About the screening
Digital Arts Resource Centre is excited to present our annual Resolution screening! Resolution is a public screening featuring a selection of works created by DARC members during the previous year.
Join us in Arts Court Theatre on Thursday, January 26th at 7PM. Artists will be in attendance to participate in a brief Q&A with the audience followed by a reception at Avant Garde (135 Besserer St.).
RESOLUTION 2023 features works by Ingrid Dabringer, Conor DeVries, Carol Howard Donati and Beverley McKiver, Amen Jafri, Anna Eyler and Nicolas Lapointe, Conrad Osei-Bonsu, Cheryl Pagurek, D.R.P., and Carmel Whittle.
RESOLUTION 2023
Digital Arts Resource Centre (DARC) Annual Screening: A juried Selection of Members’ works from 2022
When: January 26th, 7PM EST
Where: Arts Court Theatre
Cost: Free Admission (suggested donation $5 – the “door”)
Program Schedule
Doors: 7:00pm
Screening: 7:30pm
Q&A: 8:30pm
About the WORKS
Breath Taking
Playing with a $25 underwater smartphone case was deeply therapeutic.
Loved the high contrast greyscale aesthetic pulling you into the underwater void.
INGRID DABRINGER
Wasted
Wasted is a short documentary film that follows two friends as they dive into an alternative food culture.
An important, and timely conversation on food sustainabillity in a traditional documentary style.
CONOR DEVRIES
Conor is an Ottawa based, award-winning documentary filmmaker and professional cinematographer. His films have been screened at festivals internationally and toured across Canada. Most of this work is meant to start a conversation – ideas and perspectives to challenge the norm and spark transformation as a result. Conor also runs Overview Media, an Ottawa video production company that specializes in Drone Video, Creative Storytelling, Long-Term Timelapse, and Events.
RAINFOREST CREEK
From following the path of a forest creek, to entering its waters at the base of a waterfall, Rainforest Creek takes us on a boundary-crossing journey providing a glimpse of our shared world from a different, immersive, perspective. Beverley McKiver’s improvised piano joins with ambient forest sounds as the soundtrack for this visual profile of Clack Creek on the Sunshine Coast of BC. Without assuming connections or understandings that are not present, Rainforest Creek demonstrates a challenge to the human presumption of knowledge, revealing insights into the complexity of ways of being in the world that resist our comprehension and exist beyond the barrier of what we normally see.
A calming and relaxing exploration into nature that incites contemplation, and brings focus back to the true context of our modern surroundings.
CAROL HOWARD DONATI & BEVERLEY MCKIVER
Carol Howard Donati is an interdisciplinary artist of settler background working with still and moving images, print, paint and found materials. Her body of work contributes to a critical discussion of place that acknowledges the limits of our understanding and encourages awareness of other ways of being simultaneous to our own. Describing her process for lens-based work as the making, rather than the taking, of images, she uses personal technologies – camera, IPhone and action camera – as tools in her research-based practice to enter the landscape from an intimate perspective. Howard Donati holds Master’s degrees in Fine Arts and Anthropology, and her works have shown locally, including SPAO (2022), the Ottawa Art Gallery (2021), DARC (2020), Trinity Gallery (2016), and The Diefenbunker Museum (2014), and internationally, including Gallery on the Green, Yorkshire Dales National Park, UK. (2018), and the Scuderie Aldobrandini, Frascati, Italy (2016).
Beverley McKiver is an Ottawa-based composer, pianist, and teacher, originally from northwestern Ontario. Beverley is a member of Lac Seul First Nation in Treaty Three. A lifelong pianist, Beverley began composing later in life following a lengthy career in information technology. She explores themes of connection to the land, identity, and recovery of Indigenous knowledge through her compositions for singers, instrumental ensembles, and solo piano. Beverley has composed for instrumental ensembles, choral groups, and solo piano. As a performer, she has collaborated with instrumentalists, vocalists, and choirs. She is a frequent collaborator of flutist Jessica McMann and appears on her 2021 album Incandescent Tales. Beverley received a Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prize as the protégé of 2021 award winner Ian Cusson. Beverley has been recently commissioned to compose a choral piece for RESOUND Choir’s 2022/2023 season.
