Events
Between biennials, CAFKA is very active producing and co-producing a number of special events. CAFKA’s events are intended to facilitate connections between people, to introduce our organization to the community and to initiate a critical dialogue around the issues of contemporary art in public spaces.
CAFKA produces a bi-annual video cabaret we affectionately call "I Heart Video Art," a social event around the presentation of some of the most interesting and lively examples of contemporary video art. CAFKA also participates in community arts initiatives such as the Steel Rails Sessions and FEST 3, where a number of cultural organizations collaborate to create memorable cross-disciplinary events.
I Heart Video Art FFFFour, 13-05-2011
CAFKA is pleased to announce that the fourth installment of I Heart Video Art will take place at The Communitech Event Space on May 13, 2011. The program is curated by CAFKA’s Executive Director Gordon Hatt.
Friday, May 13, 8 p.m.
Communitech Event Space, 10 King Street West, Kitchener
Admission: $25, CAFKA members and students $15. 10% off for ticket purchases for groups of four or more. Tickets are available for purchase by PayPal at www.iheartvideoart.com, Encore Records (54 Queen Street South, Kitchener), and Bon Mot.
CAFKA gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Trillium Foundation, the City of Kitchener & the Ontario Arts Council, and thanks Communitech for their support of this event.
1. Meesoo Lee, Northern Lights, 2002, 5:12 min.
"This is a song by The Radio, a love song, sung by astronaut to an alien . . . it's in Japanese. The footage is from a CBC re-broadcast of a 1976 Grey Cup football game (the half-time show, featuring a chorus of Saskatchewan-ese high school girls)." Meesoo Lee.
2. Simon Payne, Iris Out, 2008, 10:00 min.
“Iris Out is a video that’s composed of single frames from sequences of expanding or contracting circles, reformatted for different aspect ratios. In certain passages of the video, the combination of circles and ellipses resembles an eye, returning the gaze of the spectator. In the middle of the piece there are rows that incorporate nine contrasting sequences comprising six different colours and tones in alternating combinations. Besides the physical impact of this piece, I am primarily interested in the relation between the edges of planes/shapes and the confines of the screen. What’s fascinating to me is the way in which the colour fields are reproduced by the eye and brain, affecting consciousness and perception.” Simon Payne
3. Paul Wong, Last Year, 2009, 6:23 min.
Approx. 6000 images, 1000 still photographs a minute flash on and off the screen. A year of pictures mash into an intense viewing experience. Using the iPhoto software, Last Year is the result of compiling all 2008 photographs from several different computer sources onto one central database. The images were put into “a chronology” according to iPhoto logic. Part journal, part diaristic we see Wong’s incessant recording of everyday life from Chinese New Year celebrations in Vancouver, Beijing Olympics, artists, art exhibitions, architecture, friends, family, New York streets, parties, music concerts, film festivals, Calgary Stampede, Pride Parade, Toronto moments. Not all the photographs were shot by Wong, included are other moments/events that comes from camera/file sharing and downloading each other’s memory cards and storing them onto iPhoto.
4. Meesoo Lee, Young and Sexy (Mister Rogers), 2004, 9:11.
"This is not what you think it is... It's a lyrical musical sequence for the young and young of heart, embedded in an episode of Mr. Rogers." Music by Young and Sexy, www.youngandsexy.org, Meesoo Lee.
5. Simon Payne, Colour Bars, 2004, 8:00 min.
“The colour bars ordinarily form a constant test signal image that is used to calibrate video equipment. Here the configuration of the seven vertical stripes continually shifts. The rapid pace with which the piece cuts produces different kinds of colour mixing, and in the video's flickering the phased fields of stripes appear to dart in all sorts of directions.”
6. Brad Tinmouth, Flashbulb Memory, 2009, 3:40 min.
Brad Tinmouth is an artist working and living from Toronto, working with newer media arts and making his work available. See more on his Internet website http://bradtinmouth.com or his blog http://borttinmouth.tumblr.com.
7. Meesoo Lee, My Oblivion, 7:03 min.
Motion study featuring members of the Delia Brett and Daelik of the dance company Machine Noise, http://machinenoisy.com/about.htm
8. Steven Hoskins, Turbulence, 6:43 min.
Loosely conceived as a companion piece to Vertical Water (2009), 40 asynchronous vertical slices of a split screen forest create an oscillating dance of trees propelled by gusts of wind. The HD original uses 80 vertical slices. Music is based on Elephant's March by Emmett Cooke, licensed use.
