Antimatter 2017
Media Installations
October 13 to 28, 2017
in the main Deluge gallery
Glass Mountain
Mirka Morales | 2017 | 11 min
In this contrast of natural and artificial portals, Morales considers the question “Are we food for the moon?” How much control do we, as individuals or as a collective, have over the mechanical forces of nature? Can we program ourselves to be free from lunacy?
The natural portal shows the otherworldly landscape of Glass Mountain, a pile of sharp black obsidian rocks, and the volcanic Lava Beds National Monument in Northern California, site of the Modoc War. In the other, a man opens a Pandora’s box which leads to dreams with buggy underworlds of taxidermied insects including the mighty dung beetle. Shot on Super 16mm film, with digital SLR stop-motion animation and found footage. Additional sounds provided by Kwisp.
Mirka Morales is a San Francisco-based artist originally from Puerto Rico. Her work is driven by a fiercely anti-colonial spirit, although it could also be described as personal and only indirectly political. Working in 16mm film and digital formats, she uses a variety of cinematic techniques including animation and live action to explore lucid dreams through reality and humour from an intimate, poetic, DIY perspective. Morales received an AB in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard and an MFA from CalArts. Her work has been screened and exhibited at Anthology Film Archives, Deluge Contemporary Art, Sundance Film Forward at the Museo de Puerto Rico, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Chicago, Boston, Oakland and Portugal Underground Film Festivals and at Burning Man.
in the Deluge transom window
Some of the Sensations
Péter Lichter | 2017 | 4 min
Some of the Sensations examines the relationship between 1950s movie gimmicks and contemporary blockbusters through the synaesthesia of classical abstract cinema.
Péter Lichter is a Hungarian experimental filmmaker. He studied film history and theory at ELTE University, Budapest. Lichter has made found footage abstract films and lyrical documentaries since 2002. His films have been screened internationally at festivals and venues including Tribeca Film Festival, Rotterdam IFF, Jihlava IDFF, goEast–Wiesbaden, Cinema 16 (NY), EXiS (Seoul), CROSSROADS (San Francisco), VideoEX (Zurich), Festival of (In)appropriation (LA), Klex (Kuala Lumpur), Flex (Florida) and Antimatter. He is co-editor of the film journal Prizma and his first book on experimental cinema, A láthatatlan birodalom (The Invisible Impire), was published in 2016. Peter frequently collaborates with composer Ádám Márton Horváth, sound designer Péter Benjámin Lukács and artists like Loránd Szécsény-Nagy and Bori Máté. His first feature length horror film, Frozen May, will be released in 2017.
in the Deluge entrance foyer
Day and Night
Mooyoung Kim | 2015 | 5 min
The film is the visual meditation of landscapes.
The film tries to capture the interaction between me and landscapes before this interaction becomes the language.
The film visually represents phenomena that surge up between me and landscapes.
This visual representation is the research about things before language.
Mooyoung Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea. He received his BFA and MFA in Film/Video from CalArts in California. His work has screened and exhibited in festivals and galleries in Frankfurt, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Seoul, Kathmandu and Athens. Kim lives and works in Seoul.
at Ministry of Casual Living Window Gallery
Palmerston Blvd.
Dan Browne | 2017 | 14 min
In Palmerston Blvd. Dan Browne invites the audience into the intimate space of his living room in this portrait of a bay window recorded over the course of a year. Gradual shifts in the interior and exterior environments mark the passing of the seasons, a slow dance of objects and light juxtaposed by the rapid speeds of bodies and the urban landscape, revealing the processes inherent in all things.
Dan Browne is a filmmaker and multimedia artist whose works explore patterns, nature and sensory perception. His films and videos have been presented at over 100 festivals and venues internationally, and have received multiple awards. Browne’s practices includes live performances in collaboration with musicians and publicly commissioned media installations in Toronto and Vancouver. Browne has collaborated with Peter Mettler, Michael Snow, Carl Brown and R. Bruce Elder, as well as members of the Loop Collective. He lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
at Legacy Art Gallery
The Warriors
Kathleen Hearn | 2016 | 5 min
Saint-Louis (Ndar in Wolof) is a city of contrasts with its complex history, colonial past and swelling youth population desiring to create their own stories. Framed by the Senegalese river, the narrow island (just two kilometres long and four hundred meters wide) is connected to the mainland by a single bridge. The defined perimeter of the city and its architecture—frozen in time—is both comforting and claustrophobic, enclosing and encircling those that live there.
