Expired January 5, 2021 5:00 AM
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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.

Filmed in Oaxaca, Mexico, this dream-like, hallucinatory film features a transparent cube floating in the landscape with a will of its own, as if magically suspended. The eye floats above the leachate, in all directions against glass walls, in the void of a box that is transparent and reflects its exterior without changing its surroundings. Through images shot on a plateau overlooking a slum where the desolation evoked by garbage is sometimes interrupted by a human presence, The Ghost of Modernity exposes the contamination that ensues from the (colonialist) project of modernization, acknowledging the resulting social and environmental violence. The nomadic displacement between the natural and urban landscape reveals the social contradictions inherent to the modernist project in Latin America. How are we seen? How do we see ourselves? Representation or idealization?


Miguel Angel Ríos (b. 1943, San Jose Norte Catamarca, Argentina) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires before moving to New York in the 1970’s to escape the military dictatorship in Argentina. He subsequently relocated to Mexico and now divides his time between New York and Mexico City. In his work, Ríos pairs a rigorous conceptual approach with a meticulously constructed, handmade aesthetic. Since the 1970’s, he has made work about the concept of the Latin American, using this idea as both an artistic strategy and a political problem. Over the past two decades, Ríos has delved into the medium of video to create symbolic narratives about human experience, violence, and mortality. In his 2012 video The Ghost of Modernity, Ríos references high modernism—with direct nods to John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Donald Judd.


  • Year
    2012
  • Runtime
    3:39
  • Country
    Mexico
  • Director
    Miguel Angel Ríos