About —
Louise Bourque, Charles-André Coderre, Clint Enns, Mike Hoolboom
The Musée d’art de Joliette collaborates with Videographe for the first time to present four short films coming out of the collection of the Montréal artist-run center.
In a media world dominated by narrative and the spectacular, experimental cinema can be disconcerting. It invites us to discover other visual languages, techniques, and highly personal approaches to aesthetics.
The four films by artists Louise Bourque, Charles-André Coderre, Clint Enns and Mike Hoolboom brought together in this program exemplify the little-known vitality of contemporary experimental cinema in Quebec and Canada. Each one explores the expressive possibilities of film in its own way, through grain, scratch, photochemical degradation, or the effects of age. The image’s textures, colors, speed, legibility and abstractions all become the artists’ primary materials, to which are added sound and the written or spoken word. These films create rich cerebral universes evoking memories, a sense of loss, nostalgia, or absence.
In Mike Hoolboom’s Colour My World (2017), the pure abstraction of the image combined with the evocative power of poetic text renders the identities ‘us’ and ‘I’ uncertain and encompassing, touching on the intimate and political. From the sumptuous visual effects of Granular Film – Beirut (2016) emerge fragments of memories of travel that, according to Charles-André Coderre, ‘now have their own life separate from my existence’. In Clint Enns’ Summer Song (2014), the grainy 8mm image evokes family films and images from the past, while the film’s fragmented editing reflects the leaps and flaws of memory. The highly complex Auto portrait / Self Portrait Post Partum (2013) dissects lost love on the thresholds of archetype and intimacy: pop music, quotations, self-representation and interventions on the image seem alternately to reveal and distort the life of Louise Bourque. The image serves as both ‘a mirror and a door’*; it escapes the self and becomes an image in its own right.
Karine Boulanger, curator, Vidéographe
* Mike Hoolboom, Colour My World, 2017
ABOUT VIDEOGRAPHE —
Vidéographe is dedicated to the research and dissemination of new artistic forms addressing current social, political, and technological issues, and endeavours to explore unconventional narrative and documentary approaches in video art, animation, and digital arts, among other mediums.
