PATTERN SEEKERS
JUNE 4 | 7:00 PM | Dave Barber Cinematheque
A program that oscillates between seeking stability and embracing disorientation. Bold patterns, bright colours, and vivid images populate these works which stumble through the chaos of nature, capitalism, identity, and language in an attempt to secure solid ground.
Natural Order, dir. Britany Gunderson
2021 | US | 5 | 16mm | Canadian premiere
Trying to deconstruct the natural world into something more ordered, cycles of chaos are created instead.
Language Unknown, dir. Janelle VanderKelen
2022 | US | 6 | 16mm on video | Canadian premiere
Language Unknown embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans (who are far more sensorially limited). Leaves, mycelium, and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world, and the (supposedly) silent watchers consider what language those swift blurs of human might possibly understand.
Color Prism Suite #2: Withering Ends, dir. Zack Parrinella
2021 | US | 4 | 16mm | Canadian premiere
The simultaneous beauty and decay of various spaces are axes into an exploration of colors and tones.
Red House, dir. Barry Doupé
2022 | US | 3 | video | Manitoban premiere
Scenes of bodily escape. The cow becomes meat becomes a man becomes an angel. Consciousness is conflated with a surveillance balloon. Being is tuned to the frequency of occult conspiracy.
Parasite Family, dir. Prapat Jiwarangsan
2022 | TH | 6 | video | Manitoban premiere
Re-discovered film negatives represent families of affluence who absorbed Thailand’s wealth, like parasites. The journey from analog to digital, and finally to AI-generated images, gradually evolves these captured faces into a new species of monster.
Faces In the Wild, dir. Magdalena Bermudez
2022 | US | 15 | video | Canadian premiere
An excavation of histories of facial recognition in which scientists direct faces to emote, close ups direct audiences to feel, and a feedback loop between a monkey and an AI reckon with the data-sourced faces of their unconscious.
Fragmentasia, dir. Robin Riad
2023 | CA | 4 | super 8 and 16mm on video
An exploration of the sense of self, through kaleidoscoping imagery, distorted sounds, and a flurry of colours. Fragmentasia is a self-reflexive short, shot on 16mm and super8, using animation techniques, prisms, and mirrors, to examine the outward self versus the internal self.
On Unshaped Dialogue, dir. Charlotte Clermont
2023 | CA | 3.5 | video | Canadian premiere
We can invent stories that use the figures we have encountered. Images that combine with those of the present and the past, from video synthesis to film. We can invent stories that use loved ones to recite texts about mathematics. They can also touch objects, with attention. Objects, without sleeping. Loved ones who don't feel the same way. Those who read the compensation table of multiple exposures to get lost.
Test Objects, dir. Sam Drake
2023 | US | 9 | 16mm on video | World premiere
Inadequate attempts to describe a sensation; lingering seasickness, and other terrestrial disorientations.
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Images from: Britany Gundeson's Natural Order, Robin Riad's Fragmentasia, and Charlotte Clermont's On Unshaped Dialogue