9. Meesoo Lee, Is It Strange???, 04:53 min.
"This is what I call a minimalist music video... Music by psychedelic-pop band The Radio synchronized with scenes from the original 'Star Trek'." The Radio at www.myspace.com/theradiowaves
10. McLean Fahnestock, Grand Finale, 2011, 04:04 min.
Grand Finale came from several places of interest that serendipitously met in one event. I have been working with appropriated footage in video for several years and I focus primarily on sports, politics, and journalism. Coming off of making a piece about the moon landing, I had been thinking about televised spectacles, events that we all experience through the TV – the "where were you when" moments. For me, as well as those of my generation, the first was Challenger. I had been captivated by the Space Shuttle and Astronauts as a child. Instead of zeroing in on that one tragic event in our history of space exploration, I wanted to present a mediated experience. All at once. Every shuttle, every launch. The overwhelming triumphs of a series of spacecraft that have now reached the end of their lives and are quickly heading into stagnant museum display nostalgia. Because it is a total image of a program, it also begs the question, what happens now?
11. Jasper Elings, Sharing a Beautiful Sunset, 2009, 1:00 min.
Jasper Elings studied animation and film at the Art Academy AKV St. Joost in Breda, the Netherlands. He graduated in the year 2005,and is one of the new, highly inventive generation of young animators. He lives and works in the Hague, the Netherlands. His short films are distributed by EYE Film Institute Netherlands, and have been screened at various festivals internationally.
12. Meesoo Lee, Love, 3:23 min.
Music: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band; The movie: "The Shining".
13. Saki Satom, Giving, 1999, 2:15 min.
Saki Satom’s work explores patterns of human behaviour that are particular to large urban centres, often focusing on codes and practices that tend to go largely unnoticed. She creates situations that allow her to interact with the public in ways that unexpectedly expose those patterns and cast them in a fresh light. And her works highlight minor incidents that turn out, on closer examination, to be surprising, even at times extraordinary. She says of her practice; "I want to view our daily routines from a slightly different angle and by so doing show that they may hold hidden possibilities."
14. Meesoo Lee, Last Year's Hopes, 2002, 6:24 min.
Figure Skater: Nicole Bobek; Music: Young and Sexy; www.youngandsexy.org.
15. Johannes Zits, Turning You On, 8:00 min.
Johannes Zits works with and combines digital imaging, collage, photography and painting to focus on the body. His work intends to draw attention to both the conventional image-making process as well as the ways images from mass media are disseminated and consumed. He received his BFA from York University in 1984. He has shown both in Canada and abroad. Zits travels widely while pursuing his art research. His extended stays in various cities include Taipei, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Shanghai, Manchester, Hamburg, Santiago, London and Berlin. In January 2008 he presented a major solo exhibition highlighting his many disciplines at the Centre DíArt Contemporain de Basse Normandie, Caen, France.
16. Simon Payne, New Ratio, 2007, min., 16:9 anamorphic, colour, stereo sound.
The colour fields that comprise New Ratio involve a tense relationship with the edge of the screen. The piece explores the move from the 4:3 screen ratio to 16:9, which is now effectively the standard for broadcast television and video. In the construction of New Ratio each colour was assigned a particular tone: white was attributed a standard 1KHz test tone; the pitch of the tone attributed to blue was half that of the test tone; and each of the colours in between (in descending order of luminance) were attributed tones at intervals between these values. The video comprises two simple repeating sequences, which are fundamentally the same duration. However, one sequence includes an additional frame of black that throws them out of synch causing a phasing that effects different mixtures of colour and a range of tone combinations. In commenting on this piece Sean Cubitt has suggested that the equal mixture of additive and subtractive colours is effectively a 'democratisation of colour.'
17. Meesoo Lee, Scott, 2002, 4:59 min.
The scene is the end of the 1949 Warner Brothers production of "The Fountainhead," starring Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper, played in slow motion and in reverse. Music by Young and Sexy, from their first LP "Stand Up For Your Mother."