So I Married Myself
Filmmaker Amen Jafri follows a divorced, single mother as she joins a controversial new global movement – sologamy (or self-marriage). While sologamy’s critics are quick to label it as narcissistic, Jafri seeks to uncover its roots and why women in particular are drawn to it. So I Married Myself is a quirky and inspiring take on the next level of female empowerment.
Great exploration into the journey of self marriage, with effective use of popular media, graphics, and multiple expert viewpoints that gives nuance and life to a compelling subject.
AMEN JAFRI
Digi-Deuil Distribution
Digi-Deuil Distribution (DDD) is a participatory installation focused on digital death. As virtual space becomes increasingly cluttered with our digital artifacts, DDD questions the impact of technology on our understanding of (im)mortality. Using a “pixel art” aesthetic inspired by video games, DDD plays with the commodification of contemporary experience by considering how our most sacred subjects are transformed into consumer products. At the same time, games offer an entry point to reflect on our deepest fears and anxieties outside of everyday life. DDD invites participants to purchase a small piece of virtual space in the digital graveyard of digideuil.net/. A vending machine offers tombstones containing web addresses that lead users/owners to their own burial sites. Each gravestone is unique and customizable, and participants are invited to write an epitaph and upload an image, sound, or text media file, which are in turn visible to the digital cemetary’s visitors.
A fun and comedic look at the ghosts of internet past.
AENL
The collaborative practice of aenl (a.k.a. Anna Eyler and Nicolas Lapointe) is based on an investigation of the web environments and computer-generated worlds associated with video games and immersive technologies. Combining digital art and sculpture, their interdisciplinary approach is inspired by the similarities and correspondences that can be made between simulated realities and real life. Interested in how digital objects influence daily life and how the technological imaginary is expressed, they explore their communicational and relational potential by appropriating the language of computer programs. In recent years, the duo has participated in local and international residencies such as the artist-run centre Verticale (Laval, 2018) and Bòlit: Centre d’Art Contemporani (Catalonia, 2019). Most recently,their work was presented at the Sight & Sound Festival at Eastern Bloc (2021), MUTEK Montreal (2021), and ZOOM OUT / SORTIR DE ZOOM at the Galerie Antoine-Sirois (2022).
Offbeat Smitty - When She Calls
A simp falls in love in this experimental music video that combines live action and cartoons. Our video came together when my friend and musician Offbeat Smitty reached out to me to make something funny and quirky for his 80s style song – because of my background as a comedian. We thought of various ideas – including making the entire video in cartoon, but with the budget and timeline tight, we decided to opt for mixing media, which is something I’ve been doing a lot of in my recent works. After we shot the video in the summer in Toronto, I reached out to my friend Zach Berge who is a cartoonist to make the animated images we then incorporated into the video. This was a fun piece to make because I did it with friends and got to direct and shoot one of the grooviest songs I’ve ever heard.
Great mildly campy and playful mix of animation, delivered perfectly as an almost-parody, of all our simp glory and struggle. Excellent song.
CONRAD OSEI
Conrad Osei-Bonsu is an Canadian-Nigerian independent filmmaker, and commercial producer living and working in Toronto.
Variations and Permutations
Variations and Permutations interweaves footage of dancer Jocelyn Todd and the expressive interactions she performs within Cheryl Pagurek’s States of Being video and audio installation. By combining varied viewpoints and approaches to image-making, from slow shutter to transparent projection scrim to digital screen recording, multiple iterations of Todd’s body and movements through space and time are portrayed. The interplay between layers captures simultaneous yet shifting identities and planes of contemporary experience – physical and virtual, lived and imagined, alternately shaped by both immediacy and mediation. Composer Jesse Stewart created the music tracks that are mapped spatially to respond to Todd’s movements in the installation. The installation’s custom software was developed by Jean-Claude Batista.
A vastly textured video that crosses art, dance and architecture, with a wonderful concept and creativity of movement.
