Film and Discussion Program

Simultaneous Contrast, 16mm, color, silent, 5.5 minutes, 2008. The striped pattern of the municipal bus shelters in San Francisco becomes a fixed foreground behind which the city passes. Spatial oscillations provide a constantly permutating play of figure, ground and space, imaging the possibility of being two places at once.

Tamalpais, 16mm, color, sound, 14 minutes, 2009. Shot on Mount Tamalpais, a spatial matrix replaces temporal causality with contiguous space. A view of landscape is taken apart, to be reconstituted through memory. The grid, a reference to the “veil of threads” invented by Albrecht Dürer as an aid for perspective drawing – to transfer vision to a sheet of paper – is used for an opposite effect – to disperse a landscape across time. The viewer is asked to remember the space as it passes and reconstitute it from memory, actively connecting the image across space and time.

Genesee, 16mm, color, silent, 3 minutes, 2011. Shot in the Genesee Valley of New York state last fall on regular 8mm to commemorate the last rolls of Kodachrome. The colors of the leaves and the film stock are augmented by orange color filters, boosting the contrast and highlighting the rich saturated yellows, reds and orange of stock and season.

One Roll in the Blackness, 16mm, b&w, 3 minutes, 2011. “Heads thrash and dissolve in photodynamic nods of light as the guitar shreds a thick noisy pitch-black. Time, space, and sonic waves are distorted through the trajectory that is motion. Evanescence is everything. Featuring Keiji Haino” (Amelia Ishmael). Keiji Haino, live in Toronto, June 22, 2011. A single roll of film, shot one frame at a time. Special thanks to Keiji Haino and Adam Rosen.

Towards a Vanishing Point, 16mm, color, silent, 8 minutes, 2012. Footage shot in Coba, Mexico and the Siwa Oasis in Egypt and a found film from California serve as inspiration for a series of sketches on the notion of the vanishing point.

Brimstone Line, 16mm, color, 10 minutes, 2013. Three grids are placed along the Credit River in rural Ontario. They become devices through which the stationary camera, pointing upstream, delineates the landscape. They motivate the movement of the zoom, which intensifies our sense of the field of view, narrowing vision and flattening space. The river, framed momentarily, flows past.

Watching the Detectives, 16mm, color, silent, 36 minutes, 2017. Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, amateur detectives took to the Internet chat rooms to try and find the culprits. Users on reddit, 4chan and other gathering spots poured over photographs uploaded to the sites, looking for any detail that might point to the guilt of potential suspects. Using texts and jpegs culled from these investigations, “Watching the Detectives” narrates the process of crowd sourcing culpability.