Film Categories: Photography

  • Field Trip

    “Field Trip” is a travel diary on the American social landscape. The images consist of visual research for future film projects and were accumulated during my many location scouting trips to the United States between 1980 and 1995. Over time, I have come to regard this photographic archive as a collection of works of historical and personal value. Over the years, I began to rework the photographs. The more I handled and touched them, the less I thought of them as photographs and the more I saw them as something that could be hand-shaped, altered, transformed and re-imagined. With three…

  • Camera Trap

    CAMERA TRAP is a comparative installation using moving images a hundred years apart. The first half of the work looks at Muybridge as both animal and landscape photographer, compared with the second half which works with current animal camera/video traps from the rainforests of Sabah (Malaysian Borneo). A visual and aural comparison of domesticated versus wild animals. Staged shooting versus remote capture. Caged sounds from the zoo versus field recordings from the rainforests. How does the way we use camera equipment on documenting animals then and now, tell us about what we are looking for through the lens? In collaboration…

  • Green and Red, But Terracotta Red

    We are looking through the mirror of time, into distorted memories, while several narrators tell us about the most vivid colours in their dreams. The film consists of a collage of 16mm found footage that I further processed and decayed using a gentle combination of bleaching techniques. This process allowed me to partially lift the emulsion from the film base and re-shift it and re-position it by hand. Faces are warped, homes collapse, memories fade and blur.

  • The Way We Are

    “The Way We Are” shares excerpts of stories from audio interviews with 4 queer Asian women living in Toronto: Katherine Chun, Wenda Li, Tamai Kobayashi, and Nancy Seto. Told in the present-tense, these stories are arranged in a way that explores the past as the present, and in doing so, immersing viewers into the real-lived experiences from a different generation. This film was inspired by the intimacy of looking through a photo album with loved ones; there is something nostalgic about the materiality of handling photographs, especially in this digital era where images are so increasingly ubiquitous. The act of…

  • I Dream of Vancouver

    In a reality continually refracted through the lens of corporate technology, what remains of those who don’t fit into this vision of the world? I Dream of Vancouver is an experimental short that explores this question through the digital landscape of Vancouver, BC. Using hypnagogic visuals and a haunting soundscape, this work expresses the detachment from the lived experience of spaces as these spaces are subsumed by algorithms and mediated images. While focusing on Vancouver as a case study, this documentary explores issues that are relevant to the world at large, such as the link between corporate technologies and gentrification…

  • Unarchive

    Unarchive juxtaposes the filmmaker’s father’s life with the political history of Chile – his birthplace – over the past century. It reflects on how we remember and how we forget, and the role of the camera in transcending the complex space in between.

  • Jatun LLaxta, Noh Kaah…

    A short experimental film that explores ancient native cities in America. Images of Machu Pichu, Sacsayhuaman, Uxmal, Chichen Itza, and Mesa Verde had been blow up from Super 8 to 16 mm, handheld developed and reticulated to create an evocative view of our past.

  • My Gentrification

    “A voice tells us: “a friend of mine drew a circle on a map and said, ‘this is where you wanna live’.” The this refers to a subsection of Toronto between Bathurst and Dufferin streets, but it could just as easily refer to the city as a whole, an area bustling with life. Or, at least it did. Marcos Arriaga’s “My Gentrification,” explores the changes in the ever-gentrifying metropolis through the lens of archival footage they procured through decades of documentation. There’s a real Jonas Mekas vibe to Arriaga’s film, which is replete with voiceover narration and grainy celluloid archival…

  • Views From Home: Facing North

    Views From Home: Facing North is a short video first shown as part of Edie Steiner’s lens-based exhibition at Gallery 44 Members Space in 2014. The project explores the changing view from her home on the Toronto waterfront from 2004 to late 2019 and is a record of rapid urban development over multiple seasons. The work began as an analogue photographic project on medium format film and later transformed into video recordings, gradually changing from analogue to digital processes over the years of the recordings. Central to the frame is the site of Fort York, which gradually disappears from view…

  • the framing of perception

    “I saw the light…” Sun, light, darkness, shadow — from time immemorial all weighted with significance and wonder. What mastery over nature, over others, to grasp the sun, control light itself! Know its speed, its heat, its colour, its radiation, its nature – is this not the power of the gods? Cinema is messaging with light and shadow. Figure and ground. Light, onto which we project significance, now transports our information. Perception shaped by our experiences, our interpretations, our projections, our illusions. Frames of drama and comedy, journalism and documentary, propaganda and advertising, all combined daily and edited, reproduced for…