You (Probably) Haven’t Seen This Before

As an artist, I tend to work under the belief that specificity is the key to universality – that the more granular and personal a subject becomes, the more deeply it can resonate with others. Much of my work engages with personal archives: I’m interested in what the deceased leave behind, how we care for those objects, and how we use them to construct memory and meaning. In many ways, this program feels like a natural extension of that curiosity, shifting from the personal archive to a collective one.

The curatorial process itself has been a new creative endeavor for me. It began with projects like Signal Overload at the Starlite Drive-In and Controlled Demolition at XINEMA in Vancouver. I initially approached the Moving Image Archive with a fairly specific idea in mind; I wanted a program centered on water, under the title Reflections in Time. When I discovered that the archive held a 16mm print of H20 by Ralph Steiner, one of my favorite moving image artworks, I thought the direction was set- it was all over, man.

But as I spent more time with the collection, something began to shift. The films started speaking to one another in ways I hadn’t anticipated. What began as a study of water gradually expanded into something broader; it became a meditation on states of matter, on transition, and on transformation. It became less about a single element and more about change itself.

I often tell my students that you have to listen to a work of art- that you can begin with an idea, but ultimately the work will become what it needs to be. I found this holds just as true in curating as it does in making; this program is the result of that process of listening.

Lately, I’ve been drawn to moving images that have what I like to think of as the breath of a photograph but the life of film; these are works that linger and allow time and material to assert themselves. Many of the films in this program operate in that space. And, in doing so, they ask for a different kind of attention; I am interested in how the images wash over the viewer, and how they how they make you feel. As Andrei Tarkovsky once said, “Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality… Through poetic connections feeling is heightened and the spectator is made more active. We become participants in the process of discovering life.”