Program

In Nefandus, two men travel by canoe down the Don Diego river in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the Colombian Caribbean, a landscape of ‘wild’ beauty. The men, an indigenous man and a Spanish speaking man, tell stories about pecados nefandos [unspeakable sins, abominable crimes]; acts of sodomy that took place in the Americas during the conquest. Nefandus attentively looks at the landscape, its movement and its sounds for clues of stories that remain untold and have been largely ignored and stigmatized in historical accounts.

Slit Me a River uses the tale of Bubbly Creek - a section of the Chicago River that was once polluted with animal entrails - as a point for an absurd departure. A narrator recounts a perverted version of the story as she recreates the river in an alluringly repulsive terrarium.

A woman is dragged through an empty field in a scenario reminiscent of horror movies and news stories. But she is alert, impassive, and remains vigilantly focused on the camera. This hand-processed, Super 8 film juxtaposes degraded, awkwardly-staged footage of every woman’s worst nightmare with an interior monologue regarding media representation of sexualized violence. The piece asks how violent, misogynist images play out in our psyches and in our culture. The film was commissioned by 8fest, Toronto.

A heavenly ode to a showering stud, or gay propaganda: The Naked-Boy Business mines the Bible and the internet to vent an evocative audiovisual response to anti-gay laws and attacks everywhere from Russia and Nigeria to downtown Brooklyn. A provocative video trip around the world, set to original music by Wonderful Terrific Cone.

While the Indian Supreme Court tries to outlaw homosexuality, an adorable mother has her knowledge of ‘gay sex’ in mint condition, wheeling out a tidbit or two for her heartbroken queer daughter in an effort to cheer her up.

60 years of Korean international adoption practice. 100 pictures of orphanized Korean children from few days to ten years old. All adoptables by Western adoptive families. On a sound background of 2 speeches of Malcom X, on the sense of belonging and family name, future adoptee picture appears. Among those children, now adults, are they hetero ? No, about 10% are not. But is it really important ?

A skeptic investigation of what an oracle can be and what it would sound like. Human desire and blind faith allow, and maybe even will, these mystic soothsayers to exist.

en pojke (a boy), deals with the privileges that become burdens. The privilege of being a creator. The privilege of being able to penetrate. The privilege of being a seeker/hunter. The video was an attempt to put myself in the most vulnerable place in order to see and accept my lack of importance. The imposed masculinity.

On the eve of his 30th birthday, Andrew Morrison-Gurza reflected on his life as an LGBTQ man with Cerebral Palsy, and the event that helped shape his identity as a gay man. With wit and candour, Andrew's unvarnished recounting of his loss of innocence shines a light on the culture of desire perpetuated within the LGBT community, and ideas of body image, abelism and gay identity.

In a prologue, two acts and a musical number.

Please Relax Now uses the screen as a source of light and darkness drawing attention to the issue of art consumption as individual vs. collective experience and extending the video piece into physical space. Motivational language is interwoven with metaphysical gestures of salvation characteristic of economics as well as of what is considered ‘Political Art.’

More or Less is a three-minute video consisting of two layers of non-camera colour gelled images and processed texts. This video stems from my extreme ambivalence about minimalism, maximalism, modernism, and audiences. Does modernist art address audiences and, if so, then how? Is minimalism necessarily slow in its editing rhythms? What are the relationships between pictures, images, and concrete poetry? More or Less pits minimalism and maximalism, speed and slowness against each other. Do they crash and explode, or do they blend into an explosive cocktail? How stable are those time-honoured truisms … more is less and less is more?

A digitally conceived homage to one of art histories most iconic and re-produced sculptures, a décor-sized David is found inside a transparent glass vase, while a steady stream of clear liquid lovingly and sensually pours onto David, slowly filling the vase. An equally soothing, reptetive scores underlines the beauty of both the human form, falling water, and contrasting ideas around sentimentality and kitsch.

Based in recorded audiovisual materials collected during the last ten years in 27 countries with low cost cameras, Set is an exercise in visual manipulation, editing, trying to show the over-regulation to which reality is subjected.

Husain deploys condominium sales fly-throughs (CGI promotional videos designed to seduce potential buyers by illustrating dreamy and uncluttered domestic and social scenarios), projecting and re-shooting the images on fluttering fabric to suggest pristine lives lived in elegant and austere boxes in the sky. At times the video is populated by alternately beautiful and creepy computer-enhanced urbanites, composite characters who go from work to shopping to working out to groomed perfection to ground-floor lounge drinks with compatriots, without stepping outside – though they may gaze longingly at the moon through a window or briefly traverse a manicured courtyard. At other times, the video clips resemble an unpeopled video or computer game – Myst, for example – in which the viewer wanders/drives/skates through architectures and landscapes designed for people but devoid of life. These scenes are at once dystopian and deeply alluring. - Kathleen Smith

Utilizing a combination of rotating pinwheel fireworks, mirrored ‘flash frames’ and degraded images of an older man’s hand clutching the arm of a younger man as they navigate a city street, this new commission reflects Scott Treleaven’s consistent focus on ideas of queer mentorship and queer historical continuity. It was inspired by a life-changing encounter with filmmaker Derek Jarman. Says Treleaven: ‘The footage was collected without an eye for narrative or even finished product, rather as a catalogue of a “way of seeing”’ – the very gift Jarman, nearly blind, gave Treleaven all those years ago.... A toolbox of techniques from the experimental film tradition shared by both him and Jarman takes on even greater power here as historical queer images dissolve into abstractions and we deeply feel, in Treleaven’s words, ‘the void left by a generation of gay artists felled by social and political prejudice. - Noah Cowan (text from the Queer Outlaw Cinema exhibition at TIFF, summer 2014)