Antimatter 2019
Media Installations
October 16 to 26, 2019
in the main Deluge gallery
The Camel Race
Isabelle Carbonell | 2018 | 24 min
During Qatar’s economic boom in the 1970s, camels became eclipsed by cars. In 1974, in a bid to preserve his culture, the Emir of Qatar launched camel racing as an official organized sport with prizes. In 2005, after a human rights outcry over the use of slave-Sudanese child jockeys, human jockeys were banned altogether from the sport. As a result, robot jockeys were invented. The Camel Race is a more-than-human and animal sensorial experience in four takes of the sport of camel racing. Humans and nonhumans converge, fusing Qatar’s heritage, modern Bedouin identity and technology in a reinvented twist on tradition.
Isabelle Carbonell is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a PhD candidate in film and digital media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is thinking through a cinema of the slow violence in the Anthropocene. Her work lies at the intersection of expanded documentary, environmental justice, invasive species, ecodisasters and experimental ethnography. Recent complete film works include The River Runs Red (2018), The Blessed Assurance (2018) and The Camel Race (2018).
in the Deluge transom window
Carousel
Annie Briard | 2018 | 5 min
Carousel reflects on the problematics of perception by taking the viewer on a road trip through the high desert, where the seen eventually breaks apart and the limits between physical reality, head trips and visions from beyond become blurred. Joshua Tree is seen through disused military optics or prisms, responding to an ancient theory claiming that we see the world as a result of minuscule crystals within our eyes. As military optics frame perspectives towards specific ends, so too might the eye and its crystalline components.
“In the much-discussed opening to Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard presents a reading of the Borges cartography fable, which concludes with ‘The desert of the real itself.’ Briard plays on the punned ending: both a departure from the real and the only landscape that might host shreds of metaphysical beauty. Each waving, hazy Joshua tree demands a different attention dispersed between separated frames. Through cracked windows or torn sails on a road trip in the hot, high desert, the viewer begins their journey in seeing the natural world for what it is and isn’t.” – Cori Hutchison, Whitehot Magazine
Annie Briard is a visual and media artist whose work challenges how we make sense of the world through visual perception. Creating lens-based and light-focused works, she explores the intersections between perception paradigms in psychology, neuroscience and existentialism. Her moving images, media installations, expanded and print photography works have been presented in numerous solo exhibitions around the world. Recently, she presented large-scale public art projects for a number of commissions in Canada. Briard holds a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she currently teaches.
in the Deluge entrance foyer
Rollerbabies (of Paradise)
Julie Sando, David Bergeron | 2017 | 3 min
The world wide web is a powerful leveller: content that was once produced and controlled by publishers, industries and institutions is often freely available to be conjured, shared and re-shared in a variety of non-hierarchal ways. This is perhaps especially true of pornography, long known to be one of the central drivers of web-based technological change and commerce. Rollerbabies (of Paradise) is a montage that exhausts all promises of the exotic and the erotic found in the original films: Bird of Paradise (1932), Rollerball (1975) and Rollerbabies (1976). As a work of satire, this piece embodies its suspicions and questions many of the voyeuristic gazes found in these earlier sources. Designed as an anti-spectacle, the visuals emphasize the juxtapositions of roughly cut transitions upon the repeated movements of the bored skaters. With its sugary violins, the soundtrack is reminiscent of the kind of sentimental music used in iconic love stories. It offers a counter-narrative of a dreamy yet saccharine world.
David Bergeron is a producer, guitarist, educator and programmer. Their most recent body of work is electronic in nature and exists between the realms of the “academic” and the “popular.” Bergeron aims to engage audiences by creating immersive environments that challenge expectations and explore the limitations of genre specificity, community and geography. They hold a Master of Fine Arts degree in Film and Media Arts and a Bachelor of Music from the University of Windsor.
