Week 3: PMA

I feel extremely lucky to be working here at PMA. As a learning environment, I couldn’t have found my way into a warmer, more positive place. Everyone is incredibly helpful and I have been amassing information every day.

At the moment I am mostly getting up to speed on the projects that I will be working on. Having read the notes for the Year of the Plague, one of the tasks I have been asked to perform is archiving the photographs and still visual materials for this project. A rather large and potentially tedious task, this has actually been intriguing as despite the clerical mundanity of filing photographs and labelling files, I get to see what Montreal was like in the late 1800s, and have already learned a lot about the city and the way in which people lived, interacted and thought a hundred years ago. Further, I have been researching smallpox, and by doing shot lists of various documentaries and AV materials from the BBC and ABC, I am getting a good idea of what would happen in Montreal (and Canada and the world) if there was an outbreak of smallpox or some sort of biological warfare with the aim of an epidemic. Plus I’ve learned a whole lot about a disease that I knew hardly anything about.

The other project that I will be working on, and have hence been reading up on is the Extraordinaty Canadians biography that we’ll be doing on Nellie McClung. I knew so very little about her but it turns out that she is a most exceptional woman who is arguably the most influential woman in Canada and most certainly had an incredible effect on the way that women are viewed in Canada. If it hadn’t been for Nellie’s gift for public speaking, sense on humour and absolutely relentless sense of morality and equality, Canada would very likely be a different place from the country it now is.

What’s so inspiring about Nellie is that she lived her life in the way that many women now see their roles. She believed in women and saw no reason why women shouldn’t be able to run the world just as well (she often argued, better) than men. Her style of feminism was not anti-male, but rather pro-female, and pro-family and Christian values. She drove to raise the standards of living for women, and avidly sought to improve the standard of living and rights of women immigrants and those unprotected by the law or family. Her avid prohibition stance was a result of the alcoholism and dissolution of families and morality that she saw in her native Manitoba, and then later Alberta and BC, and looking at the statistics and changes that took place in these parts of Canada when liquor was outlawed, seems to have done a great deal of good for the region, and especially for the quality of life of the women living the in prairies.

As she grew older, she became a more and more prominent public figure, and she rallied behind other causes. Whenever she witnesses social injustice, she made a fuss, and the simple presence of her voice alerted many Canadians to another side of the story — a side that might have been easy to ignore but would not remain unheard because of this firebrand of a woman.

Now that I have read about her, I will be working with the director on the film. I don’t know what I’m going to be doing yet — and of couse I will have to meet her first — but I’m super-excited to work on this film and learn more about this woman.

PMA Productions Internship

Today is day two of an internship which I will be doing for the next seven weeks at an independent documentary film production company in Montreal.

While initially I thought that my work would be centred around the day-to-day running of the office, I have in fact lucked out. I’ll be working in conjunction with a researcher on their film The Year of the Plague, which is currently in development, as well as Production Assisting in the shooting of interviews that will take place at the end of May. This means that I will actually have real work to do, rather than just filing and helping whoever I can with the menial tasks that interns often have to put up with.

So far I have been familiarizing myself with the research for this film, which is based on the book Plague by Michael Bliss, and has been adapted into a documentary by Jefferson Lewis, who will also be directing the film. As the film was bought by Discovery, and yet is very historical, PMA is currently going through the process of figuring out how to bring in more of the present angle of bioterrorism and what would happen in Montreal if there were an epidemic of smallpox. A lot of the work I am going to be doing will involve research on this very subject, as well as creating some sort of coherent archival system of the research and images that have already been acquired.

This afternoon, I am watching footage from the BBC and ABC and making shot lists which will be used by the editors. This I haven’t done before, but which is similar to taking notes on audio interviews, something I have plenty of experience doing. No huge challenges so far, but I am extremely optimistic about working here. All of the staff are incredibly friendly and everyone seems very enthusiastic about the work they are doing.

I will also be meeting later on with Tom and Terri, two of the researchers on the film, with whom I will discuss my role as a researcher, and also figure out a filing system for the images that are currently in a troublesome state.

Playing with clay

I went back to pottery last year after a long hiatus. If only there was real money in being a ceramic artist!

My earliest attempt

I’m listening to the Cranberries and looking at old photos. I suddenly had a moment while I was putting away laundry (yes, how exciting) when I realised that I hadn’t looked at my pictures from when I first got a digital camera, in Grade 10, for a long long time. In fact (moment of panic), I wasn’t sure where they were. I found them!

And I also found this — part of my my high school final art project. My earliest foray into altering digital pics.

The one I submitted:

The other option:

This is the original picture I took in my kitchen:

Me, Myself and I

I think a lot of us may have run into the same problem. Photoshop is an amazing program, but it’s really easy to make really awful images on it! I tried at first to superimpose myself onto other pictures, but that just looked terrible. Then I just started playing around with what I would generally like to do with my own art. I like series. I really love those photo booths you can take pictures in in the subways. I like Andy Warhol’s triptychs and other repetitive images. So I figured that maybe I could play around with the colours on some pictures that look as though they were taken in a photo booth.

