Genres: Installation

  • Magnificent Obsessions

    An assembled collage, with footage drawn from a variety of seemingly unrelated sources: memories stored on YouTube profiles and cell phone cameras, clips from classic melodramas and sitcoms. Taking inspiration from Douglas Sirk’s film, the project explores tropes of false identity, blindness, and desire within the context of a lurid Hollywood melodrama.

  • The Adobe House

    Adobe is a building material made from earth and other organic materials. It is among the earliest building materials, used throughout the world. This film is hand-processed in sage, mint, eucalyptus, and compost. Filmed at Site + Cycle 2018 at Anima Casa Rural, San Isidro Mazatepec, Mexico. Sound by Linus Winstam (aka Dj Bruce Leenus).

  • Topology of a String

    Topology of A String is a video installation of seven looping videos that investigate permutations and possibilities of a single continuous line in space. Without ever breaking the line, hundreds of variant forms can be created by weaving the string over and under fingers, across the palms or backs of the hands. This project links string games, an ancient form of entertainment shared by cultures the world over, to the branch of mathematics called topology. Each sequence starts at the same opening position yet a single change in the over-under pattern results in a completely different form. The near infinite…

  • Doing and undoing: poems from within #1 radiotherapy

    It deals with interventions that I had made with my mother during her cancer treatment. The film is part of large project dealing with my mother’s cancer healing process. Hacer y Deshacer: Poems from Within (2019) is an interactive video installation. Most of the video sequences show Gelis’s mother undressing, one strand of yarn at a time, sometimes in Panama’s Casco Viejo (historic district), sometimes in the turbulent waters of the Pacific. Using her mother’s body, she tells the story of a cancer survivor, the story of countless others. Gelis invites us into the healing process: the viewer can change…

  • Vanilla

    Vanilla takes you through the everyday ordinary life of a disabled senior citizen living in Ottawa, Canada. It is a portrait documenting aging and the loneliness of those suffering in silence. The black and white film was shot on 16mm Bolex film camera using a KODAK 7222 Double-X Negative film. Processed by Niagara Film Lab (Toronto). Created as part of Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa (IFCO) – Dogme Production Challenge.

  • ARTIFACT (circa 2006)

    The archaeology of Identity. Consider a world where all human communications are represented by numbers, a digital world. Imagine a future archaeologist finding a DV cassette from hundreds of years ago (a real found object, circa 2006, full length and uncut). Imagine trying to decode this ancient digital object, codecs unknown, obsolete, hardware long lost. Crack the code? Available algorithms scan, databases compare, construct, deconstruct, reconstruct the artifact. 2006, the dawn of self-by-numbers, digitized identity. What human fragments, fugitive narratives, remain? Do we have a future history? What will the algorithms decide? All bookings of this film include a free…

  • The Quoddy Fold

    “The Quoddy Fold” is an intimate interaction between a woman and a derelict coastal house. In this one-hour film Phillips dismantles and studies the movement from wood to dust, damp paper to mold, and ponders the house folding back into the land and sea. Phillips’ performance constantly seeks evidence of dissolving boundaries, thingness, history and intersubjectivity of space, place and species. Through the poetics of the ruin “The Quoddy Fold” is an interrogation of dwelling and landscape giving space to entertain the ecological, cultural and societal anxieties surrounding impermanence.

  • Contents

    An old wallet, abandoned intact, kept for unknown reasons. Uncorroborated memories of a close (but distant) relation. How are these documents speaking to each other? What is the nature of their harmony? Official versus living memory: each useless, unstable, disintegrating. Is memory the bureaucracy of the self? How does it order our lives?

  • Officer Tuba Meets Happy Ghost

    soJin Chun combines characters appropriated from two Hong Kong films and digitally rotoscopes them into contemporary Super 8mm film footage shot in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Toronto, Canada. Pulled from their Hong Kong settings, these characters are recast as Koreans, playing with western perceptions of Asian identity. The ruptures and continuity of culture within diasporic communities frame these figures displaced in time, space, language, and culture. The principal characters in this new film are the titular Officer Tuba (of Where’s Officer Tuba 1986) and an actress taken from the Happy Ghost Franchise (five films 1984-1991). Although they never meet, Chun…

  • Abandoned

    An unfinished housing complex has been abandoned. The imagined future from the past is taken over by foliage and wildlife.