bringing to light what came from inside
Opens Thursday, April 13
Week 1
Thursday and Friday - 5pm - 8pm
Saturday 12pm to 5pm
Week 2
Wednesday 12 - 5pm
Thursday,Friday 5pm - 8pm
Saturday 12pm to 5pm
Closes on Saturday, April 22 at 5pm
76 Geary Ave, Toronto, ON M6H 2B5
4 steps with railing leading up to a glass door entrance.
For a map of Charles Street Video (CSV), click here
Images Festival is committed to providing an accessible festival and continues to work to reduce barriers to participation at our events. This year, we are implementing a COVID-19 policy to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission for all, and to prioritize the participation of people who are disability-identified, immunocompromised, or part of an otherwise vulnerable group.
The following guidelines will be in place: Self-Assessment: We ask that staff and participants screen themselves for COVID-19 before visiting the exhibition.
This exhibition comes forward as a response to a long-time partnership between Images Festival and Charles Street Video, hosting yearly thematic residencies. In particular, a 2001 residency named Lo-Fi Sci-Fi tipped CSV on its head and filled its editing rooms with imaginative, probing artists. How could one interpret lo-fi sci-fi? Could it be, in a way, the embodiment of the once widely used, now defunct, tape-to-tape editing process?
What was seen as the future? And how do we see the future now, considering our past? In this way, Western linear timelines often seem to make no sense. How is time not bendable? Is it not possible to live the future now?
Here is where Indigenous knowledge steps in. Time is circular: the past connected to the future, and the future to the past. As Indigenous peoples, do we not live in all timelines at once? Did the ancestors not give us the tools we need to keep going? Did we not always hold it inside? How can we make sure those teachings continue to be passed on from generation to generation?
The works presented in this exhibit bring to light what always existed within: skills, stories, and so much more. Sheri, Taina, and Becca all tap into histories that are meant to be brought into the future, combining language with moving images in a multifaceted kind of poetry, all the while honouring a futurist, lo-fi aesthetic. In this moment, it is important to see these pieces as keeping the fires of the past, present, and future alive.
Please join us on April 19 at 6:00 PM for a panel discussion with the curator and artists.
Becca Redden is a settler filmmaker based in Tiohti:áke/Montreal. Her work includes documentary and fiction, leaning into speculative futures. Her latest work—Climate Futures—explores Montreal under climate change from the perspective of community activists. Becca is invested in bringing all kinds of stories to the screen, particularly ones that uplift community. The Ceremony, co-directed with Taina Da Silva, is her first fiction short.
Taina Da Silva is a Anishinaabekwe filmmaker from Grassy Narrows First Nation, and an undergrad in communications at the University of Winnipeg. Taina has worked on short documentary-style films that reflect growing up around environmental degradation and Indigenous activism.
Sheri Osden Nault is a Two-Spirit Michif artist whose work spans mediums including sculpture, performance, installation, and more—integrating cultural, social, and experimental creative processes. Through these processes they consider embodied connections between human and non-human beings, land-based relationships, and kinship sensibilities as an Indigenous Futurist framework. They are an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at Western University, a tattooer in the Indigenous tattoo revival movement, and they coordinate Gifts for Two-Spirit Youth.
Samay Arcentales Cajas is a Toronto-based queer Kichwa digital media artist and video designer exploring human–land relations, the new media dimensions of indigenous cosmology, and immersive art as a site of liberation. Her works have been shown at ImagineNATIVE, Xpace, Mayworks Festival, Tarragon Theatre, and TQFF, among others. Samay worked at Charles Street Video as program coordinator for four years and wears many tech hats working on projects across the country.
Charles Street Video (CSV) is a non-profit production organization established in 1981 to help support media artists. We provide affordable access to equipment and post-production editing facilities for creating videos, films, installations, and other media art forms. We offer regular workshops, training sessions, and residencies.
CSV fosters the creation of media art, encourages experimentation, and develops an artistic community where emerging and established artists gather and achieve their artistic vision.
Becca Redden
Sheri Osden Nault
Taina Da Silva
