Film Categories: Earth

  • Transits of Venus, The

    The two films, the first black and white, the second in color, record the sky when Venus passed across the Sun on June 6th, 2004 and June 6th 2012. Transits of Venus occur in a pattern that repeats every 243 years, with pairs of transits 8 years apart, separated by long gaps of 121.5 years and 105.5 years. Each shot is contextualized with data detailing the various technical parameters that determine the peculiarity of the image. This data is an integral part of the work.

  • Parallèle Nord (Parallel North)

    “Dans un monde réellement renversé, le vrai est un moment du faux.” – Guy Debord, La société du spectacle Qu’en est-il de la forêt boréale? “In a world that has really been turned upside down, the true is a moment of the false.” – Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle What about the boreal forest?

  • Just Passing Through

    Told through the perspective of a landscape, “Just Passing Through” tells the story of evolution as one image gives rise to the next. The film explores the relationship between permanence and impermanence where familiar subjects are fleeting and we are left to contemplate unfamiliar landscapes.

  • Different as Night and Day

    “Different as Night and Day,” shot in the Port Lands of Toronto, Canada, examines the disconcerting coexistence of technology and nature. It cycles through three views of two power plants as light and climate transition (cf. Claude Monet’s series of Rouen Cathedral). The views are bridged by long dissolves of smoke streaming from one of the plants. The dissolves are often gorgeous and reminiscent of the Northern Lights, but are composed with images of airborne pollutants (cf. the pollutionenhanced sunsets painted by JMW Turner in the 19th century). “Different as Night and Day” is a dynamic painting.

  • Walking Away 2

    Scarborough Bluffs (1974): a woman walks away from us, through a field of grass. Approaching a treeline, she turns and crosses the frame. Instead of panning to accommodate her, the camera zooms wider – the woman continues to diminish as if still walking away and the landscape is fully revealed. The shot partially repeats: a wipe transition replaces the grass with water, and a ‘shipscape’ from Toronto’s Port Lands (2011) is revealed. Poetically, light reflected from downtown office towers catches the sail of a boat crossing the frame. Then amusingly, a split-screen sequence underlines the correspondence between woman and sailboat.

  • Queen’s Quay

    Red, green, blue, and yellow grids track the horizon, left and right. The colours mix.

  • Snakegrass

    Snake grass lines a forest path. The camera passes toward the entrance to the woods. It staggers and repeats as the scene is saturated in colour.

  • Balinese Rebar

    Birds in flight break through rusted clouds and translucent buildings. Rebar at a construction site seems to snake through sunlit puddles.

  • The Order of Ideas at the Leslie Street Spit

    On the paths that cut through Toronto’s Tommy Thompson Park, at the foot of Leslie Street, an assortment of terrains collide: thicket, pebbled shorelines, muddy vistas, and fertile earth with beds of wildflowers. A giant duck crosses the horizon. A radio transmission of Shooby Taylor, the human horn, travels with us.

  • Selected Works by the Loop Collective: Volume 1

    A selection of films produced between 2005-2011 by members of The Loop Collective, a Toronto-based group of independent filmmakers, musicians, dancers and multimedia artists who strive to connect cinema to related interdisciplinary art forms. 1. fugitive l(i)ght 2. c: won eyed jail 3.Thaw 4. Parícutin 5.Quanta 6. Shapes Eat Shapes 7. Levitas 8. Spiders in Eden 9. The Changing Light 10. Christ Church – Saint James 11. Thought Form 12. Morning 13. Many Glimpses 14. Movement / Stasis (documentation)