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Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless . . . . In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses.
— John Berger, And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.
For our final screening of 2024, Video Out has brought together a collection of works which aim to make sense of ourselves, the world, and the lens through which we perceive them. From deforestation and the persistence of vision, to elegies for aging bodies and camcorders, to Sufi stories discovered in cut footage, these six videos ask us to consider not just the images we create, but the ways in which they are formed.
Stay after the screening for a conversation with the artists.
Convalescing Camcorder and Two Cats
2021
Rachel Stuckey
4:28
A video diary about aging technology and cats. Recorded on a JVC VHS-C camcorder.
untitled part 9: this time
2020
Jayce Salloum
6:13
Out of the mouths of rural boys, finding the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin in Afghanistan. After my first year of art school in San Francisco in 1978, I quit, and headed to the Banff School of Fine Arts to do a year long residency program. The instructor Hu Hohn got me hooked on Sufi stories such as The Exploits and Subtleties of the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin. Mulla Nasrudin is a Sufi wise-fool, trickster like figure. These books were chock full of funny little contemplative mediation stories. I would read these riding the bus at night and such, to get me through trying days.
Later in 2008, I'm in the central highlands of Afghanistan, in Bamiyan, where the colossal Buddha statutes were destroyed by the Taliban. A stark, arid, severe, beautiful landscape, people scrapping by, subsistence farming, much like my grandparents did in Syria. I'm filming scruffy little country boys in a new school built by Western troops. The boys are speaking Hazaragi (a Farsi dialect), via my translator but never having the time to translate responses. At the end of each session, we ask them to tell a joke or a song, something other than the conversation we’ve tried to record. Six months later when I’m back home and the rough transcript translations have been sent to me from Quetta, I discover, lo and behold, then and there were the very same Sufi stories – thirty years later – being told by these scruffy little country boys at Laisa-e-Aali Zukoor boys school, Bamiyan, Hazarajat, Afghanistan."
I am 164cm. مــن ١۶۴ســانتیمتر ھســتم.
2024
nazanin oghanian
23:25
Installed in the corner of the space, I am 164cm. مــن ١۶۴ســانتیمتر ھســتم. from the Patient #17301 series, is a two-channel video, with the two projected images sharing the vertical line of the corner. On the left channel, animated scenes are played which are completed in SketchUp, using virtual warehouse objects as props. The scene attempts to replicate the injection room at the Kosar Hospital in Tehran, Iran, where I received Decapeptyl injections every 28 days between 1998 and 2005. On the right channel, home video footage is shown from the same years (1998-2005), sourced from a personal family archive.
Engaging with spatial and temporal elements, I explore how montage can be used in a two-channel video in order to create a third space. I am interested in the ways in which new meanings arise through the relationships between disparate images, meanings that don’t previously exist in these images. Through my interventions in this footage, I explore how these new meanings can articulate the slippages of the memory on one hand, and on the other, in my body’s experience of medical intervention during the treatments.
Persistence & Loss
2021
Joseph Clark
2:42
Strobed remnants of historical logging sites cut down the myth of pristine Salish landscapes. A trick of the light in plain sight.
Content Advisory: This video includes flashing lights, which may affect some viewers.
Guardian of sleep
2022
Zachery Longboy
11:32
Inspired by a dream, Guardian of Sleep features an array of images that include animations of petroglyph-like markings, running herds of caribou and filmed footage of the baton-twirling artist leading a parade from a forest. The video was produced on an iPhone, a compositional method consistent with Longboy’s long-standing interest in emergent technologies and their potential, not only as a tool or a medium, but also as metaphorical constructs that, in this instance, mirror the forms dreams take as inherently collagist.
Camera Instruction
2024
Pablo Griff & Clark Nikolai
12:06
Learn how to use cameras using your eyes, fingers, and eye holes in this instructional video series. Pablo Griff—host of past documentaries such as Shoes: Who Wears Them? and Toilets: Where Does All That Stuff Go?—will teach you everything you need to know to become a professional pho-to-grapher. Don't forget your EpiPen!
—
Banner image: Camera Instruction (stillshot), 2024, Pablo Griff & Clark Nikolai
VIVO is located in the homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples in a warehouse space at 2625 Kaslo Street south of East Broadway at the end of E 10th. Transit line 9 stops at Kaslo Street on Broadway. From the bus stop, the path is paved, curbless, and on a slight decline. The closest skytrain station is Renfrew Station, which is three blocks south-east of VIVO and has an elevator. From there, the path is paved, curbless, and on a slight incline. There is parking available at VIVO, including wheelchair access parking. There is a bike rack at the entrance. The front entrance leads indoors to a set of 7 stairs to the lobby.
A wheelchair ramp is located at the west side of the main entrance. The ramp has two runs: the first run is 20 feet long, and the second run is 26 feet. The ramp is 60 inches wide. The slope is 1:12. The ramp itself is concrete and has handrails on both sides. There is an outward swinging door (34 inch width) at the top of the ramp leading to a vestibule. A second outward swinging door (33 inch width) opens into the exhibition space. Buzzers and intercoms are located at both doors to notify staff during regular office hours or events to unlock the doors. Once unlocked, visitors can use automatic operators to open the doors.
