Not yet noon and still buzzing from last night’s STEM Cell kick off at Metro (and not even from the $1.50 pints @ Velvet---$1.50 PINTS!!!). Lots to recap, so let’s go…

The evening’s screening began with a slight glitch as STEMlins invaded the projection booth. The room was humming with anticipation of ‘thrU’ and in a few short minutes we were treated to a few short (2.5) minutes of aAron munson’s latest opus. Underscored by Mark Templeton, thrU is aAron’s most resonant work yet. Invited into the stop motion house of unconscious reflections viewers reel through flashes of warm childhood memories, binding reflection, electric pulses. The cerebral snow and hearth of sand (?) were among my favourite images. aAron took the stage following the screening to talk about how he constructed the set and that the painstaking project took over a year to complete. He’s ‘glad that it’s over’. I look forward to seeing it againandagainandagainang...

About 13 or so shorts followed submitted by co-op creators in Alberta and Quebec. Not enough time (at the moment) to address them all. For me, among the most memorable were ‘Damaged Goods’ (Don Best) and ‘Another Lost Soul’ (Lyle Pisio) of CSIF; ‘In Deep Skin’ (Juana Awad, Jorge Lozano) Quebec Intervention Video; ‘A Little Metro Story’ (Evelyn Guay) Video Femmes; ‘Hammer Click’ (Mike Maxxis) and ‘Rock Pocket’ (Trevor Anderson) of FAVA. Although I’ve seen it many times, ‘Element of Light’ (Richard Reeves) of Quickdraw is always a delight to experience on screen.

The shorts were surely a challenge of curation and programming for the STEM Cell organizers. Selecting from 250 (?---something like that) submitted works would be tough work. Well done. Saturday matinee screenings will feature shorts from the BC and Atlantic co-ops; Saturday night Manitoba and Ontario.

Which brings me to Daniel Barrow. Stunning. Barrow sat in one of the middle rows of the Metro and performed over an hour of live illustrations on an old school (possibly school issue?) overhead projector. He narrated his pieces to the music of Matthew Adam Hart and was accompanied by an assistant who seamlessly presented him with sheet after sheet after sheet of drawings on mylar. Barrow performed three pieces: an excerpt from his work-in-progress ‘Everytime I See Your Picture I Cry’ (featuring the characters Helen Keller and---in this episode---Bag Lady). This was followed by pages from ‘The Catalogue of the Original’ (Kristy McNichol the clear audience favourite) and ‘The Face of Everything’. The density of Barrow’s work is intoxicating; the presentation hypnotic. The ‘mirrorpond’ jewel reflecting how Hillbilly (FOE) ‘would see himself in the mirror looking with eyes closed’ was key for me. The face, the self, the soul cut up and stitched back together. Taking the perversity of pain and inviting it to play: making friends with rats only to have them whisked off by owls; comforted by disjointed arms floating in as stroking angel wings; looking for love in all the wrong places and finding…something else. Scribbling in the dark, the line from FOE which resonated most was ‘I never felt more affection for myself than when I saw myself as gullible.’ The blessing and tragic beauty of belief.

chitters