rising
a program of short films by
Emily Pelstring
Laura Kraning
Charlotte Clermont
Pierre Ajavon
December 5, 2021 to January 9, 2022
Harnessing the power and possibilities of animism over this winter solstice, Deluge Contemporary Art presents a program of moving image works to be encountered in public space. Featuring a quartet of films from Canada, France and USA, rising can be viewed in the transom window of Deluge in downtown Victoria, 6 to 10pm nightly, December 5 to January 9. Engaging with themes of alchemy, the duality of light and darkness, sentient nature and the lure of the beyond, these works celebrate regeneration, the recovery of life forces and increasing lucidity: signposts leading us into solar return.
“Bound in this molecule is the energy of the sun.” With Petal to the Metal Emily Pelstring has preserved the fruits of growing season via photograms and the alchemy between natural elements and the film’s emulsion. A form of ritual caretaking and invocation through the archiving of spring and summer, her offering literally reveals the artist’s hand alongside flora’s attendant fauna. Laura Kraning has documented two years of specific rambling through an ardent study of beauty in-between: the oft overlooked poetry of accretion in the margins. Fracture is a reminder of timekeeping beyond our ongoing lack of focus and difficulty locating ourselves temporally. In Lucina Annulata, Charlotte Claremont has magicked taxonomy into incantation to accompany the seductive material narrative of her subject matter, employing the Latin names of shells to create her own language. Surface tensions and rocky outcrops segue into verdant hope and blue-sky thinking. Pierre Ajavon’s Fixing a Hole compels us to reconsider the very nature of time—to the moon and back—a voyage of uncertain duration. Chromatic come-ons and choreography of the spheres issue an energetic invitation to confluence.
Petal to the Metal | Emily Pelstring | 3 min | Canada | 2021
This hand-processed 16mm film reflects on botanical animism. It is a song written for night-crawlers, compost and shadows, inspired by human flower-lust. Water, fire, earth and air are interwoven with the garden’s creature crew. The work draws a parallel between the photographic alchemy of cinematic experiments and the photosynthetic processes of plants.
Emily Pelstring is an artist and filmmaker, and is faculty in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Her work incorporates crafts, available materials, a variety of animation techniques and visual tricks such as holography, stereography and Pepper’s Ghost to explore links among technology, spirituality and magic. Emily is engaged in an artistic collaboration with Jessica Mensch and Katherine Kline called Sistership TV, a web-based variety show that gathers numerous artists to explore questions across ecology, media studies, materialist theory and feminist theory. She is also a co-organizer of an international symposium called The Witch Institute, which brings together scholars, artists and practitioners to explore the meaning and impact of current media representations of the witch.
Fracture | Laura Kraning | 4 min | USA | 2020
Fracture mines the slips between stillness and motion, as cracks and fissures of bark and stone are spliced and layered, frame by frame, intersecting slices of time. Single frames were gathered from two years of walks across unfamiliar terrain, through forests and suburban landscapes of Western New York, where the scarred surfaces of trees and stratified rock collide with slabs of marble and clusters of moss, as the images crystallize into a flickering mirage of radiating tree limbs and splintered veins of iridescence.
Laura Kraning’s moving image work navigates landscape as a repository for memory, cultural mythology and the technological sublime. Exploring absence and the fluidity of time, she evokes liminal spaces of neither past, nor present, but a landscape of the imagination. Her work has screened widely at international film festivals, museums and galleries, such as the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Edinburgh International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, Antimatter Media Art, Visions du Réel, Union Docs, Art Toronto, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and REDCAT Theater, among others.
Lucina Annulata | Charlotte Clermont | 4 min | Canada | 2021
Sunny semantic sequences guide the gaze, a gaze that is sometimes raised, propelled downwards, then too high or motionless in front of an unrecognizable and yet familiar vision. The images, linked by echoes of chromatic palettes and linear layers, scroll to the rhythm of an incantation.
Charlotte Clermont creates a dialogue between video and audio explorations to examine our perceptions of the real. The performative aspect of her practice, moved by a desire to transpose the illusiveness of lived moments, is embodied in her singular way of working with analogue recording devices. Using materials from her immediate environment, she works upon the chemical sensitivity of film through various alterations, while leaving a large amount to chance. She holds a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University and lives and works in Montreal. Her work has been presented in Canada and internationally in the framework of festivals and exhibitions, including the International Festival of Films on Art (Canada), Fracto (Germany), the Festival des cinémas différents et expérimentaux de Paris (France), IFF Rotterdam (Netherlands), Künstlerhaus Bethanian (Germany), CROSSROADS (United States), Arctic Moving Image and Film Festival (Norway) and the Edinburgh International Film Festival (Scotland). She was artist in residence at Studio Kura (Japan), Signal Culture (United States), Fusion Gallery (Italy) and Shiro Oni (Japan).
Fixing a Hole | Pierre Ajavon | 3 min | France | 2019
By trying to fix a hole we hope to stop our mind from wandering to the other side…
Fixing a Hole uses my own lunar films mixed with an experimental electronic music composition including NASA lunar sound recordings.
Pierre Ajavon is a Parisian visual artist, composer and musician. After studies in Ethnomusicology and Sociology with a focus on psychedelic culture, he embarked on a long musical journey as a composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist and expanded into media art when he saw the possibility of bringing the sound and moving image together. Mixing electronic music, psychedelic rock and field recordings for his research, Ajavon hinges his musical thought on postmodern visual aesthetics which draw references from psychoanalysis, surrealism, psychedelia and pop-art.