Category Archives: ECU Faculty

New Film by Lindsay McIntyre Wins Oscar-Qualifying imagineNATIVE Award

Still from NIGIQTUQ ᓂᒋᖅᑐᖅ (The South Wind), by Lindsay McIntyre. (Image courtesy Lindsay McIntyre)

By Perrin Grauer. Originally posted on ECU News.

A new film by artist and ECU faculty member Lindsay McIntyre has won the Live Action Short Award at the 2023 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival.

Titled NIGIQTUQ ᓂᒋᖅᑐᖅ (The South Wind), the short drama was lauded by imagineNATIVE’s Moon Jury as an “incredibly moving story that brings you to tears” and “viscerally” connects the audience to its characters’ experiences.

“From the first frame, you are watching cinematic beauty from a filmmaker who understands the medium of cinema and knows how to conjure the spiritual element that sits within the most beautiful of our Indigenous cinematic offerings,” the jury writes. “Lindsay’s unique cinematic voice and talent is as clear and heartfelt as the South Wind it comes from.”

The Live Action Short Award is imagineNATIVE’s Oscar–qualifying category, meaning NIGIQTUQ ᓂᒋᖅᑐᖅ will be put forward to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for award consideration. The award also comes with a $7500 cash prize.

Lindsay, who often works in experimental documentary, says “it was a total shock” to win an award for a drama.

“Drama is so, so hard, and I have much respect for the people who do it. It’s really incredible to be honoured within this sphere,” she says. “But really, I think of the award as support for the story. Because it’s a really important story that we don’t talk about or know about, and it’s something I’m really passionate about bringing to the world.”

Still from NIGIQTUQ ᓂᒋᖅᑐᖅ (The South Wind), by Lindsay McIntyre. (Image courtesy Lindsay McIntyre)

NIGIQTUQ ᓂᒋᖅᑐᖅ is based on a true story told to Lindsay by her grandmother. It connects to a larger story that is touched upon in several of Lindsay’s other films, including her upcoming feature, The Words We Can’t Speak, currently in advanced development.

“Having left her Nunavut home in 1938 with her mother Kumaa’naaq (koo-MAT-na), young Marguerite must negotiate the unspoken pressures of being Inuk in her new life in the South,” reads the film’s synopsis. “When an extraordinary letter arrives from home, Marguerite discovers what’s really expected of her.”

The narrative reveals a type of benevolent racism that at once aims to erase Indigeneity and all its markers while purporting that it’s “for their own good”.

NIGIQTUQ ᓂᒋᖅᑐᖅ, which translates to “South Wind,” refers to an Inuit concept which celebrates positive change but also carries a caution.

“The south wind may bring blue skies and better conditions, but there’s also a sense of warning or a need to be present, because you can’t forget that the wind will always change back,” Lindsay says. This metaphor underscores Lindsay’s broader project of foregrounding an overlooked chapter in Canadian history.

“We know about residential schools and some of the other big ugly colonial wrongs, but we don’t often think about Inuit in the same way,” she says. “We don’t think about what the world was like for Inuit when the RCMP and the traders and the whalers and the missionaries showed up. My grandmother was an interpreter and servant to the RCMP in the early days of colonial interest so her story embodies how all of these different communities came together in a colonial context. And it’s unique because it was especially rare for an Inuk woman to be included in police business.”

Read the full article on ECU News.

Lindsay McIntyre Earns WIDC Feature Film Award

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Lindsay McIntyre in Christine Ienna’s short film Handmade Film. (Photo by Christina Ienna; courtesy Women in the Director’s Chair)

by Perrin Grauer

The prize will go to support The Words We Can’t Speak, a forthcoming feature film written, directed and produced by the artist and ECU faculty member.

Multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker of Inuit and Scottish descent Lindsay McIntyre has been awarded the 2021 Women in the Director’s Chair (WIDC) Feature Film Award.

The award, which comes with an in-kind prize valued at nearly a quarter million dollars, will support the production of Lindsay’s feature film, The Words We Can’t Speak, which is inspired by the life of Lindsay’s Inuk grandmother, according to a WIDC press release.

In a statement, Lindsay notes her gratitude for the honour, as well as her hopes for the film’s resonance with emerging artists.

Full article here: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2021/lindsay-mcintyre-earns-widc-feature-film-award

 

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill Sees a Wide-Open World, Freed from the Impossible

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By Perrin Grauer

Posted on June 01, 2021 | Updated June 01, 2021, 9:02AM

The artist and ECU faculty member on materiality, storytelling, and how decentering dominant histories can foster a better future.

Oftentimes, visions of the everyday can pass us by without making us blink.

For Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, multidisciplinary artist, writer and assistant professor in Emily Carr University’s Audain Faculty of Art, the everyday is a space that has only just begun to reveal its secrets. In the commonplace, she sees a rich material vocabulary, brimming with potential. In the concept of “ordinary,” she sees a “hierarchy of knowledges” overdue for dismantling.

To engage artistically with such concepts, Gabrielle fittingly starts with what is closest at hand.

“I often work with materials that are sourced from plants, or dollar stores, or things I find in the street; things I already see around myself in my life,” she says. “I think materials definitely speak a language. I hope mine talk about everyday experiences, the charge and the possibility in those common things.”

Some days, says Gabrielle, a wander around a neighbourhood can be enough to both renew a connection to the here-and-now, and to locate herself within the broader movement of history.

“Sometimes I just like walking down the street and picking thistles and dandelions and appreciating these tough little plants,” she says. “But sometimes I learn about the stories of people who have left whatever object behind, and sometimes I can connect into larger sweeping narratives of change and history when I learn about the materials I work with.”

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This keen sense of how materials can both speak to connections and unearth the elemental in the everyday is clearly on display in the works that make up Gabrielle’s current solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in New York City. Titled Projects: Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, the show runs through Aug. 15, as part of MoMA’s Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series.

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2021/gabrielle-lhirondelle-hill-sees-a-wide-open-world-freed-from-the-impossible

Christine Howard Sandoval’s CAG Show An ‘Utterance in Unlearning History’

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By Perrin Grauer

Posted on February 09, 2021 | Updated February 09, 2021, 10:14AM

The new exhibition of works by the artist and ECU faculty member is showing in downtown Vancouver through May 2.

A new exhibition of works by artist and ECU faculty member Christine Howard Sandoval at the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG) explores the relationships between land, language, image and archive, according to exhibition co-curators Julia Lamare and Kimberly Phillips.

The show, entitled A wall is a shadow on the land, brings together drawings, adobe sculptures, and documents from both personal and public collections, as well as an installation at the CAG’s permanent satellite site, at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station.

“With A wall is a shadow on the land Howard Sandoval makes present Indigenous ways of thinking about space and time, and unsettles the archive through the act of embodied making, enlargement, recontextualization, and collage,” Julia and Kimberly write in their introductory essay.

“The stratum of material across spaces encourages multiple entry-points for interpretation, calls into question the use-value of the image, and resists the archive’s power to cement colonial pasts. Howard Sandoval’s act of archival dislodging and material reclamation is an utterance in unlearning history.”

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Centre-stage in the CAG exhibition is Christine’s use of adobe — a composite of sand, clay, water, and straw or grass, used to make a “sun-baked mud brick.” Christine, an Obispeño Chumash and Hispanic artist, belongs to a family whose members include generations of women who worked as adobe brick makers.

This ancient and commonly used Indigenous building material has “become synonymous with the structures built by Spanish missionaries who colonized the Pacific Coast of the United States from the seventeenth century onwards.”

The large-scale wall works in A wall is a shadow on the land are created by drawing with masking tape on paper, and then applying a thick layer of adobe overtop. The masking tape is then removed before the mud can dry. A resolutely physical composition emerges, “at once quoting and flattening the elemental forms of the Spanish mission architecture vernacular,” Julia and Kimberly write.

“By rendering her images with the very building material of the iconic architecture, Howard Sandoval resists its colonial appropriation, reclaims its deep history and asserts a new visual language for its encounter.”

Full article by Perrin Grauer: christine-howard-sandovals-cag-show-an-utterance-in-

unlearning-history

Towards an Ecology of Place

Mimi and Yaaz photo edit

 

By Perrin Grauer | filed in Art, Faculty, Alumni, Community Collaboration

Posted on November 24, 2020 | Updated November 25, 2020, 7:26AM

DIY brush making is part of resilient material practice, says artist and ECU faculty member Mimi Gellman

A brush-making tutorial aimed at empowering locked-down visual artists has joined a broader continuum of arts teachings emphasizing material ingenuity and self-reliance, says artist and ECU associate professor Mimi Gellman.

DIY Brush Making, begun over the summer with help from ECU graduate student Yaaz Pillay, provides video and PDF tutorials for using materials of just about any kind to create brushes with unique mark-making capabilities — a vital lesson as many artists face barriers to purchasing pricey brushes from retail outlets.

“Having to rely on art supply stores doesn’t provide the opportunity to extend our abilities to problem solve, be creative and more self-reliant,” Mimi says.

“The thing that I get so excited about is how nimble we can be in the face of obstacles. At this moment, when everything seems to be closing down and we have less of the access we’re accustomed to, in what ways might we have more of a different kind of access? What possibilities are opened up?”

