Upcoming
VIDEO FEVER 2020 (online screening)
VIDEO FEVER 2020
A screening of new work by Xiaoyan Zhang, Jean-Pierre Marchant, Lorenza De Benedictis, Brianne Hunte, Eric Daniels, Nick White, Qirou Yang, Reem Al-Wakeal, Patrick Horan, Simon Ruscinski, Nicole Vella, Sarah Boo.
co-presented with Vtape and BUMP TV
when:
SATURDAY, 30 MAY 2020, 4-5PM & again on WEDNESDAY, 3 JUNE 2020, 6-7PM
where:
https://www.bumptelevision.com
Zoom opening reception for VIDEO FEVER and THE SCREEN IS A MIRROR held on Saturday, 30 MAY 2020, 6:30PM. For details, email karina@trinitysquarevideo.com
Video Fever is Trinity Square’s annual showcase of cutting-edge video works produced by student artists. Selected by a jury composed of Trinity Square Video’s and Vtape’s Staff and Programming Committee, this showcase provides a glimpse of what is on the horizon of video-based practices in contemporary art.
As part of Video Fever, Trinity Square hosts the Bachelors’ Commission, a summer-long production residency awarded to selected submitting artists to access our facilities, equipment and expertise for the creation of new works. We will be announcing this year’s recipients after the online screening.
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This year’s jury members included Deirdre Logue, Emily Fitzpatrick, Karina Iskandarsjah, Sahar Te, Ella Tetrault, Beau Gomez, and Miriam Arbus.
Image credit: Xiaoyan Zhang
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1) Qirou Yang, How to be Satiated in the Dark (3:10)
Qirou Yang is a Toronto based multimedia artist and researcher, who originally came from the south of China. Her practice, which is mainly research-based and process-oriented, is mostly driven by tracing her personal memory and self-perception, aligning the metaphoric narratives and place, and exploring the contradiction between living environment and societal context. Graduated from Photography BFA at OCAD University, she is not limited by creating artwork merely by still photographs. In her current on-going project How to be Satiated in the Dark, by expanding the medium through utilizing photogrammetry and 3D animation, she not only navigates the social context of the “ghost zone”, but also reveals her psychological belonging which is attached to her provenance. She will be graduating from the Documentary Media MFA program at Ryerson University in 2020 summer.
How to be Satiated in the Dark is a docu-fictional project which I began producing in the summer of 2019. The narrative in the 3D animation, which draws on a fictional and spiritual afterlife journey of “looking for homes”, references a Chinese traditional belief: when a person passes away, they will journey through the significant events of their life within their memory, and revisit their home on the 7th day of their death. I juxtapose my childhood living experiences at my first home with the ghost zone, which contradicted with the images of my hometown from my archival memory. The 3D models in the animation are accomplished by Photogrammetry, which is a digital simulation process of reconstructing the object or landscape by assembling photographic materials.
2) Brianne Hunte, The Black Artist (3:06)
Brianne Hunte is a video and filmmaker based in the suburbs surrounding Toronto, Ontario. Her work explores and investigates memory, technology, race, and the ever-changing political landscape we live in. Her previous work, “The Black in the White”, is a video and performance interpretation of her research into how black bodies move in white spaces and societies. This piece went on to be shown in the OCAD University Black History Month exhibition, “Black Richness”, in February of 2019 and the Festival of the Body held at OCADU in February 2020. In her final year at OCADU, studying Integrated Media, Hunte is producing a short fictional film, “Static”, that includes themes of memory, technology, grief, and relationships. This film will be shown at OCADU’s upcoming GradEx. Her portfolio can be found at www.briannehunte.wixsite.com/portfolio .
This video essay is an exploration of the journey as a Black video and photo based artist. Our work challenges the camera, its original intentions, and makes bodies of colour the subject of the camera. Through the discussion of community, self exploration, histories, and futures, Hunte, and her peer Auset Luxor expose their practice and personal investigations of their bodies versus the typical portrayal of black bodies. As the definition of the Black body changes, the work of artists influences and changes the landscape of the art world and allows different stories to be told.
3) Xiaoyan Zhang, Mirror (3:06)
The works I generate are structured as a dialogue about the interaction between people and the socio-political issues raised through this dynamic and rapid industrialization and globalization. The numerous transitions in my life made me think about the great capability of people to adapt to changing situations, and search for the new possibilities of personal development through inquisitive experiences. I am fascinated by the idea of merging reality and illusion into the same plane. I want the viewers to control much of the experience of the representation through their own selection.
This film emerged from a simple idea — “As a girl looks and looks at herself in front of the mirror, she reaches her hand into it and starts drawing and sculpturing upon her own face”
Identity conflicts arise in challenging situations where the person is forced to go back and rethink about his/her personal commitments or self-definitions.
The film takes an ironic approach to ways of discovering topics such as “changes”, “masks” and what “true-self” is.
4) Reem Al-Wakeal, The Space Between (5:26)
Reem Al–Wakeal is a Toronto based multidisciplinary creative of Egyptian and Lebanese descent. She works with different mediums including video, photography, design and occasionally artist multiples. Her works explore themes of nature and identity such as culture and religion. As an emerging artist, she continues to explore different topics and mediums of work through research. Reem has had her work featured in ARTSIDEOUT, Gallery 1265, in/progress Magazine, the Annual Juried Art Exhibition, the Annual ACM Studio Art Exhibition at the University of Toronto, Beaver Hall Gallery, Annual Film Festival at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Arts Night at Ryerson University.
