Digital Arts Resource Centre is proud to present RESOLUTION 2021, an annual screening of works produced by our members in the previous year. This year’s line-up of works showcases the broad scope of artistic practices in which our members are engaged. Join us on our website (digitalartsresourcecentre.ca), on Thursday February 11th, 2021 at 7pm. Artists will be in attendance to participate in a brief Q&A with the audience following the screening.
RESOLUTION 2021 will feature works by Pixie Cram, Nathan Hauch, Edgar Rene Hernandez, Jehu Jacob Mahautiere, Laura Margita, Neeko Paluzzi, Laura Paolini, Christopher Rohde & Kenneth Warner, Nena Toth.
RESOLUTION 2021
Digital Arts Resource Centre (DARC) Annual Screening: A juried Selection of Members’ Films and Videos from 2020
When: February 11th, 7 pm
Where: ONLINE at digitalartsresourcecentre.ca
Cost: Free Admission (suggested donation $5 – the “door”)
Post Screening Q & A | Reception | Themed Rooms
A music video for Golden Gourmande, a track from the album, Oh Orwell by Plumes. Plumes is Canadian singer-songwriter, Veronica Charnley. Charnley grew up in Ottawa before establishing her musical career in Montréal. She is currently based in Paris, France. The video was partly filmed in Dresden while Plumes was on tour in Germany. The forest shots were taken in the Gatineau Valley of Quebec. “The recently released video for “Golden Gourmande” is an earthy and sensual visual that splits between someone foraging for mushrooms, plucking them from the forests and the Montreal-born, Paris-based singer/songwriter performing the song in an intimate studio.” — The Joy of Violent Movement
Pixie Cram is a filmmaker and stop-motion animator who lives in Ottawa. In her films she explores themes of nature, technology and war. On top of her own art practice, she works as a freelance screenwriter, cinematographer and editor.
Filmed with a personal cellphone during the lockdown in April 2020, “still” is the first of three video poems on the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by “sway” and “slip”. A meditation on holding on in isolation, it touches on the anxiety of having one’s partner be vulnerable to the virus as an essential worker, as well as how life is demarcated between “before” and “now”. As such, it grieves what we’ve lost: the conversations in coffee shops, children laughing in parks – and how, “someday, yes, now will be then”.
Nathan Hauch (he/him) is a cripqueer poet and filmmaker. A proud member of Qu’ART – Ottawa Queer Arts Collective (@QuARTOttawa on Twitter), he is also an Associate Member of the League of Canadian Poets. “still” is the first of three video poems on the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by “sway” and “slip”. In 2017, he released his first visual poem, “the art of the morning”, a celebration of the joy disability can bring. It opened the Ottawa-Canadian Film Festival in 2018. With Amen Jafri, he was part of the creative team behind the documentary, “City that Fun Forgot?” that explored Ottawa’s (undeserved?) reputation as a dull government town to local and national media attention in 2014.
Shadow of the Invisible (“SI”) considers the impact of social change within the human collective consciousness. With this lens of constant movement, SI reveals a vivid light behind closed eyes that are deep in a dream and evokes at once many microscopic organisms that spread out in the air to expand in space and time. This experimental video work reflects a surreal change affecting social changes (distancing) of new restrictions to disrupt human being (gathering) from the outbreak of unwelcome change. Shadow of the Invisible develops a concept of new microbes that can spread exponentially to reach precious life. Human imagination combine with biotechnology manipulation can capture through new lenses the best and the worst of times but also a new reality of modern civilizations in the present of digital era.