The Warriors explores globalized youth culture as it plays out in the streets of the island of Saint-Louis, Senegal. Focusing on the in-line skate group KRONIC Roller Family, the work, choreographed by KRONIC members, records Abrame, Abou, Theirno and their peers as they perform against the backdrop of the city. In the video, the teens circle the island, looping through the streets as they mark out their territory while sounds of the city mix with the strikes of their wheels cutting against the road. In their performance, the group blends elements of local and imported culture to perform their hybrid identity and sub-culture that is uniquely Saint-Louisienne.
Kathleen Hearn is a Toronto-based artist working in video, installation, photography and performance. She received a BA from the University of Guelph and an MFA from Concordia University. Her practice involves spending time in communities and rethinking ethnographic curiosity as a culture of exchange. She often works with teens to give voice to their own unique perspectives and explores the individual in relation to universal themes of entering adulthood that dominate popular culture. Hearn’s work has shown across Canada and in Argentina, Iceland, Senegal, Benin and Nigeria. Hearn is a professor in Digital Media in the CCIT collaborative program at Sheridan College and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
at the fifty fifty arts collective (Oct 13 to Nov 5)
matters of duration
Kemi Craig
matters of duration is a video installation exploring the materiality of trauma and the simultaneity of joy expressed through images of everyday life. Gathered from analogue film and mobile devices, the images are projected onto storefront windows. One window features a Super 8 film of a dancer; the film is repeatedly run through a projector, begging the question, how long can the material body survive the markings, scratches and cuts wrought by the machine before breaking? In the second window a loop of digital images is superimposed by a soundscape featuring interviews navigating ways of looking and seeing that call upon themes of afrofuturism and hauntology. Together these works elicit a figuration for raced and gendered experiences through analogue and digital technologies.
A crucial element of matters of duration is an exercise in collaborative destabilization and restructuring of images and narratives that populate dominate culture. As a part of this work, Craig will host a DIY mini-projector workshop culminating in a participatory screening of video image collages created by attendants. See thefiftyfifty.net for more details.
Kemi Craig is a contemporary analogue artist living and working in the traditional territories of the Lekwungen and WSÁNEC peoples. A sixth-generation American of African ancestry raised in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina, her work explores the contingencies of identity through raced and gendered bodies. Working through projections of Super 8 film, 16mm handmade animation and cellphone video, she interrogates agency from the positionality of looking as well as being looked at.
matters of duration is a co-presentation with the fifty fifty arts collective.
at Audain Gallery, UVic Visual Arts Bldg
Circular Inscription
Lukas Marxt | 2016 | 7 min
A mountain range on the horizon separates the cloudy sky from the dusty desert soil of El Mirage Dry Lake. In the long shot, the gaze shows a detail of the Californian Mojave landscape, whose static panorama forms the referential and also material background for Circular Inscription. In a performative tracing of a vehicle’s path, Lukas Marxt initiates and documents in this cinematic work, the process of inscription that gives the film its title: a seemingly unmanned white car rolls into the image and begins to spin in eccentric rounds in the middle of the dried out lake. The vehicle draws its circles uniformly, from inside to outside, the squealing of the tires continuously rising. In doing so, the tire tracks furrow spiral-shaped in the desert surface, leaving behind marks in the soil of this culturally imbued landscape—a favourite shooting site for Hollywood films and advertisements, a popular venue for car races and their media exploitation, a site tightly bound to the art-historical movement of Land Art.
Lukas Marxt lives and works in Cologne, Germany and Graz, Austria. Marxt studied geography and environmental science before switching to audio visual studies at the Art University in Linz. He also attended the Faculdade de Belas Artes de Lisboa at the Institut Arte Multimédia before post graduate studies at the Art University in Cologne and HGB Leipzig. Marxt is the recipient of several fellowships and artist grants, including START Stipendium for Video und Media Art from the BKA, Vienna; Forum Stipendium, Linz; Diagonale Preis Innovatives Kino for his work High Tide; LENTOS Kunstpreis, Linz; Medienkunstpreis Marl, Germany. Marxt’s work has been exhibited in numerous group and solo shows worldwide.