MAGIC LANTERN REVISITED: 35MM SLIDESHOW COMMISSIONS
MAGIC LANTERN REVISITED: 35MM SLIDESHOW COMMISSIONS
Various Artists | 2011 | 60min. | World Premiere
I miss the childhood ritual of watching family slideshows. That comforting click and thud of the carousel as it advanced to the next image, a handful of gaudily-attired people crowded around the square dim light, drinks in hand, as the presenter musters the most captivating narration they can (possibly their only chance to speak in front of an audience) to recreate the experience of a recent vacation or event.
Thankfully as soon as slides were ‘out’, the art of the slideshow started percolating in underground visual arts circles. Decades on, slides are more popular than ever as an alternative, interactive storytelling device. This presentation gathers several local and international media and visual artists – including Andrea Callard, Very Awesome, Doreen Girard, Olya Zarapina and Erin Weisgerber, Teena Aujla, Isabelle Guimond, Esther Bourdages, Melora Koepke and Marianne Ploska – for a program of original 3-10 minute slideshow presentations that variously feature narration, manipulated sound, live music and other handcrafted elements unique to this show.
Artist Bios:
Andrea Callard currently produces videos and slide shows and also industrial media for www.greenplanet21.com. Her preserved Super 8mm films from the 1970s express thinking about nature in the city. They have been screened this year and last at MOMA, the 56th Oberhausen Film Festival, the Österreichisches Filmmuseum in Vienna, the Orphans 7 Symposium in NYC, and other venues. Callard was an officer of Collaborative Projects, Inc. during The Times Square Show of 1980 and photographed the art of the show. These pictures are widely published with cultural and art history. She produced the Avocet Portfolio which published 48 editions of fine art screen prints by important contemporary artists. Working with organizations like Studio in a School and Young Audiences, she moved ideas from the art world into public educational reform efforts. T his presentation, entitled Commuting From Point to Point, is a 45-image piece, photographs and text, that was originally installed as a gallery show in San Francisco at Site, Cite, Sight in 1980.This is a picture/thought travelogue with images from 1979 in Paris, Milan, Genova, Torino, Portofino, Rome, Capri, and New York City. The text flows as a loosely associated set of phrases, a rearrangeable poem about perception/feminism/art making/ timing and death. ---------------
The principles of Very Awesome are simple: Doing crafts and having coffee together brings happiness to Caroline Blais and Josianne Poirier. Since 2008 they have been making typographic experiments following these simple rules on veryawesome.ca, got shortlisted for the CODE poster contest and are now bringing their art to the streets.
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Doreen Girard is a visual artist and musician living in Winnipeg, MB. She uses handbuilt, handpowered and repurposed slide and animation reel projectors, producing mutable images that are often guided and accompanied by a soundtrack of dirgeful music. She has performed her films at various venues and festivals across North America, such as the Alamo Drafthouse, the Plastic Paper Festival, WNDX and Suoni Per Il Popolo. In this presentation, deft manipulation of the Kodak Ektachrome 35mm slide projector reveals cryptic images of Northern Alberta rural youth, featuring music from the Banzai catalogue, which became as much a symbol of prestige and outsider unity as the sign of the horns.
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Isabelle Guimond loves communicating vessels. Words that unfold beautifully. She loves not understanding everything and asking about her surroundings, braving the elements. A jack of all trades, she is ready to turn her world upside down at every new discovery. Her craft ranges from painting, drawing, photography, performance and sound. She loves being told stories, especially if they're true. She will seek to transport you in a world where anything is possible, a construct between narrative and noisy delirium. Simple means. Light, movement, sound, and if possible, a bit of magic. Isn't that what the basis of cinema is?
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Esther Bourdages is an art historian, curator and sonic explorer based in Montréal. She is the author of many articles and critical commentaries on contermporary art. She holds a Masters in Art History from the Université de Montréal. She focusses on new forms of sculpture within an expanded field, as multimedia, web art, sound art.
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Melora Koepke is a Montreal-based film/food/travel/culture writer who falls in love a lot at museums. She is the former film editor of Hour magazine. Last summer, I metup with Montreal band Arcade Fire for three of the dates on their European tour: In Montreux, Switzerland, Argelès-sur-mer, France, and Bilbao, Spain--where the band played on the esplanade next to Frank Gehry's Guggenheim. My article about this will appear in January 2012 in enRoute magazine. My slideshow is a travelogue showing some of the trippier moments of that trip. www.melora.ca
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A story of visions. Visions of stories.Trained in experimental Parisian collectives (CJC, L'Etna), Marianne Ploska develops a practice where the experimentations are as chemical as narrative.When she is not working on a film, she spends a great amount of time manipulating slides. She is currently studying Film Production at Concordia.
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Olya Zarapina and Erin Weisgerber met a long time ago on the far away prairies, but it is not until now that their mutual love for all things film and most things sonic has led them to work together. Olya's work, although diverse in final outcome, is rooted in good old fashioned drawing and illustration while Erin is interested in the borderlands between language, sound, and music.
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Teena Aujla: Canadian music and poetry has traditionally travelled the landscape of the country, weaving a dreamworld of pictures that flutter through time and space. Different eras, from the 1960s to the 2000s have shown trees grow from seeds, and back to re-pollinate again. Musicians travel the country by necessity, touring and leaving parts of themselves in each small town and city, both ephemeral/tactile, and in the hearts and minds of fans and public. They also take away something from each place, and integrate it into their worlds, lives and ultimately their music. In my slide presentation, I plan to represent these internal and external journeys through time and space. My work combines text and imagery, found photography/canadian filmstrips, and self-made collage graphics to evoke emotion, provoke reaction, and to convey sincerity and truth.
