Alex Mackenzie, still from The Hollow Mountain (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
To celebrate The Cinematheque’s 50th anniversary, DIM presents projector performances by Alex MacKenzie and Lindsay McIntyre with live sound by Clare Kenny and Peter Bussigel. The evening is bookended by experimental works set in West Coast forests, opening with MacKenzie’s manipulation of a 1920s hand-cranked projector and closing with McIntyre’s composition across six projectors. In between, the light performance Phosphene will shimmer across the screen, uniting “the cosmic with the microscopic” (Marilyn Brakhage), and Mall Emotions transform a promo for French mall culture into a dreamlike space traversed by a silhouetted shopper forever seeking an exit from the labyrinth of capital. Hollow Mountain, filmed with a hand-cranked camera atop a mountain overlooking the Salish Sea, uses a variety of lens interference techniques in concert with the projector to translate the topography of the landscape into pure abstraction. In Worth More Standing, horizontal and vertical planes shift across footage of the old-growth forest at Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island and its land defenders facing down developers encroaching on unceded Pacheedaht territory. Exploring the dynamics of tree/human relationships, McIntyre’s performance creates a high-contrast portrait of this landscape of ancient, seemingly silent giants whose fate rests in human hands.
Programmed by Michèle Smith
The Hollow Mountain
Canada 2022
Alex MacKenzie
20 min. 35mm performance
Phosphene
Canada 2018-ongoing
Alex MacKenzie
10 min. 16mm performance
Mall Emotions
Canada 2019
Alex MacKenzie, Clare Kenny
13 min. 16mm performance
Worth More Standing
Canada 2022
Lindsay McIntyre, Peter Bussigel
40 min. 16mm performance
Advisory: “Live and Expanded” contains strobing effects that may affect photosensitive viewers. Note that all works are of variable duration.
Live and Expanded! will be followed by a Q&A session with the artists.
Alex MacKenzie is a West Coast-based media artist working with cine film and hand-processed imagery to create expanded cinema performances and light projection installations. His work has toured and screened internationally.
Clare Kenny is a musician working primarily with keyboards and found sound. Her past projects include Eyelickers, Giantess, Skiimask, What’s Hot, Electrosonics, and Koolatron. She is based on Lasqueti Island, B.C.
Lindsay McIntyre (Inuk/settler) is a film artist with a process-based analogue practice and interests in the apparatus of cinema, representation, and bridging gaps in collective experience. She teaches film and screen arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and anywhere else people will listen.
Peter Bussigel is a composer and intermedia artist who builds sound systems that become instruments, performances, sculptures, and videos. He teaches new media and sound arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.