This video work is an experiment in self-love. BDSM and sex as a solo venture towards healing, growth, and transformation. Facing insecurity, welcoming loneliness, building strength to continue on living and loving myself.
Filter Films
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Trigger Warning: *rape offers an intimate discussion between two women about their experiences as sexual assault survivors who were raped by female partners.
Trigger Warning:*rape
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Underground presents a performative and re-staged first person documentary portrait of Westminster Station/London Underground, based on footage captured during the time period leading up to and just after the July 7th 2005 transit bombings. Through re-working the original footage, this short piece sets out to explore and present the contradictory moods of the time, from the more official government position of carrying on as usual, to the sense of anxiety felt in the day to day, while highlighting the intangible effects of trauma which shaped the experience of the city and urban space at this time.
Underground
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Barbara Hammer’s face appears through layered printing and physically scratched film. The material of the film itself – inevitably changed by photochemical decay over time – and its images are at risk of loss as surely as the endangered animal species depicted in the film. The romantic concern with nature is elaborated with a technically sophisticated metaphor from industrial processes. With her own image appearing with the animals, perhaps the artist too is at risk of being lost.
Endangered
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A home movie of a trip to Chernobyl, a dying matriarch and a set of troubling personal circumstances, The Weight of Snow is an essay documenting memory, time and place. A film referencing the tradition of personal travelogue films of The Escarpment School and the essay style of Sans Soleil, The Weight of Snow travels from Canada to Chernobyl from the perspective of a young man exploring radiation in the midst of death, cancer and emotional turmoil. A collection of all techniques used throughout the Lion series, The Weight of Snow is the centerpiece of the work. Echoing the collage nature throughout the entire series, the work synthesizes travel footage, abstract imagery and memory footage to invite the audience to a journey few embark on. Filmed at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and surrounding area in Ukraine, The Weight of Snow offers a glimpse in to the world beyond the checkpoints of the exclusion zone. The full-length version of the Lion series is available through the CFMDC.
The Weight of Snow
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Sunspots and Solar Flares combines found footage of children dancing from a 1968 Toronto educational film with excerpts of Robin Armstrong’s Nuclear war 1984?
Sunspots and Solar Flares
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An exploration into 19th century death mystiques, which rely heavily on the supernatural, along with a belief in, or at least a fascination with, fairy magic, much of it implied through subtle imagery. In all, it is a fascinating and astonishingly replete compendium of spiritual endeavor–the 19th century literary body of work that is, along with such masterful illustrators as Gustave Dore and others. These authors were passionately interested in what is noble and what is depraved, a far cry from present day ethics. Music by Messiaen.
After the Circus
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Based on stories my grandmother told me, I re-imagine while working as a cleaner the experiences of my ancestors during the Holodomor (forced famine) in Ukraine during the Stalinist-Soviet era. The “film” image is re-invented through digital video to enact a sense of ambiguity between authenticity and fiction, as can also be present in the act of oral storytelling. This is one chapter in “Stories for a Future Generation,” a series of shorts which together tell the stories of my family’s and my own migrations, and the inter-generational impacts of those upon our lives and on those of our family’s future generations.
Finding a Place to Sleep
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Pigeon Hole comically expresses the filmmaker’s desire to set fire to the restrictive and reductive labels gays use to categorize one another and themselves, especailly via modern methods of hooking up such as online websites and apps. A proclamation of liberation from marginalizing stereotypes and sexual exclusvitiy, the video features labels and descriptors culled from online profiles paired with footage of pigeons and the filmmaker burning down a large birdhouse. The Inside Out LGBT Film Festival commissioned Pigeon Hole for the “In Your Pocket: What’s Your Sex?” project challenging selected filmmakers to shoot and create a short video work utilizing smart phone technology.
Pigeon Hole
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Explorations of an Unexpected Time Traveler imagines a narrative where a woman from some undisclosed point in the past experiences continual unexplained and uncontrollable shifts in time and space. Suddenly finding herself in unfamiliar spaces, seemingly devoid of other people, she explores the various regions recording her discoveries through moving image, sound recordings and photographs along the way. Shot in various cities & counties in Alberta; Colorado; and Yukon Territory. Conceived while in Dawson City, Yukon Territory while an Artist in Residence at the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture (KIAC), March 2013. [Installation version includes a series of over 100 snapshot photographs]
Explorations of an Unexpected Time Traveler