CHERYL PAGUREK
Cheryl Pagurek’s artistic practice highlights the constructed nature of lens-based media, while embracing the creative expression offered by computing and technology. Her work in video, photography and digital media has been shown widely in Canada and internationally, including exhibits at MSVU Gallery (Halifax), Patrick Mikhail Montréal, Vu (Québec City), Gallery 44 (Toronto), Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa); numerous video screenings in Canada, USA, Brazil, France, Columbia, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Ethiopia; public art events including Nuit Blanche Ottawa Gatineau, Kamloops Art Gallery’s Luminocity program, Toulouse’s Rencontres Traverse Vidéo, and Kingston’s Next Door public art exhibit; and Currents, a commissioned video work at Ottawa’s Marketplace transit station. Her 2019 exhibit Connect/Connexion at the Ottawa Art Gallery featured an interactive video and audio installation. She received the 2020 Corel Endowment for the Arts Award celebrating the integration of technology and the arts.
Disrupted Thought Process
Disrupted Thought Process is a visualization of interrupted peaceful thought processes.
This piece shares a poignant message through great use of effects and sound design to which we can all relate
D.R.P.
There is No Word
‘There is no word’- we are nature and not separate from nature. This film combines the narrator’s voice and teachings with the imagery of the land, the ocean, the air, water and fire. Taking care of nature is taking care of ourselves. It becomes the space for retreat and for healing ourselves in ceremony and in respect of Mother Earth. Grandmother Louise teaches us that the Seven Grandfather Teachings from her traditional Ojibway, Algonquin Anishinaabe territory are a profound way of bringing this understanding into our lives. Doing the right thing requires that we care for, nurture, and heal every element of our environments: the air, waters, rocks, plants, trees and creatures, big and small. The slowing down of the elements in the film are intentional, engaging the viewer in reflection on their own relations with nature. The experimental sounds and the songs honour the gifts that Nature has given.
Collage of raw media fostering indigenous language learning shared with new breath.
CARMEL WHITTLE & LOUISE GARROW
Carmel Whittle, Director/writer/editor
Carmel A. Whittle is a Mi’kmaw/Irish educator, art facilitator and curator, visual artist, songwriter, independent filmmaker, and Identifies as she, queer, 2Spirit and an activist for social justice. She is the director and curator of the No Borders Art Festival. She is the coordinator for the Indigenous Artists Coalition, and program coordinator for the Thunderbird Sisters Collective and member and artist in residency 2020 with Digital Arts Resource Centre, Ottawa. She is co-host, developer for Podcast#83, a call to action, series of discussions with non-Indigenous and indigenous poets, musicians and artists. Ongoing collaborations with McMaster University on ‘Echoes of the land’, a ‘call to action’ for all artists. She has facilitated and curated Indigenous youth art programming and coordinated group discussions on diversity in the arts with the Independent Media Arts Association, IMAA. She works as a community outreach and Indigenous Liaison. In partnership with Gallery 101 and Research In Art Ottawa (RIA), she facilitated a series of workshops specific to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recommendations for anti-appropriation and the decolonization of the arts. A lifelong learner in Indigenous/Canadian studies at Carleton University, she is a member of the University of Ottawa, Opirg Circle of Elders and Change makers and works from her studio in Ottawa.
Grandmother Louise Garrow, Narrator
Louise Garrow is Anishnaabekwe from Sagamok First Nations. She works on Anishnaabemowin Language, translation and teaching. Currently she teaches Introductory Anishnaabemowin at Wabano Centre for Aboriginal Health. She is the No Borders Community Voices Grandmother and shares cultural teachings and knowledge related to the song cycle as part of each rehearsal. Previously Louise worked in the federal public service for a total of 27 years; including First Nations Inuit Health Branch on women and children health, mental health and wellness; Indigenous student employment, Indigenous cultural competency. She also worked at Trent University, Indigenous Studies for 9 years working as curriculum coordinator and Native Student Counsellor.
