, 1996)
…yet blooming purple became a docudrama when the fiction of filming nudity and lesbian sexuality became more interesting than the content itself. The bodies became an obviously literal and disturbing metaphor for voyeurism. The task now at hand was to comment on this state of vulnerability behind the camera as well as in front.
(J. Wilson)
Heaven or Montr̩al (the Unfinished Video), Dennis Day & Ian Middleton (5 min., video,1993 Р97)
Reflecting on the premature death of a young dancer and artist, Heaven or MontrŽal points to unfinished ideas, creating ‘outlines’ of lost energy and imagination. As a finale, it summons all its desperation, and asks for silence to speak, and stillness to dance. Ian Middleton, its co-author, died in 1993 of AIDS-related causes. (D. Day)
October 25th + 26th, Kika Thorne (9 min., S8/video, 1996)
In the balmy days of October, a group of citizens, mostly architects and designers (under the name The October Group), devised a spontaneous project to support Metro’s Days of Action. By building an ephemeral, light structure housing a temporary carnival space, they expressed their solidarity with the event and critiqued the social policy cuts of Mike Harris’s ‘common sense revolution’. (K.Thorne)