5) Nick White, Nadia’s Song (5:06)
Born in Orangeville, Ontario, Canada, Nick White began making short films in his teenage years before attending York University’s Film Production program and later their graduate program in Cinema and Media Studies. His projects have straddled various different styles including documentaries, experimental films, and scripted narratives, focusing on concepts like the power of memory and the inevitability of change through object oriented and spatial storytelling. He works as an editor and sound designer on projects for others in between directing his own films.
“Nadia’s Songs” follows a teenage boy who finds a collection of CDs that used to belong to a stranger known only as Nadia. In their shared taste in music he imagines her life story while in turn reflecting on his own. One part essay and one part love letter to second hand music shops, “Nadia’s Songs” explores the many ways we can forge our identities through the art we consume and things we collect as young adults.
6) Nicole Vella, FOR3V3R (3:28)
Nicole Vella is a multidisciplinary artist. Her interests include natural biology, computer science, the notion of infinity, and the convergence of human and machine. In our quest to live forever, what’s the cost? FOR3V3R is an exploration into cloning, mitosis, and the convergence of human and machine. This video duplicates itself every 6 seconds and distorts the audio by a factor of 3. This pattern of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 . . . mirrors how cells divide and multiply, and how computers address memory and store data. After 33 generations there are 18 446 744 000 000 000 000 (18.4 quintillion) duplications, each more distorted than the last. The result is something that looks and sounds more machine than human, completely unrecognizable from its origins.
7) Eric Daniels, The Red Bean (4:18)
Eric Daniels is a 4th year DPXA student at OCADU. He is Guelph born and raised, but lives in Toronto for
studying. This is an animation about a boy and his toaster travelling into the deep woods together and accidentally tripping on hallucinogenic beans. The animation experiments with styles and programs seeing how much possible crossover can be used between mediums and in result is a very wacky and colourful adventure.
8) Lorenza De Benedictis, Scatter Brain (1:09)
Scatter Brain is a piece I completed on clear leader with Sharpies. It’s a visualization of what the thoughts inside my head, or anyone with a thought process described as scattered, looks like. The film shows how this brain type jumps from idea to idea, good thoughts to bad thoughts and so on.
9) Sarah Boo, memories of a diorama (3:24)
Sarah is a first-year Digital Futures student at OCAD University. She is interested in the relation of our pre-verbal perception of objects to their physically manifested journey. This work depicts the experience of a diorama accessing the accumulated memories of its lifetime, moments before it is disassembled and ceases to exist. As the diorama was only created with the purpose of making this work, the images shown encompass all of the interactions it has encountered in its short existence. The anthropomorphizing of this temporarily united system of parts is a contemplation on the soul and physical memory of objects and our relationship to them.
10) Simon Ruscinski, HOCKEY (2:15)
HOCKEY is a film about my experiences growing up in suburban Hamilton in the mid 2000s. Using home videos, found footage, and a stream of consciousness narration I try my best to capture the joy, anxiety, and fear of being a confused little boy plopped in front of a television set. Could also be viewed as an exercise in a video maker trying their absolute best to pack as much tragedy and comedy into a 2 minute film as humanly possible.
11) Patrick Horan, Dysphoria (5:00)
Patrick Horan is a genderfluid artist whose interest lies at the intersection of screen and body. Patrick is currently studying at the University of Toronto and they’re never going to graduate so don’t even ask. They are trying to learn something, they are looking for the perfect pair of pants, they are very tired and would like to go to sleep for awhile.
My gender dysphoria makes me obsess about the face. My face, the faces around me, and the faces I see in media. I interrogate every detail, looking for the ways a person can look feminine, or masculine, or both, or neither. I feel, sometimes, like my face is an insufficient technology for expressing my identity – I feel limited, outdated,
faulty, malfunctioning. Using outdated and malfunctioning technology I captured images of different faces to make the viewer question their gendered perceptions. I want to make-strange the gendered body – and invite the viewer into my experience.
12) Jean Pierre Marchant, My Father the Watchmaker (3:18)
Jean–Pierre (JP) Marchant is a SSHRC-funded MFA student in Film Production at York University. Before becoming a filmmaker he earned an MA in history and worked for an international NGO, and in the defence and oil & gas industries. JP’s past work has explored themes such as the malaise of white-collar modernity, local histories, landscapes, and myths. His current work uses substantial archives of family home movies recorded by his parents to interrogate themes such as youthfulness and glamour, migration, rootlessness, working-class respectability, Latino identity, and disappointment.
This film is my attempt to resurrect the memory of my father, a man whose livelihood was rendered obsolete with the rise of digital timekeeping in the 1980s. He immigrated to Montreal from Chile in the early 1970s after a hard-scrabble childhood on the streets of Santiago. Like my mother, who immigrated from Argentina around that time, he was fleeing neither political violence nor dictatorship; my parents were working-class people whose mobile lives were characterised by neither chain migration nor lasting social ties with members of their ethnic group. After a brief period of relative prosperity in the mid-1970s, technology and global capitalism intervened. This began a difficult transition for my father from stable, meaningful work to decades of menial, low-paying jobs. He died in 2012.