Spectra
Zeynep Abes
Mélissa Faivre
Christine Lucy Latimer
Caroline So Jung Lee
June 21 to July 31, 2024
Spectra is a program of artists’ moving image works presented nightly as a public installation in the Deluge Contemporary Art transom window on Yates Street in Victoria’s Old Town and available worldwide at the gallery website. The program comprises four films exploring spectral vestiges of personal and collective memory as embodied in built environments and urban spaces.
Spectra invites viewers and passersby to consider the nature of place: the sidewalks from which we watch these films, inside a city, part of a neighbourhood, the exterior of a building—all possessed of their own histories. How do we remember and attach ourselves to locations that are rapidly becoming unrecognizable, unable to repel the assaults of market and speculation: reoriented, misremembered and sometimes forgotten altogether? How do we actively and passively create and destroy cities, neighbourhoods and domestic spaces, in real time and as virtual constructions?
The films re-engage with seen and unseen energies animating these spaces, residual as well as emanating, recalling the past and predicting the future. The artists in this program consider what drives and distorts memory as well as its possibilities and limitations in the reconstruction of conceptual and literal sites. The processes they employ subvert and transmute traditional and digital media through data processing, glitch, environmental contamination and other alterations that parallel the (re)construction and decay of memory.
The spectral traces of where our lives have been lived inevitably inform where we are going. Our ability to revisit and reconsider these locales allows us some small agency—and no small warning—in considering where we ultimately want to be.
House Pieces
Christine Lucy Latimer | 2019 | 3 min
Years ago, my mother sold her house in Woodstock, Ontario. Hundreds of high dynamic range digital photos were taken to provide to the real estate agent for the online sale listing. The images were left on an SD card that was strangely stored and subject to firmware incompatibility (or some other manner of environmental degradation). Disassembling each damaged, barely-there high dynamic range photo into its light and dark component parts, I built a VHS cascade of house pieces (never quite reconstituting what was).
Christine Lucy Latimer is a lens-and-time-based media artist from Tkaronto/Toronto. A practitioner of photochemical film and photoelectric analog experiments, her work has been featured in film festivals and galleries across five continents.
Memory Place
Zeynep Abes | 2020 | 7 min
Memory Place follows three moments of memory on the fraying certainty of home. The visualizations are produced through point cloud data using 3D scanning techniques to portray and preserve private and public recollections. The videos invite the viewer to “walk inside” these moments, creating an immersive experience of a fading past. The piece explores the alienation that arises from the changing socio-political climate of Turkey as Istanbul becomes more of an idea than a place. Recollections of safe and cherished times with family remain as the only uninterrupted memories in the changing nature of the city.
Zeynep Abes is an artist, curator and educator from Istanbul, Turkey. She studied film and interactive media at Emerson College, later getting her start at LACMA’s Art+Tech lab creating augmented reality installations. She then worked at the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier Exhibitions and earned her MFA from UCLA’s Design Media Arts department. Abes is currently a PhD candidate in the Media Arts and Practice program at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, working primarily with archival media, photogrammetry and immersive media. Her subjects revolve around identity, history and loss of memory, in pursuit of exploring the role artists play in preserving memories to navigate the struggle and alienation that arise from changing social environments and shifting identities.
ghosts of cambie
Caroline So Jung Lee | 2020 | 3 min
ghosts of cambie blends visual music, collage and documentary. It focuses on the neighbourhoods of South Cambie and Fairview that lie on the unceded, traditional, ancestral territories of the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lo and S.’lílw.taʔ/ Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xwm.θkw.y’.m (Musqueam) Nations (known by some as Vancouver, BC, Canada). Shot on 16mm colour reversal film and cut with archival found footage, the film explores the emotional friction within a neighbourhood of changing communities, shopkeepers, settlers and lives. While Hong Kong migrants in the 1980s were a major force in shaping the architectural and cultural landscape of the community, evidence of these lives are disappearing due to rapid gentrification and erasure of history. Remnants are left behind.
Caroline So Jung Lee is an award-winning diasporic Korean filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist and community arts worker. She is based in Tkaronto (Toronto, Canada) and sometimes works on unceded Coast Salish Territories (Vancouver, BC) and in Korea. Caroline experiments with 16mm handmade film, documentary and sound to explore kinetic, emotional and spiritual movement and affect in film. She obtained a degree in English Literature from the University of Toronto and a degree in Film and Integrated Media, and Social Practice and Community Engagement from Emily Carr University.
Under the Midnight Sun
Mélissa Faivre | 2022 | 10 min
A dance of light and shadows, textured grayscale expanding across the landscape of an apocalyptic city. The sun is moon and light: unveiled by means of visual pulsating dynamics, unstable frequencies and vibrating rhythms; until it disintegrates into particles and pixels, and vanishes into darkness.
Mélissa Faivre is a Berlin-based experimental video artist from France. Her rhythmic and mesmerizing work seeks to provoke question on the nature of perception. The images she creates present blended and distorted realities that test the temporal and spatial coordinates foundational to the perceptive experience. Influenced by analogue films and working only in digital format, she often questions the aesthetic boundaries between film and video.