What I did in Photoshop is as follows:

I took the four pictures and copied them all into the same file, resizing them to be the same size. Then I applied the diffuse glow filter to each picture. After that I adjusted the colour balance in each of the four layers – one more blue, yellow, red and green. I also created the grey border with the rectangle tool. There were a few more trial and error-type steps that I won’t include in here because I hit the undo button a whole lot of times.

Simplicity wins!

…and the pictures I used:

“It is winter on the dial and there is so much snow…”

Even before I went to the SAT’s espaceSONO::AUDIO.LAB[*], I had a conversation with a friend about how pretentious the exhibit sounded. He was right. Unfortunately unspectacular, neither the sound clips nor the setting left a great impression on me.

That’s not to say that there weren’t any noteworthy sound-installations. Many of the pieces hit me on an emotional level, some were simply entertaining, while other left me cold. In particular, I enjoyed a number of FISHEAD’s music remixes, as well as the beautiful pieces done by ERUPTION. Anna Friz made an interesting statement about the state of radio at the moment, but didn’t profoundly alter my perception of sound, while Katarina Zdjelar[†] hit me in the pit of my stomach so far as emotions go, but didn’t do anything with her medium that she couldn’t have done in a text-based work. I won’t mention the names of the artists who seemed to think that nine-minute clips of static or drilling would somehow be interesting, but then again, maybe I’m just not into sound.

The one piece that I did find myself entirely absorbed in, which was surprising as it was a fifteen-minute piece, was Francisco Lopez’s Addy En El Pais De Las Frutas Y Los Chunches[‡]. A journey through a natural soundscape, this work simply transported me, and invoked emotional responses to the movement through sounds. Thundering storms, crescendos of cicadas, teeming sewers, deluges of water, scraping gravel, all blended together to create a vivid mental motion picture, more interesting and powerful than anything conjured by the other works I listened to. Perhaps it was aided by complete darkness (I was inside the black box), but then again, I think the same effect could be achieved by switching off the lights.

This is what was most strikingly pretentious about the exhibit. Their presentation was lacking. The black box was perhaps interesting, but didn’t really make me feel like I was anywhere except inside a black box. The tent didn’t recreate some sort of camping environment and the air mattresses were frankly inconvenient when someone beside you got up and disrumpled your equilibrium. I do understand that there needs to be a place for these artists to exhibit their works, but I do wonder that if perhaps these were made available to me online, I wouldn’t get more from the clips in the comfort of my own home?

 

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[*] “La Société des arts technologiques [SAT] Society for Arts and Technology.” 17 Sep. 2007 <http://www.sat.qc.ca/event.php?id_event=954〈=en>

[†] “G A L E R I E S.N L.” 17 Sep. 2007 <http://www.artnet.nu/mnexpo.asp?exponr=29836>

[‡] Content & design by Daniele Volpin. “francisco lópez [ official website ].” 17 Sep. 2007 <http://www.franciscolopez.net/>

Looking past and through reflections

Digital technology has moved us into an age where seeing can no longer be synonymous with believing. While the great power of visual media stems from our innate reaction to pictures and the tendency to believe our eyes above our other senses, many photographers have begun to render visible the manipulation of the photographic to the viewer.

Nowadays, it is common to feel foolish or tricked when alerted to the fact that something that was taken for ‘real’ is actually a fiction. With the advances in technology that have enabled us to create photorealistic images, we really can’t afford to believe our eyes any more. As a media savvy person, it is absolutely vital to look deeper and be mistrustful of anything presented as ‘truth.’

The work of Danish photographers Trine Søndergaard and Nicolai Howalt exhibited at Montreal’s Mois de la Photo (Parisian Laundry, 3550 St-Antoine W.)exemplify the current photographic trend to create works that at first glance appear to be pure documentary, but with deeper contemplation reveal their underlying construction. The exhibit contains a selection of photographs of hunting scenes taken in different seasons in Denmark. At first glance, the photographs seem rather subdued. They reveal huge monochromatic vistas. Grassy or snow-covered fields dotted with dark figures often obscured by fog. But on closer inspection they become transparently manipulated. Most of the photographs have been colourised in the old-fashioned pre-Technicolor style. In this one the hunters’ hats are too orange; in another the grass is a little too green. And then a wave of realisation strikes: Why are the hunters all looking toward the horizon when there is a deer in their midst? And what are the dogs doing not chasing that bird?

These are images that need time to experience and contemplate, and the larger scale of the mural entitled Foxhill South, aids in the analysis and enjoyment of these artists’ works. The effectiveness of the exhibit is unfortunately diminished by the highly reflective glass over the photographs coupled with the opening hours which mean that there will always be too much sunlight and extreme reflections. But if one looks past (and through) this little inconvenience, this collection of photographs are full of interest, and make an important statement about reality and manipulation in photography and other visual media.

• “Nicolai Howalt.” 17 Sep. 2007 <http://www.nicolaihowalt.com/>

• Kevin Finlayson. “Parisian Laundry | Current.” 17 Sep. 2007 <http://www.parisianlaundry.com/current>

• “TRINE SØNDERGAARD.” 17 Sep. 2007 <http://www.trinesondergaard.com/>