Julie Sando is a lens-based visual artist, human rights advocate, educator and researcher. Central to her practice is the activity of collecting found imagery and manipulating those materials to the point of de-familiarization. Recent projects were created around collections of 45 rpm soul and pop recordings and amateur radio enthusiast magazines. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Windsor. Her work has been shown across Canada and in the United States.
at Ministry of Casual Living Window Gallery
There Were Four of Us
Cassie Shao | 2019 | 7 min
In a room, there are four people. Shao explores and reflects contradictions in herself within the dream realm. Despite their abandonment in isolation and surreality her characters remain eternally unmoved by their peculiar situations. Shao blends digital and analogue materials to evoke otherworldly and unique perspectives. She will always praise bathtubs, the spine and ever insoluble questions.
Cassie Shao is an animation artist currently based in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of SAIC and Hench-DADA School of Cinematic Arts at USC. She works across the fields of independent films, music videos, projection mapping and advertising as well as animated television series. Her work has screened at festivals such as MIAF, LIAF, Athens Animfest, Anim!Arte, Ars Independent, Cucalorus and KLIK.
at Legacy Art Gallery
Pwdr Ser: the Rot of Stars
Charlotte Pryce | 2018 | 7 min
The film depicts an encounter with a mysterious, luminous, electrical substance. Inspired equally by medieval accounts of visionary experiences and by 19th century photography of the invisible, Pwdre Ser joins Kirlian photography with hand-processed images. “Pwdre Ser” is the Welsh name for a mythical substance that has been observed by many since the 1400s.
As I pondered the mystery of substances that fall to earth from the cosmos, I was drawn to the idea of matter imbued with an ancient, restless light, light from beyond our solar system. I began to imagine the qualities of such a ragged electrically charged light, at once particle and wave, pulling and pushing nervously: a substance and a phenomenon.
In my work I have explored ideas of mystical contact with the natural world. For this film I drew on a personal experience from when I was nine years old: coming home late one night when the sky was clear and full of stars, I became aware as if for the first time of the vastness and magnitude of the universe—my own insignificance by contrast to the firmament, and by extension the comparative brevity of my life. At first such thoughts caused me great fear but over time I have come to realize that once the ego has gone all that remains are particles of matter, particles that are shared with the universe and with the restless inquisitive stars that refuse to orbit with regularity and take off to chart their own path, particles that have a beauty rhythm and mystery of their own.
Charlotte Pryce has been making experimental films, photographs and optical objects since 1986. Pryce graduated with a BFA from the Slade School of Art and completed an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her films have screened in numerous festivals including Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Toronto, San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, Ann Arbor and London. Awards include the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Douglas Edwards Award for Best Experimental Cinema Achievement, Film at Wits End Award and the Gil Omenn Art and Science Award from Ann Arbor Film Festival. In 2019 she presented a career retrospective at Rotterdam Film Festival and her work has been performed at the Bozar in Brussels, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at Mostra de Cinema Periferico in A Coruña Spain.
at Empty Gallery
AGENS
Lyoudmila Milanova, Steffi Lindner | 2018 | 18 min
In AGENS, clouds and fog come and go, but only featured in interiors. Everyday scenes of the ephemeral—smoke from a cigarette, steam from a kettle or a dishwasher—gradually turn into peculiar cloud and fog phenomena. While becoming denser and more surreal, familiar vapours get increasingly detached from their conformed functionality.
Lyoudmila Milanova was born in Varna, Bulgaria and has been living and working in Cologne, Germany since 2000. After receiving an MA in media science at the University of Cologne, she finished her postgraduate studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne in 2011. Milanova’s artistic practice includes videos, installations and objects. She has shown her work in exhibitions in New York, Marseille, Kyoto, Rotterdam, Seoul and Cologne and has been the recipient of numerous grants and stipends.
Steffi Lindner grew up in Berlin, where she lives and works, creating videos, drawings and installations since completing postgraduate studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne in 2013. Lindner is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships and her work has been included in various exhibitions at galleries and festivals including Images Festival (Toronto), Gallery YYZ (Toronto), Art Cologne, Erarta Motion Pictures (St. Petersburg), NADA Art Fair Miami, Liste Basel, Festival International Exit (Creteil) and Capla Kesting Fine Art Gallery (NYC).
at Victoria Arts Council Gallery
Acoustic Turbulence
Colton Hash | 2019 | 15 min
Acoustic Turbulence is an interactive art application that presents visualizations of underwater noise generated by pollution from large ocean vessels. This exploratory program allows viewers to experience unfiltered hydrophone recordings of the passage of various ships through the Salish Sea while moving a virtual camera vertically between a representational surface and an abstracted submarine environment. The transition is abrupt. Most vessel noise is generated below the waterline, and sound propagates farther and more rapidly through ocean water than through air. Viewers transition between different scenes of shipping lanes, each featuring a specific class of vessel and representative hydrophone recording.