À portée de mots
Regardez autour de vous. Où que vous soyez — chez vous, dehors, dans une salle d’attente — vous avez fort probablement, dans votre champ de vision, des mots. Au moins quelques uns. Suffisamment de mots pour vous mettre à composer, consciemment ou pas, des poèmes ; pour vous mettre à effleurer des images inédites ; pour humer le bouillon poétique qui habite le lieu où vous êtes. Produit pour le Salon du livre de l’Outaouais
Earnest, intriguing, charming and very well paced. À portée de mots is a piece I'd happily watch more than once.
Marie-Ève Fontaine & Guillaume Saindon
Storytelling is at the heart of multidisciplinary artist Marie-Ève Fontaine. After completing a theatre degree at the University of Ottawa, Marie-Ève has participated in the development of countless theatre, storytelling and puppetry projects as a creator, author, actor, puppeteer and director across the country. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Marie-Ève has started producing videos featuring poetry, puppets and wild ideas. She collaborates regularly with accomplice Guillaume Saindon through their production company 2359. Guillaume works as a theatre and film director, video designer and software developer in live and interactive arts. His work has been presented across Canada and in a variety of festivals. After completing his B.A. in theatre at the University of Ottawa and a film degree from the Prague Film School, he went on to do an MA in Digital Narratives from the Internationale Filmschule Köln in Germany. He studied the contribution of digitality in live art forms. He then completed an M.F.A. in theatre directing at the University of Ottawa. His research and practice revolve around the notions of immersion, interaction, ludology and transmedia. He is now artist in residence at the Théâtre du Trillium and regularly works with Marie-Ève Fontaine through their production company 2359.
Untitled (Moiroloi)
Court exercice autour du concept grecque de “Moiroloi”, ou “lament”. Réalisé au tout début de la pandémie dans le cadre d’un séminaire de maîtrise, l’exercice aborde la perte de l’extérieur et de sens exacerbé par la pandémie. L’esthétique est inspiré du travail du vidéaste expérimental Japonais Takashi Ito.
Guillaume Saindon’s Untitled (Moiroloi) explores lamentation through repetition, immersive sound, and a great sense of rhythm.
Guillaume Saindon
Guillaume works as a theatre and film director, video designer and software developer in live and interactive arts. His work has been presented across Canada and in a variety of festivals. After completing his B.A. in theatre at the University of Ottawa and a film degree from the Prague Film School, he went on to do an MA in Digital Narratives from the Internationale Filmschule Köln in Germany. He studied the contribution of digitality in live art forms. He then completed an M.F.A. in theatre directing at the University of Ottawa. His research and practice revolve around the notions of immersion, interaction, ludology and transmedia. He is now artist in residence at the Théâtre du Trillium and regularly works with Marie-Ève Fontaine through their production company 2359.
Events in the tunnel
Drawn from Super 8 films in the artists’ personal archives as well as found amateur 8mm footage, Events in the Tunnel presents an absurdist abbreviated retelling of Canada’s colonial history as defined by that great colonial trope, the cross-country train trip. In the transitional void of a train tunnel, we witness familiar 19th and 20th century paradigms of white middle-class conformity as represented by images of travel, amusement, and domesticity, with Canadian culture embodied by a chimeric portrayal of the early 20th century painter Tom Thomson. Sound design by Chris Ikonomopoulos.
Penny McCann and Eric Walker deliver a great short for the small gauge fans out there featuring Super 8 footage.
Penny McCann & Eric Walker
- @penny.mccann2
- @pennymccann_1
- @PenelopeMC22
Events in the Tunnel marks the first co-directing project by life partners and artists Penny McCann and Eric Walker. Penny McCann’s body of media artwork spans thirty years and encompasses both narrative and experimental films and video. Her work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Ann Arbor, Michigan), the Hamburg International Short Film Festival (Hamburg, Germany), the Ottawa Art Gallery (Ottawa, Ontario), and the Cinémathèque Québécoise (Montreal, Québec). Visual and media artist Eric Walker studied video art with Dara Birnbaum at the Nova Scotia College of Art in the 1970’s. His artwork is in numerous public and private collections including the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the Owens Art Gallery, and the Ottawa Art Gallery.
