Wow, (insert some swearing here for emphasis – you can choose) first of all I have to say I am completely, thoroughly impressed by Daniel Barrow’s work. The totality of his performance was just incredible. I can attest to the difficulty in coordinating a number of layers of acetate on an overhead projector having dabbled in overhead image play but the ease with which he manipulates and activates the images, spaces, characters, and the internal images spaces especially (TVs, mirrors, book pages windows) was incredible. But the plastic really came to life combined with an elaborately detailed, highly researched, and captivating story creating an absolutely breathtaking experience (he didn’t even use a script for the entire 45minute performance. “The Face of Everything” and its accompanying cast list and the shorter “Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry” are really indescribable in their enchantment. I can say it is really too bad for those of you who couldn’t make it, you really missed out. But aside from the technical virtuosity with which Barrow transformed very simple materials the delicate handling of the content, a sense of lost innocence and ideals of beauty and relationships, of transfigurations and of the necessity or not of suffering, of façades, how we make contact between our interiority and the rest of the world; our faciality in the world.

So many of the films seemed to navigate different aspects of describing or being unable to describe interior experience and particularly the process of realization particularly Trevor Anderson’s Rock Pocket recounting his childhood desire to be able to walk through the Klondike Days festival with his boyfriend, each of them with their hands in the back pocket of each other’s rock jeans, just like all the teenagers he saw when he was 10 years old. But the dismay of having to enact the scene with a surrogate, that it was possible but never real, brought up the simultaneously beautiful, sad and hilarious aspects of the process of bringing fantasy to life. I also must say the overall feeling of this film great, wonderful storytelling and Steven Hope’s camera/editing work was gorgeous.

I remember the first time I saw one of aAron’s films, it was being projected on to the side of an abandoned house, and I kind of freaked out because I was so excited about it, I mean I had heard he made really great work but it kind of blew me away. So I had been looking forward to seeing his latest film. Much more of an internal memory vault/dreamscape of a haunting enigmatic figure, thrU uses internal collaged bits of film and projection within the stop motion set to reference the relation to the exterior world; completely captivating, I only wish it was longer.

Another great piece in its captivating simplicity of process and visual hypnotic wonder was Lyle Pisio’s Another Lost Soul. Pisio takes hundreds of thousands of still photographs of a polished steel ball attached with a rod to the camera as he moves through a field/path and interior living spaces. Watching it one becomes so aware of the body of the camera, always connected yet distorted in our reflective positionality.

I really want to go on more (and I will later) there were a lot of really impressive pieces I am just amazed but what is being created in Alberta and Quebec media centers but I have to get myself to Latitude now for the installation and performances tonight, Kelly Bollen’s video mixing is always a sure hit, tonight accompanied by Shawn Pinchbeck all the way from Estonia and aAron Munson in the newly formed media collective aDemod. I am also really looking forward to seeing Scott Amos’s film Memory Lapse in Saturday’s B.C. screening, his working methodology/aesthetic is close to my own heart, found film, scratchy dirty surfaces, re-imagined memories. Anyway I am excited about the surprises that await tonight.

See you there
Andrea