Deep Water features works by Yen-Chao Lin (Montreal), Fraser McCallum (Toronto), Erin Siddall (Vancouver), Miguel Angel Ríos (New York/Oaxaca), Julie René de Cotret and JuJe Collective (Guelph), and Virginia Lee Montgomery (New York/Houston). Produced over the span of the last decade, these short videos and film works make use of natural elements—water, air, fire, minerals, etc.—to circle around issues such as the exploitation of environmental resources, colonial tendencies encroaching on sacred spaces and rituals, pilgrimages to locales that bear remnant traces of activism and protest, the fraught period that we call modernity, and metaphysical ways of summoning hope for the future. Blending documentary, experimental film, performance documentation, archival research, site visits, and semi-fantastic folk retellings, the works included in Deep Water are linked by a common surreal or dreamlike atmosphere, perhaps suggesting a permeability between the exterior world and psychic topographies.
Deep Water is organized by Laura Demers, and is presented as part of the plumbraiser, a fundraiser for the plumb
Many thanks to the Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF) for sponsoring this virtual screening.
Butterfly Birth Bed is a metaphysical art film about hope. Inspired by 'The Butterfly Effect'—the philosophical theorem that any small change in our environment, even the gentle flapping of a butterfly's wings may manifest big climatic change—the film documents the ethereal emergence of live butterflies over storm imagery contained in a butterfly-scale Shaker bed. Collectively, Butterfly Birth Bed's symbolism and elemental soundscape facilitate a surreal incantation for healing, hope, and recovery. The film is directed, edited, and scored by VLM.
VLM (b. Houston, Texas, USA) is a filmmaker, sculptor, and facilitator. She received her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture in 2016. Working across video, performance, sound, and sculpture, her artwork is a research practice of metaphysics. Its content is surreal, latently autobiographical, and often with a feminist impulse. The work is paradoxically cryptic and literal, conceptual and hand-built, digital and physical. While her artwork shifts in subject matter from ponytails to particle accelerators, to syrups, stones, moths and machines—VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures like drilling, dousing, or reaching and recursive symbols like circles, holes and spheres. Her diverse artistic movements interrogate the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures. VLM also works as a professional scribe, a Graphic Facilitator, a job for which she travels the country to diagram the development of ideas at group meetings and conferences for clients. In her work as an artist, VLM turns this skill, which she describes as “mind map scribing,” inwards, rendering the contours of her own subconscious and the logic of her dreams and memories. Collectively, VLM's symbols, forms, and gestures rupture material surfaces, opening up portals to unknown psychic ends.
- Year2020
- Runtime5:35
- CountryUnited States
- DirectorVirginia Lee Montgomery
Deep Water features works by Yen-Chao Lin (Montreal), Fraser McCallum (Toronto), Erin Siddall (Vancouver), Miguel Angel Ríos (New York/Oaxaca), Julie René de Cotret and JuJe Collective (Guelph), and Virginia Lee Montgomery (New York/Houston). Produced over the span of the last decade, these short videos and film works make use of natural elements—water, air, fire, minerals, etc.—to circle around issues such as the exploitation of environmental resources, colonial tendencies encroaching on sacred spaces and rituals, pilgrimages to locales that bear remnant traces of activism and protest, the fraught period that we call modernity, and metaphysical ways of summoning hope for the future. Blending documentary, experimental film, performance documentation, archival research, site visits, and semi-fantastic folk retellings, the works included in Deep Water are linked by a common surreal or dreamlike atmosphere, perhaps suggesting a permeability between the exterior world and psychic topographies.
Deep Water is organized by Laura Demers, and is presented as part of the plumbraiser, a fundraiser for the plumb
Many thanks to the Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF) for sponsoring this virtual screening.
Butterfly Birth Bed is a metaphysical art film about hope. Inspired by 'The Butterfly Effect'—the philosophical theorem that any small change in our environment, even the gentle flapping of a butterfly's wings may manifest big climatic change—the film documents the ethereal emergence of live butterflies over storm imagery contained in a butterfly-scale Shaker bed. Collectively, Butterfly Birth Bed's symbolism and elemental soundscape facilitate a surreal incantation for healing, hope, and recovery. The film is directed, edited, and scored by VLM.
VLM (b. Houston, Texas, USA) is a filmmaker, sculptor, and facilitator. She received her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture in 2016. Working across video, performance, sound, and sculpture, her artwork is a research practice of metaphysics. Its content is surreal, latently autobiographical, and often with a feminist impulse. The work is paradoxically cryptic and literal, conceptual and hand-built, digital and physical. While her artwork shifts in subject matter from ponytails to particle accelerators, to syrups, stones, moths and machines—VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures like drilling, dousing, or reaching and recursive symbols like circles, holes and spheres. Her diverse artistic movements interrogate the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures. VLM also works as a professional scribe, a Graphic Facilitator, a job for which she travels the country to diagram the development of ideas at group meetings and conferences for clients. In her work as an artist, VLM turns this skill, which she describes as “mind map scribing,” inwards, rendering the contours of her own subconscious and the logic of her dreams and memories. Collectively, VLM's symbols, forms, and gestures rupture material surfaces, opening up portals to unknown psychic ends.
- Year2020
- Runtime5:35
- CountryUnited States
- DirectorVirginia Lee Montgomery