Film and Video Series: 19 & 20 June 2006 7 p.m.
Vancity Theatre at the Vancouver International Film Centre
1181 Seymour Street $9.50 adult, $7.50 student/senior
www.vifc.org/604.683.FILM (3456)
More than any other west coast city, it is San Francisco–rather than the more commonly held view of Los Angeles–that shares the greatest similarities with Western Canada’s largest city, Vancouver. The topography of both Vancouver’s Lower Mainland and the San Francisco Bay Area creates a spectacular scenic setting on the Pacific, and because of this, there is an obsession with “the view” and a manner in which this visual obsession has shaped both cities’ different urban formations and diverging, though no less innovative, artistic productions.
The Infra-structural Image: Urban Projections from the Bay Area and Vancouver is an exhibition and two evening film series which will present new media installation, video and experimental short film that explore the relationship between film, memory and perception in relation to the Bay Area and Vancouver urban environments. The “infra-structural” is used to describe a set of approaches to representation of urban phenomena that operate “between” the structures of the city and the apparatus of the camera, film, and photography. It stresses the increasingly entangled relationship between film, video and the city, while simultaneously probing residual social and cultural relationships.
Some of the work such as Rebeca Bollinger’s Fields (2001), explores the relationship between the camera, the body and the city. The work consists of two cascading grids of still image “fragments” from short “video grabs” taken on Bollinger’s walks through the streets of San Francisco and its environs. These vibrantly coloured urban abstractions operate somewhere between the video still as a “field of information” and abstract color field painting. In another instance, Washing Machine (2006), by Adam Harrison, captures both the pedestrians passing on the street and the reflection s of this activity in the lens-like window of a washing machine within the quasi-public space of a Laundromat—a space elevated within the tradition of modernist street photography for its public attributes and symbiotic relationship to the street. The tumbling of wet clothes and sloshing water suggests the chemical processes of analogue picture making and apparitional nature of its recording just as the social apparatus of the washing machine mimics the increasingly redundant social device of the film projector.
The exhibition takes place at the Belkin Satellite and includes work by Bay Area artists Chip Lord, Rebeca Bollinger, Jim Campbell, Anthony Discenza, and Michael Damm. Vancouver artists will include Fiona Bowie, Adam Harrison, Jamie Dolinko, Matthew Griffin and Reid Shier.
The film series at the Vancouver International Film Centre presents work by Dominic Angerame, Bruce Baillie, Jeff Carter, Stephen Denure, Nathaniel Dorsky, Daniel Gahr, Chris Gallagher, Ernie Gehr, Glenn Lewis, Tomonari Nishikawa, Al Razutis, David Rimmer, Michael Rudnick, Scott Stark, Jamie Tolagson. For film information and tickets: www.vifc.org; tel: 604-683-FILM(3456).
This project is curated by Jordan Strom a candidate to the Masters Degree in Critical and Curatorial Studies at The University of British Columbia.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, and the Faculty of Arts at The University of British Columbia, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Acquisitions and Exhibitions Fund, the Alvin Balkind Fund for Student Curatorial Initiatives, and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Vancouver International Film Festival & Vancity Theatre.