Terminator- new video screenings

' Food is Power, we use it to change behaviour '. That's the opening line from Terminator, a short new video piece that's going to be making it's debut this September, at screenings in the UK, as part of One Minute Volume 6, curated by Kerry Baldry.

On the 27th it'll be at the Horse Hospital in London  in the autumn programme of the London Underground Film Sessions http://www.thehorsehospital.com/now/london-underground-film-sessions-autumn/and on the 30th, it will be screened (via pedal powered cinema) in Alexandra Park in Manchester, as part of an event called One Day Wonder(ment). On October 25th, Aid & Abet in Cambridge will screen it as part of an event called Dark Hours/ Fixed Space and then on November 24th, it will be appearing @ The Museum of Club Culture in Hull.

The video is part of a longer series called Acts of Domestic Terror, which explores issues surrounding food sovereignty, radical gardening and DIY politics. In Terminator, a mysterious figure called 'The Activist' performs a number of Situationist inspired back yard interventions designed to provoke resistance against 'Terminator Seed Technology' and promote the global battle to maintain biodiversity.

I'm very excited that the piece is going to be premiering in the UK with it's long history of horticountercultural politics and I'm busy working on completing the rest of the series, which I hope to show more of soon! If you're in the neighbourhood for either screening and have a chance to have a look, I'd love to hear what you think.

Wasted - new work in progress

Slow, silent, omnipresent, all we could see, ever increasing, more toxic than previously thought, photo degradation, malnutrition, metabolized subsequent to ingestion, particularly damaging, the term debris, manufactured and processed, insidiously and ineluctably formed or imprinted, a system of coding, something discarded, the right or duty of intervention, anywhere in the world and ever growing, in ways that are only just becoming known.

 

Glass, rubber, metal, persistent solid material, the overwhelming amount, how vast, domestic waste, unquantifiable plastic mass, buoyancy, durability, undeniable behavioral propensity, indirectly, intentionally, disposed of or abandoned, towards a legal recognition, may be shaped when soft and then hardened.

Obligations, a forage into the great garbage patch, microscopic, their “social contract”, starvation, laceration, fragmented plastic debris, infection and suffocation, new sources of global contamination, enough is enough, just below the surface, the abysmal depth.

 

Over-consuming, we’re all afraid of what we’re going to find, a cylinder of tightly packed, shredded black plastic, strong bonds of various kinds, formerly living materials, blatantly visible, beyond visual, scavengers who take, lethal nature, giving rise to yet another… 

Art, Activism and the Murdered and Missing Women

Tuesday, February 7th, I'll be co-presenting the video Calculating 63 with Leannej @ SFU Burnaby Campus and talking about the Evergreen project. Carol Martin of the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre will also be there and there will be a discussion about art and activism and recent events in the DTES. Please come by if you can and if not, I hope to see you the following Tuesday @ the February 14th Women's Memorial March.

Apologia - a new body of work

Post- Stanley Cup, pre-Occupy, Apologia re-purposes texts taken directly from the raw plywood hoardings that covered Vancouver streets after the June 2011 riots. I've mimicked the gestures and faked the textures and colours of the original scripts and then re-mixed selected portions of the narrative scrawl into a fabricated tableaux of counterfeit relics; creating, in effect - a false 'Apology Wall'.

Lost in the crowd, amidst the spectacle's shameless sermonizing and almost self- congratulatory contrition are fragments of feeling that seem to point to a deeper and potentially meaningful, collective unrest. By re-contextualizing the 'real' wall's chastening catch-phrases, randomly inserting manipulated 'profile picture' images, and assigning imaginary authorship to impersonal confessions, I'm hoping to redeem the more plausible expressions of private regret, remind people of other civic events that bear witnessing, explore genuine acknowledgements of public dissent and perhaps, by reading between the lines, discover the catalysts for inciting a lasting and constructive civic conscience.

New Video Work

... a lone, masked figure takes a stand in a disrupted landscape... defining her place, creating the space to inhabit her own body, looking for ways to construct new meaning. Fighting for the right to stand alone, the hope to be included, the freedom to say no, the freedom to say yes, over here, out there, anywhere, everywhere; Independence...

From the synopsis for my latest video, Independence, now playing at festivals this month in Beirut, Riga and Budapest and also viewable online as part of CologneOFF Vll- http://coff.newmediafest.org/ If you have a few moments please have a look and let me know what you think, wherever you are.