Edgar Hernandez is a prolific artist whose work in film, media projection, sculpture, painting and digital technologies with a focus on difficult questions related to habitat renewal, climate change and mental health. Aguacateco Mayan speaking from Guatemala, Edgar Hernandez is based in Ottawa, Canada. Edgar has seen his work exhibited in many group exhibitions, including the One World Film Festival, The People’s Forest, Prescott Russell and Fresh Paint / New Construction Gallery Art Mûr, Montréal. He holds degrees in art and design, including a BFA (Sculpture and Media) from the University of Ottawa with a minor in Spanish. Furthermore he earned a college diploma in Graphic Design from La Cité collégiale. Navigating through the current social changes, Edgar has filmed numerous short videos of indigenous knowledge and wisdom through the Eagle and Condor Collective. Edgar is currently an art instructor for the Association pour l’Intégration Sociale d’Ottawa (AISO), Ottawa. This busy working artist also finds time to be an active local community volunteer and has contributed to abroad community projects in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.
The death of George Floyd shook the world to its core. Many in the black community found it difficult to put into words how they felt not only about his death, but on the wider systemic anti-black racism that they face daily. This film was part of the #I HAVE NO WORDS initiative, which saw community members in the National Capital Region coming together to grieve and share their personal feelings about the impact George Floyd’s death has had on them. Many tears were shed, anger and frustration expressed and fear of what the future holds. The film captures their raw emotions, provides an opportunity for catharsis and gives us hope for renewed resilience. It is a rally call for systemic change.
Jehu Jacob Mahautiere is an Ottawa based videographer who has been capturing footage since 2015 for a diverse range of private clients and non-profit organizations. Jehu is truly a global citizen. He started travelling the globe at an early age and was exposed to a wide variety of cultures which developed his passion for equality, human rights and justice. Behind his lens, Jehu’s goal is to evoke emotions and to have his audience question who we are as a society – especially by focusing on untold stories of those who may be voiceless. When not working on his visual art, Jehu is usually found trying to understand human nature, through research, conversation, and travel.
Sad Empire is #dream, #revery #reimagining #loveletter #actualreallifeexperiences as if I was able to tell you anything anyway. It is also a kind of ghost story, which channels Rocky Horror Picture Show a little bit! It is about what artists can even do to try and make work about cultural and social activitism in Ottawa 2020.
Laura Margita works with textiles, heavy and light objects, paint, video and performance. Taking vulnerability to the extreme, she creates work that teeters on excruciating embarrassment, imposing a zone of non-comfort for the audience that is paradoxically deployed by her nurturing persona. She was born in Windsor, Ontario on the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomie. Her background is United Empire Loyalist/second generation Romanian and she has lived on unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin Territory for most of her life.
The birds in the arbour (2020) is a five minute, single-channel video that uses deep-fake technology to merge a miming performance by the artist with a photograph of a ceramic doll in order to sync to Mado Robins’ iconic 1958 performance of The Birds in the Arbour — often referred to as the “doll song” — from Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffman. The resulting video is an exploration of the uncanny and mortality as humans evolve from the animate and into the inanimate.
Neeko Paluzzi (b. 1988) is a queer, Canadian artist and educator whose practice focuses on intertextual photo-based installations. His images blend the possibilities of traditional, analogue darkroom processes with contemporary photographic techniques, such as 3D scanning and printing. He is a graduate of the Photographic Arts and Production program at the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa (2017) and holds a degree in Second Language Teaching from the University of Ottawa (2011). He had a featured exhibition at the Scotiabank CONTACT Festival in 2019 and was the winner of the 2018 Project X, Photography Grant from the Ottawa Arts Council. Paluzzi is currently completing a Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Ottawa while maintaining a teaching position at the Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute.
The restrictions of street traffic and general movement throughout the urban environment amplified feelings of isolation during the first lockdown in March 2020. I began to explore the area I live in. I concentrated on particular elements and details of ordinary, overlooked architecture. In response to this exploration, I created several videos depicting interior and exterior architectural details from around the Rideau Vanier neighbourhood. These works combine structural elements and objects using my body as a conduit to reconsider how they are understood. This is one such video. On the one hand, the videos humorously depict ‘home entertainment’ or finding means to amuse yourself with limited resources. The videos also have a darker undertone of loneliness and anxiety. Produced for #Microcosm with the City of Ottawa’s Public Art department.
