Film Categories: Landscape

  • До Землі (To the Ground)

    A three-channel video installation which depicts various plants from Saskatchewan that were captured during my year-long mentorship with Sandra Semchuk (supported by BC Arts Council). The project applies the approach of ethnobotany, in this case combining stories of both Ukrainian and Ukrainian Canadian people about the medicinal use of different plants. The video triptych pairs close-ups of plants together with audio stories about them, giving an inside view of an interwoven connection between Ukrainian people and plants, while at the same time unveiling the history of immigration through individual family stories. By including both English and Ukrainian language the work…

  • Another Europe

    An essay film rooted in experimental cinema and queer storytelling. A female narrator (fellow artist Kathi Hofer) provides the voice over for this film, making it a reflection on my life and my journey through Europe from 2019-2020. Associative spaces unfold. A train of thoughts. The boundaries between factual and memories become a blur. How much of my personal story can be read more globally? Visual portraits of Europe’s faraway places away from typical tourist hot spots provide the mise en scène for this film. Landscapes in transition, pictures of movement, visually resembling the long journeys I have undertaken using…

  • temporal assemblages

    temporal assemblages is an ecological video poem exploring human presence and absence in natural and built environments. Although the performers in the film are directed within the frame, the locations serve as canvasses for improvisation and the landscape is an equal player in the narrative of the scene. A meditation on impermanence and the transience of place, the title is inspired by assemblage art where fragments of existing artistic objects are reconstituted into new artworks. The filmmaker here samples her own archive of media materials produced over several decades of practice, from analogue photography, Super-8mm and 16mm film recordings, early…

  • Conversations on the Lake

    Conversations on the Lake investigates politics of dwelling in rural Northwestern Ontario communities along the Lake Superior north shore. It was nominated for Best Documentary at the 2014 Female Eye Film Festival and was shown in film festivals internationally, including travelling festivals and in rural communities abroad and in Canada and the US. The film explores how the land, its waters, and its landscapes are valued by citizens who live and work in communities bordering the Canadian side of Lake Superior, the largest freshwater supply on the continent, expressing a sense of place unique to the region. With the landscape…

  • Wavewidth

    Wavewidth captures the sense of calm that a seaside landscape can provide. Lifted by waves of time, the spatio-temporal markers are disturbed by the sound. The marine and sound waves resonate in a contemplative cinematographic experience.

  • Homunculi

    Filmed sporadically and intuitively during the summer months of 2020 and 2021, Homunculi is a recontextualization of a personal archive of hand processed 16mm “home movies” and various cinematographic experiments. Reassembled, these once disparate images form a cinematic prism in which to view and confront the prevalent anxieties of an increasing uncertain future. Homunculi is a visual and sonic daydream, reaching beneath the facade of domestic and pastoral tranquility to reveal a lurking, inevitable force that promises to tear the world asunder.

  • Arrival 1, Arrival 2

    This experimental essay film springs from the final days of December 2020 when I moved from Chicago to Toronto. The film documents my move and then continues on alternate paths, weaving through the liminal spaces of borders, sickness, interpellation, and dreams. Content Note: This film contains extended discussions about fatphobia and disordered eating. Specifically, this film contains descriptions of food restriction, idealization of thinness, and intense emotional and physical pain after eating. After 11:41 there is no direct discussion of disordered eating. Flashing lights throughout. Loud noises throughout.

  • Tell Me about SunTea

    Tell Me about SunTea (Super 8, Digital Video, Colour, Stereo Sound, 6 minutes and 47 seconds) Tell Me about SunTea builds a conversational and spatial ecosystem, weaving together the disparate spaces of the Toronto Islands and Covington, Texas. The film considers the life cycles of plants and animals, as discussed by the filmmaker’s Gram and as remembered by the filmmaker. Conversational obstacles and a failed interview attempt are re-imagined as off-road opportunities. The repeated voice over reveals changes in cadence and content that point to the fragile intimacy held in language and storytelling. “Considering different forms of mechanical and organic…

  • Pressure & Release

    Pressure & Release is a multi-layered story drawn from memories of my paradoxical sleep, a sub-conscious response to the recognition that we are amid the “Anthropocene period” and the “Holocene extinction.” Certain ideologies combined with well ingrained cultural practices are driving this rapid transformation into something we may or may not yet imagine as this era’s lasting presence unfolds.

  • Turbulence

    Turbulence is a meditation on various places in the Canadian Prairies, places that are part of an ancient Precambrian seabed rebounding from the last ice age. This is a region that once had a dynamic range of plants and wildlife supporting ancient cultures that flourished here for millennia.