v=d/t
[velocity equals distance over time]
Rebecca Barten | Michael Bucuzzo | Alex MacKenzie | Julia Petrocelli
June 20 to July 19, 2025
A program of artists’ moving image works engaging with concepts of escape velocity: traceries of transition, anticipation of arrival, preempting the past. In a period of perpetual fright, these four films choose flight—kidnapping themselves through documents of departure and manifest motion. Abstracted tarmac markings and highway residue join hijacked collage and appropriated advertising: runways and runaways in search of time and distance from the everyday world.
Dusk to dawn in the gallery transom window and 24/7 at deluge.ca.
YUL 20A
Alex MacKenzie | 2023 | 6 min
A readymade of sorts, animating the tarmac as landing protocols fuse with painted arrows and guidelines on bruised asphalt. Distinct concrete squared segments are reinterpreted as film frames flickering past, with this hypnotic and immersive taxiing finally giving way to a rush of unbuckling.
Alex MacKenzie is a west coast-based Canadian media artist working primarily with analog film equipment and hand processed imagery. He creates works of expanded cinema, light projection installation and projector performance. His work has shown at Rotterdam International Film Festival, EXiS Experimental Film Festival in Seoul, Oberhausen in Germany, Lightcone in Paris, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, Antimatter in Victoria and many other festivals and art spaces worldwide. Alex was the founder and curator of Edison Electric Gallery of Moving Images, Blinding Light!! Cinema and Vancouver Underground Film Festival. He has been an artist in residence at Atelier MTK in Grenoble, France, Struts Gallery/Faucet Media in New Brunswick, Cineworks’ Analog Film Annex in Vancouver, Daimon in Gatineau and Mire/SPECTRAL in France.
Alex co-edited Damp: Contemporary Vancouver Media Art (Anvil Press 2008) and interviewed David Rimmer for Loop, Print, Fade + Flicker: David Rimmer's Moving Images (Anvil Press 2009). Commissions include Portal (Situated Cinema WNDX Winnipeg 2012), Auroratone: Digitalis (FilmPop Montreal 2012), Beauty in Pesticides (The Film that Buys the Cinema, Cube Bristol 2014), Hyborian Witch (Wrong Wave/Kensington Gore 2013) and Quoinfilm (Close Up London 2025).
Alex is a founding member of the Iris Film Collective in Vancouver.
The Flower Cult of Amelia Earhart
Rebecca Barten | 2024 | 6 min
A synaptic celluloid requiem, propelling the High Priestess Aviator Earhart through far-sighted passages of flora, fauna, air, fire and water.
Rebecca Barten is an experimental filmmaker and collage artist who has made poetic/conceptual works in both 16mm film and video which engage themes of radical otherness rooted in highly edited explorations of cinematic metabolism. Often, Barten’s films are living documents of the creative process of their own making. Along with David Sherman, she coined the term “Microcinema” in 1994, co-founding Total Mobile Home Microcinema in San Francisco and Exploded View Microcinema in Tucson AZ.
Her films have screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Best Experimental Film Award 2025), Antimatter (Victoria BC), Experiments in Cinema (Albuquerque NM), Cosmic Rays (Chapel Hill NC) and San Francisco Cinematheque. Barten currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.
I-80
Julia Rose Petrocelli | 2024 | 6 min
I-80 is a drive on the American road. Dirt and debris concealed in a layer of packing tape, enacted into movement, magnifies the road and its millions of travellers. Following a woman in the privacy of her 2001 Lexus.
Julia Petrocelli is an artist focusing on handmade filmmaking processes. She received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in the spring of 2024 and attended the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, or FAMU, where she worked exclusively with 16mm film. Most of her work examines processes, archiving and collecting directly on the filmstrip, creating a singularity and ephemerality to her individual prints. She has shown her work in the Fluxus Museum, murmur contemporary, Katherine Small Gallery and more.
Stress Eating Time
Michael Bucuzzo | 2023 | 11 min
Crushed under the unbearable weight of time, an airplane has an existential crisis and hijacks itself. Air travel cinema and luxury watch advertisements are reappropriated to explore the suspended zone between arrival and departure, life and death, technology and spirituality.
Michael Bucuzzo is an Amsterdam-based filmmaker and sound designer. Using experience borne out of the commercial film industry, he explores the emotional architecture of popular media. Through a play of sonic textures, illusory set design and archival media, his work constructs atmospheric dream worlds. Michael’s films and performances have been included in festivals and venues such as European Media Art Festival, Eye International Conference, Onion City Experimental Film Festival and International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Michael is also a graduate of the Master of Film artistic research program at the Netherlands Film Academy.
