Heehyun Choi is a moving image artist in Los Angeles, California and Seoul, South Korea. Choi’s works are grounded on the interest in discussing cinema from a structuralist viewpoint and exploring the materiality and virtuality of image.
Emily Pelstring is faculty and Undergraduate Chair in the Department of Film and Media, Queen’s University. She creates experimental animations for screen, installation, and performance contexts, often bringing vintage technologies of representation into dialogue with contemporary imagery. Recent collaborative research projects include the Sistership TV live-streamed series and The Witch Institute symposium.
Serena Lee's practice stems from a fascination with polyphony as a way of mapping how things come together and apart. She plays with movement, language, cinema, textures, space, and voice, tracing embodied knowledge through aesthetic, martial, and sonic practices. Ongoing collective study includes collaborating with Christina Battle as SHATTERED MOON ALLIANCE, a DIY framework for sci-fi world-building; and with Read-in, collectively researching political, embodied, and situated practices of reading. Born and raised in Tkáron:to/Toronto, Serena is currently based in Vienna where she is doing a PhD at the Akademie der bildenden künste Wien (AT); she practices close to home and internationally.
Syd Farrington is an artist and filmmaker working with celluloid. He is self-taught, often hand processing himself. He is interested in playing with our expectations of both the fictional narrative film as well as artists’ moving image, applying themes of nature, geography, intimacy and isolation.
Márcio Cruz (b. 1978) is a filmmaker based in France. Márcio uses new digital media technologies and the sonic to challenge "Western" notions of time and agitate the liveness of the Black media archive in its multiple forms. He deploys different forms of Black futurities and new digital media technologies on the creation of the Black music essay. Márcio holds a Masters in Digital Media Technology at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Chelsea Phillips-Carr is a self-taught filmmaker with a background in Cinema Studies.
Anna Hawkins is an artist working primarily in moving image and installation currently based on Treaty 6 Territory ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan), Edmonton, AB. Her work centres around the ways that images, gestures, and language are circulated and transformed online, as well as the impact of technology on the intimate spheres of daily life.
Blue II
July 17 , 2:00 pm
— 6:00 pm
All times are listed in Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)Heehyun Choi, Emily Pelstring, Serena Lee, Syd Farrington, Márcio Cruz, Chelsea Phillips-Carr, Anna Hawkins
— Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma
…continued from "Blue I"
5.
Maggie Nelson writes about blue, and she writes about Yves Klein’s blue, and then Sasha Frere-Jones writes about Yves and Maggie and about Yves really only making ultramarine covetable by binding it to other things through a process he developed with a guy whose last name is Adam. Yves didn’t actually make a new colour. Sasha says it’s the process that makes Yves Klein Blue what it is. He reminds me that it’s otherwise purchasable as Medium Adam 25. If one placed Yves Klein Blue, Medium Adam 25, and Ultramarine side-by-each, would they be indistinguishable?
6.
What if the supply chains are never repaired? Their links broken or uncoupled forever? What if YInMn and Cobalt and Bluetiful and Maya Blue and Indigo and Yves Klein Blue or rather Medium Adam 25 or more succinctly Ultramarine can never be made again? What if the only blues we have left to see are no longer CMYK or oil-based or acrylic or wax or powdered but the configured simulacrum RGB on our devices or unmediated AFK?
7.
Blue is both rare and ubiquitous in the environment. There’s the clear sky blue and the turquoise of tropical seas. But blueberries, bluebells, cornflowers, blue morpho butterflies, aquamarine, jeremejevite: These are rare. There is much more red, yellow, brown, and green. According to Dr. James Fox, blue eyes aren’t even really blue. They contain no blue pigment. They are an optical illusion. Just like the sky and the sea, they reflect something that was never there to begin with.
8.
Maya Blue lasts and outlasts bodies, clay, water, and time. Can a relationship, whatever that means, do the same? Does Maggie still think about blue, or being blue, or whatever that book was about?
— This program is part of the suite ok to rest curated by Jaclyn Quaresma. You can find the bibliography here.
