Please join us Tuesday 31 May @ 7PM for this inaugural screening of Language Formed in Light, guest-curated by Clint Enns.
All screenings will take place at The Black Lodge Studios and are free + open to the public.
PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts is excited to announce a new screening series to be presented over the next four months. Language Formed in Light is comprised of four different film screening nights featuring experimental films and video art by four recognized artists from Canada and the United States. The works in this series were selected due to their innovative use of cinematic language. Some of the titles create an entirely new filmic language, while others focus on expanding the established cinematic vocabulary. This screening series will be the part of a serial presentation guest-curated by Clint Enns for PLATFORM and recognizes the work in film and video by note-worthy contributors to the medium.
The first installment of Language Formed in Light is a selection from Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines series. The Whispering Pines series incorporates “live animation” techniques, lo-fi aesthetics and generally hacked objects. Moulton’s use of cinematic language can easily be seen as an expansion of the narrative methods developed by Maya Daren in Meshes of the Afternoon. In her work, Moulton uses repetition and circular narrative to examine the interplay between consumerism, psychedelia, New Age philosophy and the mundane. However, Moulton’s videos are anything but bland.
The objects in Cynthia’s (Shana Moulton’s alter ego) possession act as portals into her own overactive subconscious, wherein hallucinatory sequences explore the nature of material and spiritual concerns in contemporary culture. Thomas Beard (Light Industry) has stated, “As a serial form, however, Whispering Pines is not so much a soap opera as a one-women Twin Peaks.” In addition to variousWhispering Pines episodes, we will also show the related video The Mountain Where Everything is Upside Down, a video in which Moulton as her alter ego Cynthia performs a hallucinatory exercise routine involving a work-out ball and magic crystals!
Shana Moulton creates evocatively oblique narratives in her video and performance works. Combining an unsettling, wry humor with a low-tech, Pop sensibility, Moulton plays a character whose interactions with the everyday world are both mundane and surreal, in a domestic sphere just slightly askew. As her protagonist navigates the enigmatic and possibly magical properties of her home decor, Moulton initiates relationships with objects and consumer products that are at once banal and uncanny. Moulton studied at the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, where she received her MFA. Moulton has also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, and studied at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Her video work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including at Art in General, New York, Migros Museum, Zurich; Contemporary Museum of Art, Uppsala; Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin, Paris; Aurora, Edinburgh; Dark Light Festival, Dublin; Impakt Festival, Utrecht; Internationale Kurzfilmtage, Oberhausen; Broadway 1602, New York; and Gimpel Fils, London. Moulton's performances have been presented at venues including The Kitchen, New York; PERFORMA 09, New York; Aurora Picture Show, Houston; Electronic Arts Intermix, New York; The Bluecoat, Liverpool; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; among others. Moulton lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
