by Rea McNamara on April 25, 2016
If you live in Toronto and have friends in the arts, they were likely busy last week. Most of the local art world were attending the screenings, gallery shows and live presentations launched as part of the Images Festival. Now in its 29th year, Images is the largest North American annual festival for experimental and independent film and video.
Few screenings saw greater demand than Mike Hoolboom’s sold out Incident Reports. Even press, such as myself, were put on a waiting list. This wasn’t exactly a surprise: the Toronto-based filmmaker is an influential figure in the Canadian film and media scenes. He’s not only had a prodigious output that’s warranted retrospectives at festivals worldwide (including Images), but is a co-founder of the exhibition collective Pleasuredome and was the first artistic director of Images (2000).
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by Rea McNamara on February 12, 2016
“The career of the American filmmaker Charles Atlas has been a steady but slow-burning fire for more than 40 years,” wrote Holland Cotter just last year. Despite pioneering the media-dance art form, and collaborating with dancers and performers like Michael Clark, Marina Abramović and Leigh Bowery, Atlas didn’t have his first solo until 1995 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. That’s a big name institution to land a solo with, but it’s only been within the past decade that he’s had a steady stream of solo presentations at institutions and galleries. Those include the Tate Modern, London’s Vilma Gold, and Luhring Augustine in Chelsea.
Why the CV gap? This question naturally came up in the context of Atlas’s recent screening of his early works in Toronto. Organized by Pleasuredome, the event was a cross-section of motion movies, narratives and video featurettes accompanied by a book launch of his first monograph at Art Metropole.
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