Program 1: Space Ages
The floating structures and artificial islands of Ontario Place serve as remnants of the past’s aspirations for the future. Built in the spirit of Expo 67 and founded on the same modernist principles, Ontario Place and the Cinesphere emerge from the belief in technology as an altruistic and revolutionary force improving quality of life for all of earth’s peoples. The films in this program revisit this era of rapid change and technologically-mediated humanism, complicating idealisms and examining the potentials and shortcomings of the past’s visions of the future. Merging science fiction and the recent past, the artists in this program re-contextualize these histories to explore their many blind spots, and to question their complicity in the expropriation of land, resources, bodies and power.
Susan Britton, Rent Due, 1983, 5:25
Two roommates caught in the emergence of the so-called “information age” are underwhelmed by its immateriality and intangibility.
Nina Levitt, Comrade Valentina, 2006, 1:30
Archival footage of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, is unearthed to celebrate an underrepresented moment in space exploration, and to question the gendered narratives of the space age.
Gillian Dykeman, The Moon (Dispatches from the Future Feminist Utopia), 2016, 2:35
A polyphonous voice narrates a future-to-come, which calls for new harmonies between living things, vibrant matter, and land.
Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen, 1967: A People Kind of Place, 2012, 20:00
A UFO landing pad erected as a gesture of welcome in rural Alberta obfuscates settler-colonial history, exposing double standards in Canadian ideals of hospitality and citizenship.
Biographies:
Sam Cotter is a Toronto-based artist and writer interested in intersections of research, text and image. Cotter regularly employs photography, film and installation to examine issues of visual representation and artifice. Recent exhibitions and projects include Reciprocity – a failure to communicate, a special commission for C Magazine’s participation at the L.A. Art Book Fair, Spit and Image at Ryerson Image Centre and An Exhibition (with Fraser McCallum) at Xpace Cultural Centre, he will have a solo exhibition at Zalucky Contemporary in the fall of 2016. His writing has appeared in publications including Canadian Art, CV, C Magazine and Flash Art.
Fraser McCallum is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto. He holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto (2016), was a recent participant in Demos: Life in Common at the Banff Centre (2015), and a research fellow for the Curatorial Incubator program at Vtape (2013).
About Vtape:
Vtape is a vibrant distribution organization that represents an international collection of contemporary and historical video art and media works by artists. They make this collection accessible to curators and programmers, educators, scholars and public audiences worldwide. In addition to providing a distribution framework for established and emerging artists, Vtape is committed to establishing video art preservation and exhibition standards, and strives to support hybrid practices in an increasingly complex technical milieu.