|
Festival of Contemporary Film and Video
November 21, 2005 to February 3,
2006
Sir Wilfred Grenfell
Art Gallery is pleased to present a varied contemporary film and video
festival and exhibition series which will support the creation of a "film
culture" at Grenfell College.
The festival begins on Tuesday, November 22, when the gallery celebrates the
simultaneous opening of a video-based exhibition and a three-month film
festival. Pierre LeBlanc, visual arts instructor, said that in terms of
visual culture, film offers its viewers the possibility of seeing a work the
very way it was intended by its author(s).
"This is important in regions where galleries and venues are not numerous,"
said Mr. LeBlanc. "It offers instructors a unique tool to discuss and
critique the creative process in terms of both aesthetics and process in a
manner that is difficult to achieve with photographic reproductions of
artists' work."
The recent movement towards establishing a film studies program on the
Grenfell campus makes this festival a timely endeavor.
"The most important part of establishing a film school anywhere is the
creation of a 'film culture'," says Mr. LeBlanc. "Though students are well
versed in wide release Hollywood cinema, it is a treat for them to
experience more challenging expressions from both contemporary and
traditional artists. These works provide a platform to discuss and reflect
on narrative structure and the various processes that intervene between an
idea and its realization."
Gallery director Gail Tuttle says the Art Gallery at Grenfell College serves
as catalyst for the dissemination and interpretation of cutting edge
contemporary art.
"Film, video and new media are important avenues of expression for artists,
but they are forms of visual art that may not be well understood or
appreciated by the community," she says. "It is part of our mandate to
provide the public with opportunities to consider art they will not see
elsewhere in the region. The gallery prepares program notes, video synopses
and catalogue essays for distribution during the festival. In addition,
outreach activities bring the public in touch with the artist's meaning and
purpose for creating their work. We offer recent historical context for the
festival with a series of Canadian films from the 60s and 70s. And, unique
in the western Newfoundland region, we continue to offer our program of
talks, tours, activities and gallery visits to special interest groups and
high school art classes."
List of Events
November 22 at 7pm
in FC2014
Deserted Streets at Midday
Video program curated by Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak
"This group of video works rumbles with disoriented
energy and seethes with visual violence – never explicit, always embedded,
lying harmless until some key unlocks the meaning. Menace lurks in
Deserted Streets at Midday…as each work reveals the unreliable nature of
time itself – as only time-based works can. These artists attest to the
basic law that all must be risked to achieve a full report. No question is
irrelevant."
Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak
Works
by 8 artists icluding:
Leslie
Peters: beautiful lies,
2004, 12:00
Daniel Cockburn: Stupid Coalescing Becomers, 2004, 2:31
Jeremy Bailey, Strongest Man, 2003, 4:33
Deirdre Logue, That Beauty; 2003, 1:28
Jennifer Norton, Excess, 2002, 1:20
Steve Reinke, Anthology of American Folk Songs, 2004, 27:45
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsey and Cooper Battersby,
Untitled, 2004, 10:00
Emily Chhangur, Quenched, 2003, 6:00
November 28 at 7
p.m. in the Art Gallery
Joyce Wieland
Reason over Passion
(1968-69)
16 mm film, English, colour, 80 minutes
January 12 at 6:30
p.m. in the Art Gallery
Jack Chambers
The Hart of London (1970)
The Hart of London is an experimental film concerned with
several themes and constructed out of a variety of material; newsreel, found
footage and film shot by Chambers himself.
Visually and thematically it shares much common ground with
the work of Stan Brakhage, whose influence, when watching the film, is hard
to ignore; Chambers postulates the primacy of light using a number of
techniques, and uses his material of a Spanish slaughter house and the birth
of a child (amongst other things) to riff on the themes of life and death,
all to stunning effect. The maintenance of the film's tension, and its
complexity of scope, however, pushes The Hart of London way beyond any
reductive comparisons. Brakhage called it 'one of the few GREAT films of
cinema'.
