2019 PROGRAM
Photophobia: Contemporary Moving Image Festival

Program 1: August 8, 8:30 - 11:00 pm at Art Gallery of Hamilton's Irving Zucker Sculpture Garden
Program 2: August 10, 8:30 - 11:00 pm at Hamilton Artists Inc.'s ArcelorMittal Dofasco Courtyard

Photophobia is the 13th annual festival of short-format contemporary media, film, video and moving image presented in partnership between the Art Gallery of Hamilton and Hamilton Artists Inc. Established in 1999, Photophobia was Hamilton’s first film and video festival dedicated to the development of experimental time-based media at a time when there were no such platforms in the Hamilton community. Not confined by restrictions or themes, Photophobia showcases contemporary practitioners who test the boundaries of the medium in a free, multi-part festival series presented outdoors under the cover of night. All three screenings are free and accessible.

Program 1:

Thursday, August 8, 7:00 – 11:00 pm
Art Gallery of Hamilton, Irving Zucker Sculpture Garden
123 King Street West, Hamilton, ON
Duration: 109 minutes

Ben Bogart (British Columbia) - Through the Haze of the Machine’s Mind We May Glimpse Our Collective Imaginations (Blade Runner) (excerpt), 2017 (15:00)
Brian Ratigan (New York) - Dull Hope, 2018 (2:45)
Britany Gunderson (Wisconsin) - A Fixed Answer, 2019 (3:00)
Guillaume Vallée (Manitoba) - self-talk with nothingness, 2017 (4:15)
Jan Swinburne (Ontario) - CRACKERS: A Brief History of Code, 2018 (4:23)
Leslie Supnet (Manitoba) - The Peak Experience, 2018 (8:05)
Gabriela Aguero (Manitoba) - Exilio, 2017 (5:20)
Evan Tapper & Scott Sørli (Ontario) - Gay Alien Shame Parade (GASP!), 2017 (5:00)
Vera Sebert (Austria) - Liquid Traits of an Image Apparatus, 2019 (7:22)
Nick White (Ontario) - A Year, 2018 (1:40)
Solomon Nagler (Manitoba) - genizah; passages from the lublin book graveyard, 2018 (10:00)
Patrick Jenkins (Manitoba) - Emanations: A Visual Poem, 2017 (4:37)
Matthew Ripplinger (Manitoba) - Sir Bailey, 2018 (7:53)
Pixie Cram (Ontario) - Emergency Broadcast, 2017 (7:00)
Johanna Nulty (Northern Ireland) - Unconscious Intention, 2018 (4:01)
Mohamed Ismail (Egypt) - Five by Five, 2019 (5:15)
James Pomeroy (Manitoba) - Konstruktion Aria, 2017 (3:15)
Simo Saarikoski (Finland) - Abandoned Land, 2017 (12:15)

CLICK HERE to learn more about the screening program at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

The AGH is a fully accessible venue. Please note that AGH exhibitions will be closed. The screening will begin at dusk.

Program 2:

Saturday, August 10, 8:30 – 11:00 pm
Hamilton Artists Inc., ArcelorMittal Dofasco Courtyard
155 James Street North, Hamilton, ON
Duration: 96 minutes

Di Hu (China) - Urban Sculptures, 2017 (6:15)
The surveillance camera and the smartphone, one is passive and the other is active, represent two types of societies, disciplinary society and society of control as described by Gilles Deleuze. Recent advancements in techniques of control have largely blurred the boundary between the two. The artist believes the best way to portray this phenomenon is to take images of these surveillance cameras to clarify the ways by which they are inserted into the body of the city. A smartphone contains a whole life and has become life itself. Try imagining the future with these images….

Caroline Blais (Manitoba) - Murmur, 2017 (3:13)
In the evening, the murmur of appliances and the buzz of a fly are the sounds filling the room.

Margie Kelk & Lynne Slater (Ontario) - UnderSee, 2018 (7:40)
The animated film, UnderSee, conveys a world of exquisite harmony which slowly dissolves under the relentless onslaught of pollution. A clean-up crew of aquatic species arrives to eat away the invasive pollutants, and the undersea garden seems to regain some life. The question remains: can the reef and its creatures continue to withstand new threats, or will they give way to a murky universe of jellyfish that can survive in adversity?

Victoria N. Inglis (Manitoba) - High Altitude, 2018 (3:59)
High Altitude explores what it means to be an Indigenous artist in the modern world. Being a youth in a fast paced digital arts scene, Inglis poetically explores the ideas of decolonization, racism, creativity, and life on lands of broken agreements. Though poetry they explore ways to go back to the land and heal.