There are two all-gender washrooms. One has a stall and is not wheelchair accessible. The other is a single room with a urinal and is wheelchair accessible: the door is 33 inches wide and inward swinging, without automation. The toilet has 11 inch clearance on the left side and a handrail.
To reach the bathrooms from the studio, exit through the double doors and proceed straight through the lobby and down the hall . Turn left, and the two bathrooms will be on your right side. The closest one has a stall and is not wheelchair accessible. The far bathroom is accessible.
Rachel Stuckey is a media artist living and working in Austin, TX. She received an MFA in Transmedia Studio Arts from the University of Texas at Austin as a Creative Research Fellow, and a BFA in filmmaking from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Stuckey has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center, Laboratory, Signal Culture, Belgrade Art Studio Online, and the Media Archaeology Lab. Her work has shown at The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale, Hyperreal Film Club, Drkmttr, aCinema, Other Cinema, Film Forum, Echo Park Film Center, daswerk, Slovenski Filmski Center, and elsewhere. She was an invited speaker for Computer Art Study Days at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the MALfunction Artist + Researcher Series at the Media Archeology Lab, and the Strange Pilgrims Symposium at The Contemporary Austin.
Stuckey is the Director of Digital Arts at The Museum of Human Achievement in Austin, TX, where she advocates for diverse voices in emerging media arts and indie games. She has previously served as Gallery Director at Women & Their Work and programmer for Experimental Response Cinema and Mad Stork Cinema. She is the founder of the Welcome to my Homepage digital artist residency program.
Jayce Salloum is a Vancouver-based photographer and video artist known for installation works that sensitively investigate historical, social and cultural contexts of place. The grandson of Lebanese immigrants, Salloum studied in the United States and began his artistic career in 1975. The central themes played out in his work include questions of exile, ethnic representation and notions of identity. In 2014, Salloum won a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. https://twitter.com/JayceSalloum
nazanin is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and arts administrator. Her artistic practice emerges from critical reflection on concepts such as body, identity, gender, memory, politics, and the ongoing interplay between the individual and society. nazanin’s recent work explores power relations and the ways in which women’s bodies are controlled through the medicalization of their bodies and reproductive health. Working mostly with video, audio, and other sensory stimulative installations, she is interested in discrete components of the auditory, visual and gestural aspects of memory and control. She is a recipient of the BC Binning Memorial Fellowship, and her work has been exhibited across Iran and Canada including VIVO Media Arts, AHVA Gallery, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, and Morris And Helen Belkin Art Gallery.
Following the completion of her MFA in Visual Arts from UBC in 2020, nazanin has worked and collaborated with several not-for-profit art organizations in recent years, including Vancouver New Music, Western Front, VIVO Media Arts, Vancouver Art Gallery, and The Dance Centre.
Joseph Clark is a lecturer in film studies at Simon Fraser University. His research, teaching and creative work focus on archival and non-theatrical media, including newsreels, home movies, and sponsored film. He is a long-time member of the DOXA Documentary Film Festival Programming Committee and part of the organizing committee of the Vancouver Podcast Festival. He is the author of News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle.
zachery cameron longboy is a sayisi dene, video/performance and visual artist presently living in vancouver bc. originally from churchill manitoba, longboy is recognized for his hybrid investigations of gender and first nations identity. longboy's video work is part of the collections of: the national gallery of canada. glenbow museum, the canada council art bank. with numerous screenings including the vancouver art gallery, museum of modern art, images independent film and video festival, out on screen.
Pablo Griff is originally from Derby, England. Raised very English in Vancouver, BC, Canada. After travelling and doing much conceptual work. Griff treats art as a collaborative effort. “Art comes to me more as collaboration.” His early works include photography, film, sculpture, text and conceptual work. Pablo Griff creates in Vancouver.
Clark Nikolai lives and creates art in Vancouver. Originally from Saskatchewan, where he made films and videos in Saskatoon’s vibrant punk and parallel art scenes. His work covers all genres and often combines found footage, music and experimental visual effects, stylized staging and dream-like experimental narratives. He is an early pioneer of video art in the Canadian prairies, and was a founding member of both the Open Air Audio Visual Co-op (1984) and Video Vérité Artist Centre (1989) of Saskatoon (now PAVED). Since 1981, he has produced over fifty videos and films, which have screened and received awards around the world. His practice has also included still photography and experimental music.
Genki Ferguson was born in New Brunswick to a family of writers and grew up in Calgary. He spent much of his childhood in the subtropical island of Kyushu, Japan, where his mother's family still resides. Fluent in Japanese and capable of making a decent sushi roll, Genki was the recipient of the 2017 Helen Pitt Award for visual arts, and recently completed a degree in Film Production.
