Programmed by Ben Donoghue
Daniel Young, Christian Giroux, Adrian Blackwell and Ben Donoghue in person
This Vancouver premiere screening of Adrian Blackwell’s Night Equals Day and Daniel Young and Christian Giroux’s Every Building, Or Site, That a Building Permit Has Been Issued for a New Building in Toronto in 2006 bring two recent structural approaches to development in Toronto to the West. These two new silent 35mm architectural films form the initial parts of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT)’s “Cinema and Disjunction” commissioning and production support project for critical architectural film works. Drawing inspiration from art historical precedents and contemporary critiques of the urban form, the initial projects presented under this framework defamiliarize and interrupt Toronto’s visual narratives with new questions and alternative possibilities. To express our intent in Bernard Tschumi’s terms, these films “reinscribe the movement of bodies in space, together with the actions and events that take place within the social and political realm of architecture.”
Blackwell’s Night Equals Day employs complex camera control to record a day at a single point of Regent Park’s (Canada's oldest public housing development and now the site of significant condominium development) Sackville and Oak streets intersection, compressing a twelve-hour equinox day to thirty minutes of film time, one frame per second, and one three-hundred-and-sixty degree camera rotation per hour. In Young and Giroux’s Every Building, one experiences a comparatively accelerated city represented by one hundred and thirty odd buildings or building sites captured in short static shots. These highly aestheticized images, shot all over Toronto’s boundaries, develop a time-based response to photo-conceptualism’s language of architectural photography, reframing Ruscha within contemporary practice. – Ben Donoghue
Adrian Blackwell is an artist and urbanist whose work focuses on spaces of uneven development in the postfordist city. Daniel Young and Christian Giroux have been collaborating on sculpturally concerned projects since 2003. They are represented in Toronto by Diaz Contemporary.
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Feb 11 09 | Emily Carr University | 7pm | Free | ecuad.ca
Film does not equal Sculpture: Two Toronto sculpture practices experiment with film.
Young, Giroux, and Blackwell will briefly introduce excerpts of their recent film projects, followed by two short talks investigating the relationship between these moving images and their ongoing investigations of physical space.
Emily Carr University Lecture room, South Building #301. Presented by Emily Carr University 2009 Lecture Series.
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Feb 24 09 | Cineworks | 6pm | Free | cineworks.ca
Thought on Film: The Condition of Post-modernity
An excerpt from David Harvey's The Condition of Post-modernity will be presented for group reading and discussion. Harvey’s answer to Fred Jameson’s Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition is a significant influence on Young, Giroux and Blackwell’s work because of Harvey’s rigorous basis of his analysis of cultural and social change in the economic and his special emphasis on social geography and the production of space.
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Co-presented by The Pacific Cinematheque, Presentation House Gallery, VIVO Media Arts Centre, Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society and Emily Carr University.
vivomediaarts.com | cineworks.ca | presentationhousegall.com | ecuad.ca