“God Hates Himself: The Videos of Gary Kibbins,” February 13, 2018
Over the last 30 years, Canadian video artist Gary Kibbins has created a unique body of work that unpacks commonly held notions to underline the absurd in the everyday. Unfolding with wry humour and precision, his videos explore both sense-making and, more importantly, non-sense in a form that is at once philosophically dense and visually lush.
This programme features a half-dozen new Kibbins videos that question language, meaning and belief. Microscopic gestures get close examination: e.g., one narrator loses his balance while paying too close attention to his movements through a threshold, another analyzes the repressed psychosexual traumas that undulate through a late-night house party. At the same time, larger meanings are questioned: the video God Hates Himself finds the ardently atheist Kibbins recording the testimony of a witness and victim of Congolese civil-war atrocities who still declares a faith in God. Kibbins lets this declaration of belief stand, but juxtaposes it with a more solipsistic story of the unfolding of a typical North American life—yet again undercutting the tools which we use to try and make sense of our place in the world.
Or So We Say
dir. Gary Kibbins | Canada 2017 | 10 min. | Digital
Doorway
dir. Gary Kibbins | Canada 2017 | 8 min. | digital
The Child’s Concept of Chance
dir. Gary Kibbins | Canada 2014-2017 | 5 min. | digital
We Move Only Ourselves
dir. Gary Kibbins | Canada 2015 | 10.5 min. | digital
God Hates Himself
dir. Gary Kibbins | Canada 2013-2016 | 20 min. | digital
Ocean View
dir. Gary Kibbins | Canada 2014 | 11 min. | digital
Tuesday, February 13 9:00pm