Memo to Pic Desk

Shot on Mount Tamalpais, a spatial matrix replaces temporal causality with contiguous space. A view of landscape is taken apart, to be reconstituted through memory. The grid, a reference to the “veil of threads” invented by Albrecht Dürer as an aid for perspective drawing – to transfer vision to a sheet of paper – is used for an opposite effect – to disperse a landscape across time. The viewer is asked to remember the space as it passes and reconstitute it from memory, actively connecting the image across space and time.

“As Benjamin had predicted, nothing brings the promise of happiness encoded at the birth of a technological form to light as effectively as the fall into obsolescence of its final stages of development.” – Rosalind Krauss

Elegant and rigorous, while surprisingly playful, Chris Kennedy’s Go Between observes the Brisbane River, passing boats, and cars on the William Jolly Bridge through an intoxicating play of masking and superimpositions.

A quick defamiliarization of a familiar San Francisco landmark.

The striped pattern of the municipal bus shelters in San Francisco becomes a fixed foreground behind which the city passes. Spatial oscillations provide a constantly permutating play of figure, ground and space, imaging the possibility of being two places at once.

Three freestanding grids placed along the Credit River in rural Ontario (reminiscent of the Dürer Grid used by Renaissance draughtsmen to achieve accurate proportions) become devices through which the stationary camera frames the landscape and creates perspective.

Not in distribution.

8mm unsplit. Streetcars circle. The ferry leaves and returns in one gesture. Camera and character dance.

A study of the incongruous and iconic suspended monorail in Wuppertal Germany. Shot on super 8 and finished on 35mm film, Phantoms expertly employs the exaggerated grainy texture of the emulsion to suggest a netherworld out of time, both science fiction and ancient history, while an accompanying text muses on the vanity and folly suggested by the mysterious structure.

Inspired in part by a poem by Toronto poet Ryan Kamstra, the acrobat is a consideration of the relationship of gravity and politics – the beauty and necessity of rising up, but also, perhaps, the significance of allowing oneself to fall. If the force of gravity is in relation to both mass and proximity, how does the force of politics resonate across space and time?

Shot in two downtown Toronto parks over the course of the pandemic, LINES DRAWN looks at various measures of persuasion, containment and control that were brought to bear over the course of the City’s attempts to curtail the spread of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, space was defined by how the social bond was re-formed and which barriers were designed for mutual and directional protection. What are the shapes of the pandemic and how did they shape our interactions with each other ?

"Travelling the Trent-Severn Waterway by houseboat, from the Kirkfield Liftlock to Omemee." (the8fest)

Not in distribution.

Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, amateur detectives took the Internet chat rooms to try to find the culprits, looking for details in photographs uploaded to the sites that could point to the guilt of potential suspects.

“A digitally animated version of Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #349, which was commissioned by Toronto’s Mercer Union gallery in 1981. Recreating LeWitt’s geometric vocabulary and primary colour palette, 349 careens through emblazoned emblems, lifted from walls and transported into dialogue with LeWitt’s exploration of spatial systems and human emotion.” – Andréa Picard

Keiji Haino, live in Toronto, June 22, 2011. A single roll of film, shot one frame at a time. Special thanks to Keiji Haino and Adam Rosen.