Sue Morris (United Kingdom) - Doing, Redoing, Undoing, 2017 (13:25)
According to the World Health Organization, there are an estimated 50 million people believed to be living with dementia worldwide with 10 million new cases each year. It is a syndrome with far reaching social and economic impacts yet one that is little understood or widely discussed in public. Dementia is not just memory loss stemming from old age. It affects other complex brain functions including language, perception, special navigation and emotional/social awareness. Doing, Redoing, Undoing, is a video work exploring how dementia affects the individual, especially, and how it can render the familiar as threatening and unsettling The work was devised and filmed in Nazareth House, Derry, N.Ireland which operated as a care home for the elderly for 120 years before closing in 2013. 

Producer/director: Sue Morris, filming: DNK Media Productions, editing: Sue Morris/DNK Media Productions. Funded by the Arts Council of N.Ireland and the Dementia Services Development Trust, UK.

Caroline Falby (Ontario) - The Animation of Mortality: Ne Me Quitte Pas, 2018 (5:00)
Ne Me Quitte Pas is part of my series The Animation of Mortality. The artworks are inspired by a loved one's death from HIV/AIDS. Like a virus connects victims, each generation of work takes elements from the piece created before. Figures are layered, linked and distorted until they resemble cloud-like shapes. Ne Me Quitte Pas uses After Effects to combine stop animation, digital collage and drawing elements. The accompanying audio layers lyrics from renditions of Jacques Brel's song Ne Me Quitte Pas into a lamentation of loss and aspiration.  

Jars Hooch (Manitoba) - Poly, 2019 (15:00)
in a /space
in a haze, awakens.
a static mind-fog persists,
bangs its head to feeeeeeel.
from the distance comes
a pink being;
little bits dancing,
receding, breaking,
faking, making, resting
touching
being.
fall together & come apart.
little bits

Grace Han (Manitoba) - Be Free From Myself, 2018 (3:35)
This performance video captures how I feel about my initial identity that was lost and my current identity, which is totally confusing. The video shows pain, burden, and a strong desire to be free from all the expectations I have carried by using a great amount of physicality and skills.

Jennifer Linton (Ontario) - Wunderkammer, 2018 (5:36)
Madelaine’s cabinet of curiosities contained a collection of wonders to both delight and horrify. One day, a mysterious item in her cabinet captures her attention. A darkly-tinged fantasy that explores the erotic-grotesque.

Nicholas Aiden (Newfoundland) - Platform, 2016 (4:56)
Platform examines intrapsychic space through durational performance, struggle and failure. Mirroring the impossibilities of fixed gender narratives, the familiar posture of the high-heeled foot and the secondary sex characteristic of hair covered legs are exploited together in strenuous meditation. Emphasis is placed on the mechanics of the body as it labours to sustain its footing, to concretize its relationship to physical space by proxy of prosthesis, as it balances a sociopolitical platform.

Khadija Baker (Quebec) - Blue Beard Today's Tale, 2016 (15:00)
The work questions the continuation of the use of woman body and a reflection on her role in the recent process of global reform.The move between my portrait in the story and me performing in this video is a symbolic act and a reflection on the role of women in reality to fight for survival instead of being the first who pays the price in violence situation.

Tracy Peters (Manitoba) - CHOKE, 2019 (1:44)
CHOKE examines the lack of oxygen in aquatic ecosystems as algae blooms emerge during spring thaw.

Alana Bartol (Manitoba) - reading wild lands (dispersal 6-18-048-02 W5), 2018 (6:57)
Iron filings and magnets become tools of divination as a dowser conducts a site reading of a drill cuttings sample from an abandoned oil well in Alberta, Canada. 

Linh Thai (Ontario) - A Long Long Time Ago, 2017 (2:47)
A playful papercut projection influenced by traditional Chinese shadow puppetry. This animation is based on an improvised rhyming verse Linh’s mother used to recite to her when she was younger. Her mother in turn learned it from her friends and elders in Saigon, Vietnam. This is a variation of a common wordplay that is passed on from generation to generation, similar to the way children’s playground songs are learned.

Jonathan Culp (Ontario) - I Regret, 2018 (7:30)
My chequered past gets unpacked and draped over a tree. Hand processed 16mm film, created at Film Farm 2018.

Ryan Steel (Manitoba) -  On the Bus, 2018 (3:36)
A meditation on the buses, people and ghosts of Winnipeg Transit.

The Inc. is a fully accessible venue. Please enter through the main gallery entrance or the courtyard gate entrance off of Cannon Street West. The screening will begin at dusk.