The Quick and the Dead

The adventures of a porn potato versus pop ups.

For more than two decades Mike Hoolboom has been one of our foremost artistic witnesses of the plague of the twentieth century, HIV. A personal voice documenting and piercing the clichéd spectrum of Living With AIDS from carnal abjection to incandescent spirituality, no surviving moving image visionary surpasses him. Buffalo Death Mask is a three-part meditation — visual, oral and haptic, both campy and ecstatic — on survival, mourning, memory, love and community. A conversation between Hoolboom and visual artist Stephen Andrews, both long time survivors of the retrovirus, floats over what seems to be a dream of Toronto and some of its ghosts. No one savours the intimations of immortality inherent in recycled footage like Mike, no one else understands how processed Super 8 can answer the question “Why are we still here when so many are gone?"

An analog animation using the same set of drawings to tell four different versions of the same story. The emotional fallout of two witnesses to a police shooting, a musical about groovy gay boys making the scene, a cop show about the chase and arrest of a suspect, and a news report about soldiers on leave in Iraq.

Using the Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination, the Maysles brothers, 'Gimme Shelter' and a television series opening credit sequence as a conceptual framework 'Dramatis Personae' examines the Black Star Agency's photographic archive during the time of the artist's coming to consciousness in the 1960's. The source material signals the search for meaning in the precise moment the bullet enters Kennedy and leaves the world in shock and as we watch Jagger as he tries to find the instant the knife kills the Woodstock Nation.

YOU&i is a film version of a 'pas de deux for one' choreographed for Toronto Dance Theatre's 'Singular Bodies' program. In collaboration with dancer, Jarrett Siddall, the intent is to translate the various interpretations this image into movement. Some of the movement is determined by the autonomic nervous system response to exertion. It is the system that controls our heart and respiratory rates so the movement is driven both mind and body.

'play god' is a meditation on the movements of the shadows in Plato's cave or the TTC, take your pick. It was commissioned for TUFF (Toronto Underground Film Festival) to puzzle commuters on their way to and from work.

A car commercial send up in which Bambi meets Nissan. The question is: who’s who?

The 1st part of the 2nd half is a visual poem wrestling with ideas about love and resurrection.In the artwork’s initial incarnation all of the oversized frames were installed as filmstrips in a room to create the appearance of a giant trim bin that the the editor/viewer entered. The conceit was casting the viewer as a Lilliputian editor of an analog film and requiring of them to piece the ‘film’ together in their minds. In 2015 all the frames were re-shot and animated. There are two versions of the piece.In addition to this version (17:31 minute) gallery version, an additional version is available. It is a 40 minute slowed down version with a soundtrack by Mary Margaret O’Hara recorded live during its inaugural viewing.