Laura Paolini (she/her pronouns) is an artist from Toronto, currently living in Ottawa. Her artwork is primarily conceptual and manifests through installations, videos, and performances. She has performed at art-based events and festivals, and has exhibited in galleries including Hamilton Artists Inc, Xpace Cultural Centre and Art Mûr during the 16th edition of Fresh Paint/New Construction 2020. Paolini graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2007, earning a BFA with Distinction from the Sculpture/Installation Department in the Faculty of Art. Currently pursuing an MFA in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa, she is the recipient of the Charles Gagnon Masters in Fine Arts Entrance Scholarship. Her writing and critical thoughts on art and art-making have appeared in arts-based publications such as Les Fleurs du Mal, Fuse, Musicworks, and <H>ART International. Other video works are available through Vtape in Toronto.
Melt is a psychotropic rock spectacle with images and music by Christopher Rohde & Kenneth Warner. Extreme close-ups of butter melting in a pan metamorphose into colourful abstractions that evoke shifting through distant stellar regions, as well as the familiar comforts of a home-cooked breakfast.
Christopher Rohde & Kenneth Warner have been constant artistic collaborators ever since an impromptu late-night jam session in 2001. For nearly 20 years, they have fostered a shared passion for analyzing, designing and creating art in a variety of formats, including music, film, video, mixed media experiments, live concerts and immersive multimedia experiences. In addition to their personal artistic endeavours, since 2014, they have been the driving forces behind Mirror Mountain Film Festival, a showcase for celebrating unique creative voices.
An invitation inside the world of Nena’s cinematic imagination through the lens of CAMERA OBSCURA ETC.
Prof. Toth is a graduate from Prague’s renowned FAMU University’s film school, where she has earned a Master’s degree in Cinematography. Her teaching experience includes over 35 years in European and North American universities; Faculty of Dramatic Arts, Belgrade (FDU); Academy of Film and Television and Art Muses (FAMU), Prague; University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, California; University of Toronto, Canada, Lomonosov, Moscow State University, Russia. She was a cinematographer in over one hundred short films and videos, and Director of Photography in four feature films. In 2010 she had established THE OTTAWA FILM FEMINA MEDIA ARTISTS Collective. Nena had presented as Canadian Independent Media Art curator over 30 Canadian films of FILM FEMINA program (female media artists’ work) in North America and Europe. Nena is developing a new experimental film MAGIC PHANTASM granted with* A* grant from the City of Ottawa.
Kathryn Desplanque, PhD, is an academic, artist, and activist. Kathryn serves on DARC’s Board of Directors and is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in art history. She is a historian of print media and visual culture whose research examines the ways the art world adapted to the emergence of industrial financial capitalism. She studied studio arts at Concordia University, and art history at Carleton University and Duke University. In summer 2021, she will be assistant professor of 18th and 19th century European art at UNC Chapel Hill.
Jillian McDonald is a Canadian artist who lives in New York and teaches at Pace University. Solo exhibitions include the Esker Foundation in Calgary, Clark in Montréal, and AxeNéo7 in Gatineau; group shows include FiveMyles in Brooklyn and Root Division in San Francisco. A CBC IDEAS documentary profiles her videos, which were also reviewed in The New York Times and Canadian Art. Critical discussion appears in books like The Transatlantic Zombie by Sarah Lauro. Awards include grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts and The Canada Council for the Arts, and residencies at Glenfiddich in Scotland and The Arctic Circle in Svalbard.
Ludmylla Reis was raised in Brazil and moved to Canada in 2016 to further their artistic journey. With degrees in advertising in 2008 and directing for theatre in 2018, they’ve navigated live and digital storytelling for over ten years. Their work in storytelling has since evolved into a multidisciplinary approach. Ludmylla works with poetic filmmaking narratives sparked through human encounters. Their camera frames the beauty in daily life in order to reimagine the narratives of oppressed humans through mythological lessons.