Resonance
RESONANCE is a short documentary film about memory. Sam Wood was 23 when he found an old photo album belonging to his father with photos taken of him at the exact same age. In the interview about the photo album that followed, Sam and his father discuss family history and their personal differences. This serves as a launching point to investigate larger themes of memory: what is preserved in our histories, what is discarded, and how complicated ‘memories’ really are.
Sam Wood
Sam Wood is a musician, videomaker, and occasional photographer based out of Ottawa. He received his BA in Music Studies in 2017, and his MFA in Film Studies 2019. Sam has performed music in venues across the province, and is pleased to have had the support of the Digital Arts Resource Centre to complete his first in-depth video project: RESONANCE. His main interests are in the documentary form and how it can be used to explore memory construction, concepts of truth, and fiction versus non-fiction. While not working on videos, you’ll find Sam around the city performing music or getting shots for his photography project (@ottstreetart on Instagram).
Dilatory Transmission
Filmed with a vintage vidicon tube camera, Dilatory Transmission is an experimental narrative short film depicting a retrofuturistic newscast exploring the alienating effects of the endless media and content under late-stage capitalism. Take a glimpse into the dystopian city of Monopolis through an evening spent watching the nightly news. Due to quarantine restraints, the film was developed in isolation solely by A. John Yates. With a unique approach to special effects, this film combines computer-generated imagery with the outdated technique of rear projection. Local musician Jacob Gonato elevates the film with a sensational score spanning from catchy jingles to improvised synth droning.
An endearing short from Aidan John Yates. Dilatory Transmission's dedication to pushing its aesthetic language and world building is strangely comforting.
Aidan John Yates
Aidan Yates is an amateur filmmaker, animator and sculptor who lives in Ottawa. His work explores themes of isolation, societal conformance and late-stage capitalism. He has a passion for experimenting with vintage technologies, favouring super 8 film and vidicon tube video. He is currently studying visual arts at Canterbury High School and aims to pursue film animation or production at the post-secondary level next year.
About the Jury
Ashford Sabastien Callender
Ashford Sabastien Callender is an Ottawa-based experimental digital artist, as well as a community educator and organizer. Inspired by psychedelic futurism, he uses his background in audio and video post-production within creative mediums such as web, film, and video to explore and create thoughtful, immersive, cross-cultural audio/visual experiences – one of his primary goals is to encourage people to see art, primarily, as a participatory space where we all have the power to alter our capacity for connection and understanding… and also encouraging people to peer into the technology side of art, to help inspire and create new visions.
Lesley Marshall
Award-winning filmmaker appearing in festivals nationally and internationally, music videos by Lesley are featured on Rolling Stone, American Songwriter, Vice, Exclaim!, Brooklyn Vegan, Aux, Rookie Mag, and Stereogum. Lesley’s webseries Dollar Bin DJ was shortlisted for Telefilm and WIFTV in 2018. Lesley’s current documentaries, the Illegal Midwives of Vancouver Island received funding from the BC Arts Council in 2022 and The Colour Orange will be broadcast on CBC in 2023. Lesley is the founder of MAVNetwork, focused on hiring inclusive crews working with Netflix, TD Bank, and CBC. Lesley’s projection art has been performed at the NAC, Montreal Jazz Fest, CentrePHI and in galleries in NYC, Toronto, Montreal, and the Netherlands.
Mercedes Ventura
Mercedes Ventura (she/they) is an emerging interdisciplinary artist based in Odawa/Ottawa, Ontario. Mercedes’ work functions as autobiographical fiction investigating new spaces of the digital era, appropriating signifiers of self—gender, culture, religion, family, nation, and so on—as building blocks to envision works in various media: web, sculpture, and photographic self-portraiture to name a few. In the spring of 2017, Mercedes received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa. She has exhibited works in Odawa/Ottawa-Gatineau region and Tkaronto/Toronto in various galleries and artist-run centers. In the summer of 2020, Mercedes produced a web-based public artwork for the city of Ottawa and the Digital Arts Resource Centre.
