Images 2020: Seen and Not Seen (Patreon)

Today (in between watching episodes of the perfectly passable Netflix series "Ozark"), I have been dipping into the live stream of this year's Images Festival. All online, for obvious reasons, Images kicked off on Friday with Sky Hopinka's maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore, which I've already seen. Good choice for an opener, and given the State of Things, this global streaming event means that Hopinka's film is now just as "distributed" as Trolls: World Tour. So it's a bit of a win.

I watched a program of films by Vancouver artist Julia Feyrer, and I would definitely categorize them as interesting, if not fully realized. Feyrer is a multimedia artist, primarily a sculptor it seems, who has shown her work in galleries as part of installations. And one gets the clear sense that her films operate as components of larger aesthetic projects, even to the extent that the objects that feature so prominently in her work are in fact her 3D creations, recontextualized through celluloid.

In this regard, Feyrer's work reminded me a bit of Oliver Husain and Jean-Paul Kelly, two similarly inclined film artists. And seeing a host of Feyrer's work all at once was indeed instructive; she is becoming increasingly literate with the medium of 16mm film, moving beyond the utilitarian confines of "artists' film" and achieving some lyricism native to the medium. 

The most successful works are two from 2014. Dailies is a sort of compendium of various creative gestures undertaken with clocks, a specific motif in her work of the period. It is uneven, but has the benefit of allowing Feyrer to try out an array of ideas with respect to camera movement and framing. Escape Scenes uses a backseat shadowbox set-up to generate various hanging sculptural formations, all of which interact with the wind from the open car windows. As a set of variations on a theme, it's a nifty and unexpected combination of Chris Kennedy formalism and Jodie Mack whimsy. 

But the most compelling "film" I've encountered thus far at the digital Images edition is one that cannot be seen or shown. Biometrics, a new film by Miko Revereza, is a cameraless film that involves a live performance element, and cannot be digitally reproduced. So there was no "object" for the artist to submit for web streaming. But more importantly, Biometrics is specifically about the need to keep certain kinds of information out of the digital realm, and the fact that an older technology like 16mm film can allow us to communicate in clandestine ways that might be temporarily out of the reach of power.

Here is Revereza's explanatory title card, which he "screened" in lieu of the film, which had to be semi-withdrawn from the festival. Its absence speaks as loud as many films' presence.