Creative Description for the 4:00PM screening of Blue II was developed by the following individuals:
Lead Describer - Kat German
Sound Engineer - Camille Craig
Voices / Collaborators:
The Blue Curtain - Jennifer Brethour
Petal to the Metal - Jessica Watkin
The Taste of The Name - Jessica Watkin
Pale, blue - Scott Yamamura
Blackness = Time ÷ Media = ∞ - Nicole Campbell & Treena Phillip
Topography - Jennifer Brethour
Blue Light Blue - Colette Desjardins
The Blue Curtain
Heehyun Choi
USA/SOUTH KOREA | 2020 | DIGITAL | 7 MIN
ENGLISH, KOREAN (WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES)
Utilizing the screen recording method, this desktop-essay film successively follows the colour blue that has been used in paintings and videos under expressive or technical decisions. The colour blue in this work connects artworks from different periods in art history and inquires about the truth and delusion in the act of seeing. After a short surfing session, there is a random yet organically constructed archive about the colour blue.
Petal to the Metal
Emily Pelstring
CANADA | 2021 | 16MM>DIGITAL | 3 MIN
NO DIALOGUE
This hand-processed 16mm film reflects on botanical animism. It is a song written for night-crawlers, compost, and shadows, inspired by human flower-lust. Water, fire, earth, and air are interwoven with the garden's creature crew. The work draws a parallel between the photographic alchemy of cinematic experiments and the photosynthetic processes of plants.
The Taste of The Name
Serena Lee
CANADA | 2015 | 16MM>DIGITAL | 10 MIN
ENGLISH/FRENCH
"The object is to name each of the three hundred and thirty shades of blue in every possible language, in order to ascertain the extent to which names for colour are universal. The task should take about forty minutes. It should be performed on a sunny day, if possible in the shade, not in direct sunlight."
Borrowing from an anthropological study initiated through the University of California in 1969, The Taste of The Name is a fantasia on universality. As a parallel to the elusive “umami” and its gradual scientific acceptance as a primary taste, we consider what is perceivable, knowable, and namable. Through the blue spectrum of various hermetic artifices, we are fed fables of Jules Verne's Nautilus and resurface in a virtual tanning bed, turning over in a slippery navigation of language.
Pale, blue
Syd Farrington
UK | 2021 | Super 8MM>DIGITAL | 2 MIN
ENGLISH
A reflection on the sweetness of a simple quiet exchange.
Flowers bought from a shop, 45 years expired film and an afternoon in a garden in spring. This film is processed by hand.
Topography
Chelsea Phillips-Carr
CANADA | 2021 | 8MM>DIGITAL | 4 MIN
NO DIALOGUE
A Toronto city symphony. Shot on 8mm throughout the spring, this film aimed to capture the essence of the city as something cold and rigid, populated by harsh lines and social alienation. After the film was processed, it was coloured over with a rainbow of shades, suggesting organic life and vibrancy. The colours alternate in strong strokes and circles, and more fluid, diluted washes.
Blue Light Blue
Anna Hawkins
CANADA | 2021 | DIGITAL | 15 MIN
ENGLISH
In Blue Light Blue, the blue light emitted from the blacklit LED screens of cellphones, tablets and laptops is materialized and personified in a pseudo-horror film. The perceptions of day and night are confused and the private space of the bedroom is transgressed. Here, screens masquerade as mirrors or windows or light sources, all the while surveilling us as we gaze into them.
Blackness = Time ÷ Media = ∞
Márcio Cruz
FRANCE | 2021 | DIGITAL | 6 MIN
ENGLISH
Blackness = Time ÷ Media = ∞ will challenge the chronological/linear future that informs Modernity. Informed by the study by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Derek Jarman and Black Quantum Futurism, this film reflects through the continuum of Black cinema, music, dance, and the non-human to unleash Blackness as an unstoppable force. With the release of the liveness within each medium piece that composes the equation, the time travel machine takes off.
