A Labour of Love: Curated Short Film Program
Sunday, November 27th at 12:00pm
Synopsis:
A Labour of Love is a collection of films that has an emphasis on the artist’s intensive labour and care in the filmmaking process that challenges our familiar notion of filmmaking with digital cameras and editing on computer software. Filmmaking has become increasingly easy and accessible; nowadays, technology has even developed enough for anyone to use their phone to quickly make a short and sweet video and share it on social media platforms. Inversely, this program surveys films that have extra layers of labour by selecting artists who are experimenting with different techniques and approaches to moving image production. The significant role of the artist’s perspective and the effort in devising and constructing their own methods of filmmaking let us meditate on the material-driven processes and investigations involved in time-based image production.
Beginning the program with Glenn Gear’s Beach Heart and Iris Moore’s The Evening Thread, we see direct imprints of artists’ hands playing in making images move; hand-collected and assembled materials from the seashore make new motifs in Gear’s work and hand-made images of paper, wood, and flowers drive the narrative in Moore’s film. Brandon Hocura’s Cascade des Oiseaux not only discovers the waterfall itself as a primordial moving image, but it also exemplifies how old archives are brought to a new life through the artist’s attention. Ana Valine’s silent 16mm film Oceans: SB1 is eco-processed using seaweed as a developer, seawater as water source, and salt water as a fixer, exhibiting the location-specific nature of the film conceived by the artist. Alex Mackenzie’ Pinhole Park was filmed with a pinhole camera constructed by the artist, demonstrating yet another example of hand-tooled filmmaking. Both Lina Wu’s rain to eaves and Alisi Telengut’s The Fourfold use hand-drawn images; whether as simple as using a pencil or imbuing colorful pastels. Peggy Fussell’s VOTE! embodies labour and material-driven processes in the simplest concept. Finally, we arrive at Eddy Wang’s The Self Made Of Python Now Forgotten, created by an algorithm the artist wrote using the programming language Python, in which snippets of video recordings he took over the past seven years have been stitched together by Python’s algorithm. The film speaks to us as it organizes Wang’s attempt to understand his daily life by synthesizing countless quotidian videos with his own algorithm.
Artist Bio
Jung-Ah Kim is a filmmaker/researcher/curator from South Korea currently based in Kingston, Canada. She received her MFA in Documentary Media from Northwestern University (2019) in Chicago and is a Ph.D. student in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. She is interested in experimenting with material conditions of both craft and digital media to make images move. She also conducts oral history projects working closely with communities that inform her curatorial practice.
Shorts Featured:
Beach Heart
2 mins 5s | Dir. Glenn Gear | 2021
The Evening Thread
10 mins 30s | Dir. Iris Moore | 2019
Cascade Des Oiseaux
4 mins 19s | Dir. Brandon Hocura | 2020
Oceans: SB1
4 mins 54s (Silent Film) | Dir. Ana Valine | 2020
Pinhole Park
11 mins 31s | Dir. Alex Mackenzie | 2021
Rain to Eaves
2 mins 50s | Dir. Lina Wu | 2021
The Fourfold
2 mins 26s | Dir. Alisi Telengut | 2020
Vote!
2 mins | Dir. Peggy Fussell | 2020
The Self Made Python Now Forgotten
14 mins 7s | Dir. Eddy Wang | 2022
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