Plaza
moving image art in public space
Vol 1: June – August 2026
Sasha Opeiko | Leonardo Pirondi | Gina Hara
Launching in June, Deluge curates an ongoing, quarterly series of artists' moving image works for the outdoor community screen at the southwest corner of Oak Bay Ave and Davie St in Victoria. Presented in conjunction with LIVERY Victoria, Plaza can be viewed from the street, sidewalk and dedicated benches onsite (which also house a sound sculpture by Canadian composer Christopher Butterfield), installed beside a large-scale sculpture by Daniel Laskarin. The inaugural Plaza program has a running time of approximately 10 minutes and can be experienced late afternoons/evenings from 4pm to 8pm, Wednesday through Sunday.
Unaesthetic Tableau
Sasha Opeiko | 2025 | Canada | 3 min
Unaesthetic Tableau traces a haunted, blundering passage through a digitally constructed scene built from photos and found images of remnants and dissolution—trash, stains, peeling paint, broken TVs. These fragments were translated into 3D models using AI software that imperfectly and erroneously remediates visual information. Misrecognition becomes a generative force as textures become warped, objects are distorted and debris is reconstituted as digital wreckage. The video’s scene is a virtual tableau that was first screen-recorded and then used as a base or platform for a second version rebuilt in Blender. In this iteration, the models are rendered white and textureless, appearing sculptural, bone-like and spectral. A navigation through this space is animated and layered over the initial footage. The resulting composition resists resolution. Frames are dropped, then roughly interpolated, producing low-res motion that echoes the incompleteness and distortion of the models. Sound, too, is abrasive, like a dragging, scraping camera hauling itself through artificial, unfinished terrain. This work continues the artist’s engagement with melancholy, digital perception and the aesthetic ambiguity of found objects. Decay is mediated through digital mistranslation and loss surfaces in spectral misreadings and partially incoherent reconstructions.
Sasha Opeiko is an artist, writer and researcher working with video, installation, new media, painting, drawing and assemblage. Her practice explores melancholy, decay, mediation and the material life of images and discarded objects amid conditions of consumption, obsolescence and technological mediation. Through found materials, digital processes and fragments of visual culture, her work considers how matter, memory and technology carry states of loss, transformation and disintegration. She has exhibited at Art Windsor-Essex, Thames Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Peterborough and McIntosh Gallery, among others. She has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and SSHRC. She completed her PhD in Art and Visual Culture at Western University in 2024.
The Perfect Room
Leonardo Pirondi | 2022 | Brazil | 2 min
The rendering of an impeccably constructed computer-generated image displays a disarranged home. Filmed on 16mm and hand-processed, the image is formed through a process that allows imperfections such as hair, dust and dirt.
Leonardo Pirondi is a Brazilian-Portuguese filmmaker and artist. His films create and inhabit alternate worlds that blur the lines between reality and fiction, challenging conventional storytelling structures. Pirondi's films have screened internationally at festivals such as Toronto International Film Festival, Tiger Short Competition in Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Viennale, Slamdance, Mar del Plata, IndieLisboa, FICUNAM, BFI London, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Oberhausen and Media City. His work has been presented in art centres such as Museum of Modern Art Rio de Janeiro, CCCB in Spain, Wexner Center for the Arts and REDCAT. He has had solo shows at Galeria Mola in Portugal and Spectacle Theater in NYC. Some of his films live in the Cinematheque of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, UCLA Film & Television Archive collection, James Baldwin Library at MacDowell and The Film-Makers' Coop. in New York City.
Pirondi holds bachelor's and master's degrees in film from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2025, is a Sundance Institute Fellow and was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2025. His work has been featured in publications such as ARTFORUM, Filmmaker Magazine, MUBI Notebook, Senses of Cinema, Cineuropa, Talking Shorts and InReview Online. His short and feature films have been supported by Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual of Portugal (ICA), Locarno Residency, Projeto Paradiso, Allan Sekula Social Documentary Fund, San Diego Underground Arts and Tim Disney Prize for Excellence in the Storytelling Arts. He is a programmer for Climate Film Festival NYC and part of the board of directors and selection committee for Badam Film and its development fund. He is currently developing two feature-length films: AMERIKA’ATINGA, which was selected for the Locarno Residency in 2025, and Contos do Céu à Margem do Rio.
Sidings of the Afternoon
Gina Hara | 2021 | Canada | 5 min
“Each age demands its own form.” – Hannes Meyer
Inspired by Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, light works by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy and Bauhaus urban design. Follow my train of thought, my shifting perception of the space around me, my fleeting relationships with nature and my urban cell. Seasons passing by while I stare at the same three objects in my house. What is outside, what will we find when we emerge? How will we move on when our toxic relationship with a virus that paralyzed our urban bodies ends? Scathed or unscathed? Dreams, algae, shadows, flowers and knives.
Gina Hara is a Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker and artist. She holds an MA in intermedia, an MFA in film production and had worked in different media with regard to film, video, new media, gaming and design. Her research focuses on marginalized narratives in the context of technology, specifically social media and games culture. Hara’s art works have been featured by different institutions including New Museum in New York, Budapest Kunsthalle and the City of Montreal. Waning (2011), her first fiction film, was nominated for Best Canadian Short at Toronto International Film Festival. Your Place or Minecraft? (2016) is her machinima docu web series about game studies and is available on YouTube. Hara’s feature length documentary, Geek Girls (2017), explores nerd culture from women’s perspective and was in theatres in Canada and Australia in 2018. Geek Girls is currently available on the website of the National Film Board of Canada, while it is distributed by Women Make Movies in the USA and South America. Hara’s most recent work, Sidings of the Afternoon won the Critics’ Choice Award at Milan Machinima Film Festival 2021. Hara lives in Montreal, where she is the creative director of the Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre.