January 16 at 6:30
p.m. in the Art Gallery
Jack Chambers: 3 short films
Circle (1969), Mosaic (1965) and Hybrid (1966)
Chambers’ first film Mosaic (1966) encapsulates his central
themes of birth and death with a succinct use of montage. It concerns the
impassioned denunciation of the Vietnam War.
In Hybrid (1967), Chambers utilizes documentary-style shots
of a gardener cross-pollinating a rose bush intercut with imagery of the
Vietnam War. It is a playful portrait of a collage friend and fellow painter
Greg Curnoe.
A marvelous example of structural cinema, Circle (1969)
depicts the passing of one year, day by day, and the stunning meditation on
time and domestic space, focused on one point in Chambers’ backyard.
January 18 at 6:30
p.m. in the Fine Arts Lecture Theatre (FA224)
Paul Wong Presents: Split Decisions
A video series of works by 12 artists
Curated by Paul Wong
Split
Decisions
is a program of recent international, Canadian and Toronto shorts featuring
the works of seasoned video artists and emerging artists curated by Paul
Wong from the Vtape collection. “I have selected pieces created from the
place 'of two minds' - tapes that examine conflict both exterior and from
within the deep recesses of the human psyche. Relationships, collaborations,
youth and fading beauty, aging, private hell, personal torment, religion,
morality, art and science, nature and technology, alone and together --
challenging and entertaining, from out of the dark into the disco light."
This program is a culmination of the Paul Wong curatorial residency at Vtape
in January/April 2005.
Works by 12 artists including:
Nelson
Henricks: Satellite, 2004, 6:00
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay: Forever Young, 2001, 5:00
Hilary Martin: Prescripted, 2001, 5:00
Deidre Logue: That Beauty, 2003, 1:28
Samuel Chow: Confessions, 2003, 4:20
Tricia Middleton and Joel Taylor: Lost In Space, 2003, 11:15
Ross Turnbull: The Letters From R, 2005, 20:00
John Beagles and Graham Ramsay: Trilogy, 1999, 3:00
Tom Sherman from The Off-Kilter Series: The Appearance of Voice,
2004, 4:57
Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby: The New Freedom Founders: A
Cure For Being Ordinary, 2004, 10:00
Johanna Householder, Dec. 31, 2000, 2000, 7:20
February 1 at 6:30
in the Fine Arts Lecture Theatre (FA224)
Michael Snow
Wavelength (1967)
Michael Snow ad Carl Brown
Triage (2004)
Michael Snow is best known for his influential 1967 film
Wavelength, which remains one of the landmarks of structuralist
cinema. Already an accomplished musician, sculptor, painter, and
photographer in his native Canada he became interested in film after moving
to New York in the early '60s, Snow saw filmmaking as a natural extension of
his other art making activities. His first film, New York Eye and
Ear Control, incorporated the "Walking Woman" figure he had already
employed in a series of widely-exhibited paintings and sculptures.
His subsequent films investigate the medium's formal
possibilities and are often structured on the mechanical properties of the
camera itself. Wavelength is organized around a 42-minute zoom
across a New York City loft.
Triage
is a dual-projection film, directed by Michael Snow and Carl Brown. Snow's
single-image frames—a high-speed "realism"—interact with footage shot by
Brown that has been subjected to a wide range of photochemical
transformations. These simultaneous projections are doubly counter
pointed with an electronic collage soundscape.
Gala closing
event:
February 3, 2006
Student Film and Video Night
Reception hosted by the gallery |
Designed by Matthew Hollett
Still from
Jeremy Bailey, Strongest Man, 2003, 4:33
Still from
Daniel Cockburn, Stupid
Coalescing Becomers, 2004, 2:31
Still from
Deirdre Logue, That Beauty;
2003, 1:28
Still from
Emily Chhangur, Quenched,
2003, 6:00
Still from Jack Chambers, The Hart of
London, 1970
Still from Nelson Henricks, Satellite,
2004, 6:00
Still from Nelson Henricks, Satellite,
2004, 6:00
Still from Michael Snow, Wavelength,
1967, 42:00
|