Colton Hash is an emerging artist who currently resides as an uninvited guest on Lekwungen territories of Vancouver Island. Hash’s practice is inspired by the wild and anthropogenic landscapes that surround him. He integrates scientific understandings, social concerns and intuitive experience through multimedia creation. His politically-oriented practice has received regional recognition with the Witness Legacy Award for Social Purpose and Responsibility Through Art from the ProArt Alliance. Hash has received a B.Sc. in Computer Science, Visual Arts and Environmental Studies from the University of Victoria, and recently completed an art residency with Ocean Networks Canada.
at Victoria Arts Council Gallery
The Five Finger Splash
Robert Hamilton | 2019 | 9 min
The viewer is taken into a slow-motion tableau of a recreational dive competition on a luxury cruise ship sailing in the Gulf of Mexico. Capturing meticulous detail of every spectating body, The Five Finger Splash is a mesmerizing and absurd portrait of leisure, privilege and human progress.
Robert Hamilton is an internationally recognized media artist. He is a Professor of Multimedia at McMaster University, Canada. His has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a second MFA from the Jan Van Eyck Academie in The Netherlands. His research primarily involves video, animation and interactive gallery installations. He has been the recipient of ten grants from the Canada Council and two from Ontario Arts Council. Since 1986, Hamilton’s artwork has been presented in numerous international festivals, galleries and museums, including Transmediale (Berlin), Hilversum Museum (Netherlands) and Maison des arts de Laval (Quebec). His video work has won the German Video Art Prize and The Chicago Film Festival Silver Hugo Award. His artwork is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the AKI Academie of The Netherlands amongst others.
at VAC Satellite Gallery, Greater Victoria Public Library, Central Branch
bearing
Greg Marshall | 2018 | 3 min
bearing composes Google 360° Sphere photographs from Yemen with recorded data from over 327 US military drone attacks between 2002 and 2018. These records were further researched according to their geographic location. Each region of attack was remapped to a planar image and used to create the image sphere. The camera reveals the rotational coordinates and timing of each attack, visualizing the 17-year period into about two and a half minutes. The images were assembled according to time of day and weather and placed within a synchronized spin of yearly revolution. A central mirror-like sphere indicates the severity of each attack, according to its size, and is locked in relation to the camera. The images depict various regions and cities within Yemen, areas of everyday common interest, a kind of geographic snapshot of the country which for the most part does not necessarily depict results of civil war or drone strikes.
Greg Marshall is a Canadian interdisciplinary media artist working in art video, animation, documentary, installation, object and image making. His work often examines the structures and effects of war.
at VAC Satellite Gallery, Greater Victoria Public Library, sxʷeŋxʷəŋ təŋəxʷ James Bay Branch
The Mulch Spider’s Dream
Karel Doing | 2018 | 14 min
What is it like to be a spider? A creature that lives in the same environment as we do and yet has an experience far removed from ours. The Mulch Spider’s Dream evokes a non-human world through shape, colour and rhythm. The seemingly abstract images are made by using the internal chemistry of plants interacting with photographic emulsion, a type of image that I have called a “phytogram.” The making of phytograms involves simple biodegradable chemistry that is used to soak petals and leaves harvested from wild and domesticated plants. By bringing the organic material in contact with film emulsion, chemical traces are formed, reflecting the interior structure of the plants.
Karel Doing is an independent artist, filmmaker and researcher. His interest in experimental film and expanded cinema is reframed within a critical approach toward modernity and post-modernity, in search of new meanings of the real and the material. Through the study of (phyto)chemical process, the recording of oral history and the (re)use of cinematic heritage he explores alternative knowledge systems. In many of his works the rhythmical, painterly and performative qualities of the analog film medium are foregrounded. His films, performances and installations have been presented internationally.