Through a Pinhole...
2010. January 14. 13:31 | (1957 comment)
I recently decided, after much thought, to buy a digital SLR. Even though I have a background in photography, I feel like I've been on hiatus from photography for 15 years. In the past, I learned all the traditional techniques--developed my own film, exposed my own prints, burned and dodged in the darkroom filled with the heavy smell of developer, stop bath, and fixer. I miss those days, but I'm more than ready to move on, or perhaps move back into 35mm photography, although this time it's mostly digital.
So, one of the first things I did when I got my new camera was to make a couple of pinhole 'lenses' and to get back to the basics. Pinhole photographs with a digital SLR are surprisingly easy to make: First, I made a tiny pinhole in a small piece of aluminum from a pop can. Then I drilled a hole in the center of a black body cap for the camera. I glued the aluminum pinhole lens to the body cap, and that's about it. I had to play around with exposure to get a proper image, but that's the fun of it. It's a DIY lens and it's one of a kind. The images are soft and sometimes if the light is just right, you can get rainbows and strange prismatic shapes across the picture. Images of the real world with ephemeral aberrations.
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2009. October 30. 04:34 | (0 comment)
Fall is my favorite time of year in Canada. I love Halloween: the cool nights, the multi-coloured leaves blowing in the wind, the feeling that everything is changing, dying, and slowly transforming back into the earth; the long walks in crisp air with steaming coffee in hand and lines from "The Raven" filling my head. Yes, I am a hopelessly gothic romantic. Everything about the Fall makes me feel both alive and melancholy. And I have to admit that I'm liking the lengths to which some people will decorate their houses and facades for Halloween. It seems that Halloween is the new Christmas in North America, and this is just fine by me.
So it is often said that veil between the living and the dead is at its most tenuous during this time...the real and the fake...or is that surreal? Ghosts, goblins, zombies, and um...dismemberment abound. Oh, and pumpkins.
2009. October 22. 06:34 | (0 comment)
Lately, I've been thinking about the Northern coast of Labrador. I've visited there around this time last year and the two years before that. I feel homesick for the place, even though I didn't grow up there. I miss the wonderful people and family I met, the vast open land and the deep blue and emerald seas.
So this little polar bear carving suspended in a lucite world somehow makes me think of the very real connections I have to the Labrador land and its people.
2009. October 7. 04:46 | (0 comment)
On Monday, Oct. 5, I finished an animation I've been working on over the course of the last 8 or so months, entitled "Child & Firefly." It's a short fable I did in collaboration with Atif Siddiqi about a little boy who is enchanted by the mystery and wonder of a luminous firefly, set in an imaginary world inspired by designs from India & Pakistan. It's a make-believe place from the point of view of a child, taking its visual cues from South Asian shadow puppetry and the work of animator Lotte Reiniger.
Although it is obviously made-up and fantastic, the message and mood of the narrative is quite timely and real. It's been a long haul, but I'm happy with the outcome as it strengthens my own conviction in creating worlds that are striking and subtle in their articulation; places on the edge of dreaming and metaphor; emotive and human vignettes revealed in a shadow puppet world. Below are a few stills from the animation.
It's strange, but somehow this animated world seems much more real and vivid to me than the day-to-day drudgery of laundry, dishes and taking the bus to catch various appointments. hmmmm....what is real and what is fake? And ultimately, what creates meaning in one's life?
2009. October 5. 12:47 | (3 comment)
still from "Resettlement [floating home]"
A short animation I did years ago about the resettlement programs that took place in Newfoundland, Canada. Stop-motion animation combined with archival film footage create a loose narrative that is both historical and based in fact, and at the same time poetic and dream-like. The real and the imagined...but it's perhaps difficult to tell which is more believable. And yes, houses were actually floated and toed by boat across stretches of open sea during resettlement!
the Fake and the Real
2009. October 3. 23:29 | (3 comment)
I've been thinking about the word 'fake' quite a bit these past few weeks.
The idea of 'Fake' presumes that something existed before it that was 'Real' or 'True' in the first place, and that the 'Fake' represents the impostor or facsimile; a lesser-than, counterfeit, or fraud.
But for me the "Fake" is necessarily intertwined with the "Real", and sometimes the boundaries of each bleed into one another. What is real or fake, and can one always make a distinction (and more importantly, is it always necessary to make such a distinction?)
In my work in animation, installation and live video performance, there is often a merging of that which is 'real' or 'true' with that which could be considered 'fake' or 'made up'. The blending of historical facts and archival research with the meanderings of dreams, desires, and fictional narratives necessitates this merging of real and fake. There is from the beginning, a suspension of disbelief.
For instance, if I'm working on a stop-motion animation, the set is miniature and often has forced perspective and unrealistic angles to provide the look and shot I want. The puppets are to scale with the sets and are made with real materials, but finished in such a way as to look like wood or stone, skin or glass, all of which could be said to be faux-finished or fake. And then there's the whole process of animation itself, taking 12 or 24 still images for each second of projected film time to create the illusion of movement where none exists in real time. All fake. All illusion. But at the same time, the narratives I may weave exist in and of themselves, and may evoke real feelings in real people. The narratives blend the real and the imagined.
Montreal, CAN
