wandering through, across and within
a program of short artist videos
curated by Christina Battle, summer 2013
I have a tendency to wander. While exploring different landscapes I think about how it is that I move through them and how this might be different from how I moved through other landscapes before. How time seems to pass differently in each new space and how this in turn might make me different. Different than how I was in the landscape just before and different than how I was in the one where I am from. And after a while I wonder – where am I from again?
wandering through, across and within includes works that go beyond documentations of the land itself with each of the artists working to activate unknown lands as they travel through…across…and within them.
“and the water up above, and the water down below is there. but isn’t real. i saw it. and i felt it. but it wasn’t real.” – Steve Reinke
With works by:
Adán De La Garza & Christina Battle; Brian Lye; Deirdre Logue; Heidi Phillips & Kruno Jost; Jenna Maurice; Justin Beard; Marcy Saude; Max Bernstein; Nicholas O’Brien; Nika Kaiser; Serena Lee; Steve Reinke; and Zak Tatham. facebook page & info
screenings:
Counterpath Press: Denver, CO – August 30
WNDX Festival of Moving Image: Winnipeg, MB – September 27
ANTIMATTER [Media Art]: Victoria, BC – October 19
program introductory video:
Descriptions of Works in the Program (all provided by artists; not in screening order)
Great Blood Sacrifice
Steve Reinke
5:56 mins, 2010
A walk through the primordial landscape of the high desert of New Mexico, down the cliffs to a water reservoir. This is the place where love dies. All meaning is drained from the world, though pure affect drops from the sky.
Finding equanimity within the landscape by walking through an obstacle,
Part 1
Jenna Maurice
2.10 mins, 2013
From the larger body of work – Concerning the Landscape: A Study in Relationships – attempts to create a relationship with the landscape by using aspects of the human developmental stages as a starting point – including innate reactions, mimicry and non-verbal communication. This series of performances focuses on the complications of communication, which is used to visualize reality, the attempt of dialogue, the dissonance between form and content and the possibility for trial, success and dysfunction in understanding. By exploring the concept of landscape in a reactive way, I try to gain a new relationship with the land through empathetic mimicry as well as reactions to its unique attributes- citing moments of relational conflict, understanding, unity, resistance and tenderness.
Interior/Exterior
Nika Kaiser
3.24 mins, 2012
My works are precarious amalgams of cultural and personal references in which the camera becomes the eye of the viewer. Using the desert landscape as a locus and through a practice of creating idiosyncratic costumes, I perform as many characters, suggesting that one’s identity is in a state of constantly becoming. The desert serves as an inner topography of the mind, rather than one of physical place– a location in which to negotiate fluctuating states of self.
Grasswalk
Nicholas O’Brien
2.40 mins, 2009
Modded map and scripted camera using Valve’s Hammer engine.
Standing in the Road
Brian Lye
1.20 mins, 2013
Can I join ya?
Finding equanimity within the landscape by walking through an obstacle,
Part 2
Jenna Maurice
1.15 mins, 2013
From the larger body of work – Concerning the Landscape: A Study in Relationships – attempts to create a relationship with the landscape by using aspects of the human developmental stages as a starting point – including innate reactions, mimicry and non-verbal communication. This series of performances focuses on the complications of communication, which is used to visualize reality, the attempt of dialogue, the dissonance between form and content and the possibility for trial, success and dysfunction in understanding. By exploring the concept of landscape in a reactive way, I try to gain a new relationship with the land through empathetic mimicry as well as reactions to its unique attributes- citing moments of relational conflict, understanding, unity, resistance and tenderness.
Lost at Land #1
Justin Beard
1.40 mins, 2010
On A White Lake, Near A Green Mountain
Zak Tatham
4.40 mins, 2009
Intelligent Life & Animals music by M83
Willow
Deirdre Logue
1:13 mins, 2012
Shot with a toy camera, Willow records a cyclic rushing through the inhospitable low crown of a fallen tree. Revealing the artist’s increased discomfort as she repeats her task, Willow speaks to our tendencies to push into irritation instead of away from it.
Breathing Space
Heidi Phillips & Kruno Jost
1:08 mins, 2012
Rough cut of a film shot with the LOMO camera in Croatia.
five states of freedom
Adán De La Garza & Christina Battle
3 mins, 2013
Escaping the local laws of multiple landscapes, just wanting to blow shit up.
Neapolitan Sixth: walk around the rock
Serena Lee
6.15 mins, 2013
That morning, I left before rush hour and walked across the river in the general direction of the Eiffel tower, a safe bet because you can’t miss it.
Earlier, we sat motionless in the coach in the train in the dark speeding through the tunnel under the channel, and I read about feet leaving no trace on pavement, and that people “merely skim the surface of a world that has been previously mapped out and constructed for them to occupy, rather than contributing their movements to its ongoing formation.”*
When I first saw the rock, I had to stop because it was unexpectedly unlike other rocks.
When you first hear a Neapolitan Sixth, you have to stop because it is unexpectedly unlike other harmonies.
* Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, 2011.
Made with support from the Toronto Arts Council.
aVoiding the obvious
Max Bernstein
5 mins, May 2012
While searching for shooting locations appropriate to represent a philosophical void, I found myself having to function in a peculiar order. When the camera was rolling, I had to make myself disappear. As per the requirements of conceptual nothingness, the continuity demanded that no subject be present. I had to cross a theoretical vanishing point somewhere on the horizon of a 360 degree image. It became a process of intuitive measuring of environments, which were often absent of any spacial distinctions, beyond the distance between myself and the lens. Many of my efforts became futile.
Should I Stand Amid Your Breakers Or Should I Lie With Death My Bride
Marcy Saude
4.30mins, 2012
A line from a Tim Buckley song spawns an extremely literal film. Figures in a haunted landscape, mediated by nature and the individual frame, accompanied by field recordings from a broken tape recorder.