“Tempo Não Para (Time Doesn’t Stop)” . February 18, 2014
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- Axis by John Kneller
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- As the Sun’s Shadow Continues to Extend When it is Setting by Camilo Restrepo
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- Activated Memory 1 by Sabrina Ratté
Tempo Não Para (Time Doesn’t Stop)
As the injunction Tempo Não Para (tattooed on the body of a street performer in Camilo Restrepo’s As the Sun’s Shadow Continues to Extend When it is Setting) reminds us, time doesn’t stop: it rolls along cyclically, continuously, day through night and season through season. The play of time is both the inspiration and challenge for these varied and beautiful film and video works, each of which in its own way attempts to harness and channel that ceaseless flow through technological apparatuses and post- production effects.
Both Chris Welsby’s classic Seven Days and John Kneller’s exciting new work Axis were created via specially designed camera harnesses: Welsby uses an equatorial stand to guide the camera along the sun’s path over the course of seven days, pointing at ground or sky depending on cloud cover, while Kneller’s adapted Bolex rotates around various sites in the city of Toronto, the results further amplified by exceptional optical printing which breaks down the image into travelling mattes of moving light. In Activated Memory 1, Montrealer Sabrina Ratté uses video processing to create a nearly three-dimensional landscape that oscillates somewhere between the future and the video past. The Italian video collective Flatform also reimagines the landscape in wry and clever ways: Cannot Be Anything Against the Wind animates the landscape of rural Italy, fracturing the farmland into shifting seismic counterpoints, while the stunning Movements of an Impossible Time is a perfect illustration of how cinematic illusion creates our sense of time: a single travelling shot across an Italian villa takes us through the four seasons, aided by rain curtains, wind machines and dry ice.
Movement of Impossible Time (Movimenti di un tempo impossible) dir. Flatform | Italy 2011 | 8 min. | video
As the Sun’s Shadow Continues to Extend When it is Setting (Como crece la sombra cuando el sol declina) dir. Camilo Restrepo | Colombia/France 2013 | 11 min. | 16mm
Seven Days dir. Chris Welsby | UK 1974 | 20 min. | 16mm
Cannot Be Anything Against the Wind dir. Flatform | Italy 2010 | 6 min. | video
Crops dir. Gerco de Ruijter | The Netherlands 2012 | 3.5 min. | video
Axis dir. John Kneller | Canada 2013 | 18 min. | 35mm
Activated Memory 1 dir. Sabrina Ratté | Canada 2012 | 6 min. | video Approx. total running time: 73 min.
John Kneller in person.
Tuesday, February 18 6:30pm