By exploring the different meanings of pace (as speed, as measure, as constraint), PACED investigates the twin paradoxes of modern nomadism: alienation from increasing connectivity, and the constant movement of everyday life that keeps returning one back to the same place. Using non-repeating 10-second clips (shot primarily with a camera phone) which flicker across 5 split screens, PACED both collides and regulates the movement and semantic interaction of the visuals and music in accordance to an internal structure to comment on how urbanism has divorced its residents from the natural, and how its rituals and veneer distract from its cruelty and impacts.
Filter Films
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Referencing mythology and gothic fiction, Shamans, the Cunning is about surviving in evil times. Here, human identity turns fluid and the borderline between human and animal evaporates. Shamans evokes its themes via drama and choreographed movement.
Shamans, the Cunning
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A project spanning three years of production and research, Lion explores the Chernobyl disaster and the nature of radiation, recollection, and personal history. Lion navigates atomic fallout and a girl’s adolescence, a dream before death, radiation as a cause and a cure for cancer, masculine bravado, feminine obsession, a trip to Chernobyl amidst the death of a matriarch, and the destruction of memory. This conceptually arranged film album is composed of seven works on 16mm and hand processed with darkroom techniques that mimic the effects of radiation on film. The series combines memory, history, pop culture and technical experiments to create visual representations of invisible forces. Please visit the artist’s filmography for individual chapters of Lion.
Lion
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“‘L’ennui (Les Reves d’un Somnambule)’ is a film in three segments. The very beginning consists of a three-minute dedication to Universal Leader. Lots of fun… The first section depicts a beautiful old woman floating through states of insomnia and timelessness. The pace is very slow, serene and dreamlike. The second section deals with the frenzy/insanity of the city. By using entire scenes in negative and layering street scenes one on top of the other, Raphael achieves a surreal and frightening eeriness to this section. The last part is not only an ode to human beauty, but it’s also quite humorous in parts. This entire section is shot in a totally white room with only a chair starring two nude people – a black woman and a bearded white man. Raphael used step-printing to emphasize their dance movements and progressively shortened the duration of the cuts until finally there’s only one frame of each person forming a complete merging of the two bodies – both black and white, male and female, bearded and breasted. It’s a very sensuous sequence. The music for ‘L’ennui’ was done by an ex-student of John Cage and works stupendously with the imagery. All in all it’s a film well worth seeing.” – A. Ibranyi-Kiss, Cinema Canada
L’Ennui (Les Reves d’un Somnambule)
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Referencing Yayoi Kusama’s concept of self-obliteration, Dust is a memory document, a self-portrait in a moment one prefers to forget. Using techniques to erase portions of the image, the film is a mutating, disintegrating echo of the biblical references in The Weight of Snow. Dust references genesis; we are dust, and to dust we return. The full-length version of the Lion series is available through the CFMDC.
Dust
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Cure is a document from a time when radiation was touted as a solution for everything- for beauty, power, perhaps even for a broken heart. A drifting composition, Cure uses gently applied “radiation” techniques to mimic the application of a precious beauty cream. It completes the look with whispers of the promise of radium and the solutions it brings, floating in and out like traces of perfume. The full-length version of the Lion series is available through the CFMDC.
Cure
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An attempt to tame the atomic frontier, Cowboys and Iodine is a fever dream involving the masculine bravado and seldom-discussed gender shaming used to encourage men to volunteer as liquidators for the cleanup of the Chernobyl disaster. Employing dip, spray and smudge techniques to replicate the different methods of radiation exposure the men experienced. The film also employs a split negative/reversal process to reflect the methods that waves of radiation enter the body. Cowboys and Iodine blends subtext, social stigma and personal aspiration to construct the internal contemplation of a man going to war with the atom. The full-length version of the Lion series is available through the CFMDC.
Cowboys and Iodine
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A technical experiment about exposure and an interview of a woman’s experience with radioactive ablation therapy for thyroid cancer, Sodium Lamp Study is a meditation on exposure, treatment, and the unseen emotional effects of radiation. The visual element of Sodium Lamp Study explores the photographic concept of reciprocity failure – when the exposure of an image is separated in to multiple exposures rather than a single exposure with the same light strength, the results become unreliable. In a similar way, patients facing the treatment of thyroid cancer are presented with an option of a single dose of radioactive iodine, or multiple treatments. The full-length version of the Lion series is available through the CFMDC.
Sodium Lamp Study
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A film exploring the impulsive nature of radiation, Water is the last dream of a dying man. Using brilliant blue and black images from cross-processed 16mm, the film explores the end of the 3 Chernobyl divers – three men who sacrificed their lives to drain a pool of radioactive hydrogen peroxide beneath the burning reactor no. 4 during the Chernobyl disaster. Mutating out of darkness in to a piercing blue, Water drifts under the surface of consciousness and into final memories. The full-length version of the Lion series is available through the CFMDC.
Water
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Part dream, part documentary, Forever weaves history and hedonism to form a world of dandelions, hypnosis, bicycles and memory. Created from experiments replicating the effects of radiation on film, the piece explores the nature of airborne radioactivity and brings us from a woman’s story of adolescence, to a bicycle race, to life in the Soviet Union. A bricolage of pop culture and personal histories, Forever is about looking for dandelions and finding atoms. As the opening film of Lion, Forever employs spray and smudge techniques to explore the concept of airborne radioactive contaminants and how they travel in open air. The images are marked with artifacts of radiation – emulsion failure, exposure variables and particle marks – each frame as impulsive as the air patterns that carry them. The full-length version of the Lion series is available through the CFMDC.
Forever