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2020/toward-an-ecology-of-place

Lindsay McIntyre Solo Show Featured as Part of Capture Photo Fest

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By Perrin Grauer | filed in Faculty

Posted on April 21, 2020 | Updated April 27, 2020, 5:00PM

The exhibition features outtakes from Lindsay’s films, mounted into lightboxes.

New work by Lindsay McIntyre, film artist and Assistant Professor of Film + Screen Arts at Emily Carr University, is currently collected in a solo exhibition at Marion Scott Gallery, in partnership with Capture Photography Festival.

The show, entitled Lindsay McIntyre: the tool of the tools, features outtakes from Lindsay’s films, mounted into lightboxes.

“Hands are the tool of tools,” Lindsay says in her exhibition statement.

“They represent work and time. They tell stories. They are the record of our lives. They represent guilt and things unsaid. They dismiss, threaten, summon, feed, and signal friendship and love. They are how a mother shows love to her child.”

Lindsay, who is of Inuk/settler Scottish descent, draws a line between her ongoing formal inquiries, and the particular resonance her subject holds for Inuit communities and individuals.

“For Inuit, hands and the tools they make have always been a concrete part of life,” she continues, noting how her formal concerns as a filmmaker work in concert with that textual focus.

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2020/lindsay-mcintyre-solo-show-featured-as-part-of-capture-photo-fest

Lindsay McIntyre Featured in ‘Border Crossings’ Magazine

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By Guest Entry | filed in Media, Faculty, Aboriginal Gathering Place, Media Release

Posted on January 21, 2020 | Updated January 27, 2020, 2:31PM

The in-depth interview by Robert Enright digs into Lindsay’s current practice, praxis, and how both were sparked by a found piece of film.

Film + Screen Arts faculty member Lindsay McIntyre is the subject of a feature interview by Robert Enright in the current issue of Border Crossingsmagazine.

In the article, Enright characterizes Lindsay’s films as “familial and cultural meta-narratives; at the same time that they tell the story of her Inuk great-grandmother’s life, they also tell the story of their own making.”

He writes: “Much of their power comes from their material presence. McIntyre makes her own emulsion, so that her films look as if they have come to us from another time. The scratching and degradation are utterly seductive; the mind wants to understand what the eye is seeing, and what we are seeing can be everything from an ulu, the Inuk cutting tool, to caribou teeth strung on a wire and held in the beautifully lived-in hands of a matrilineal family member. She can run her camera lens over the weighty surface of a massive steel vessel caught in the Arctic ice, or in her backyard garden where she records her daughter’s flickering, lyric presence.”

In describing the “impressive” range of Lindsay’s filmography, Enright says that “(h)owever different the films may be in subject matter, her signature sits on them all, a kind of visual fingerprint.”

Indeed, as Lindsay herself says in the interview, “(t)here is always the mark of me as a maker in my works.”

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2020/lindsay-mcintyre-featured-in-border-crossings-magazine

Canadian Art Magazine Features Cover Artwork by Mimi Gellman

Cover of Canadian Art Magazine Mimi Gellman

 

By Perrin Grauer | filed in Art

Posted on January 13, 2020 | Updated January 23, 2020, 8:47AM

The work by the ECU Associate Professor is part of a drawing practice which explores the ‘architecture of consciousness.’

Artwork by artist and ECU Associate Professor Mimi Gellman was selected to appear on the cover of the current issue of Canadian Art magazine.

The gleaming, otherworldly image graces the magazine’s issue on antimatter — a subject which “presents a mirror world of abstract phenomena: time reversals, mutual annihilation, cosmic rays, cloud chambers, an infinite sea of sub-atomic particles that parallels our ‘real’ world of matter,” according to the issue’s editors.

Mimi describes her work as approaching some of the affinities between the biological, the perceptual, the cultural and the astronomical.

“My drawings do not explore the exterior world we perceive but rather what I call the ‘architecture of consciousness’ which permits us to perceive it,” she says.

“Recalling astronomical diagrams and reflecting the mixture of hybrid cultural worldviews in my background, they reveal deep similarities between the dimension explored by sub-atomic physics and the implicit interiority of contemporary art.”

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2020/canadian-art-magazine-features-cover-artwork-by-mimi-gellman

Lindsay McIntyre in Capture Photo Fest

The exhibition features outtakes from Lindsay’s films, mounted into lightboxes.

New work by Lindsay McIntyre, film artist and Assistant Professor of Film + Screen Arts at Emily Carr University, is currently collected in a solo exhibition at Marion Scott Gallery, in partnership with Capture Photography Festival.

The show, entitled Lindsay McIntyre: the tool of the tools, features outtakes from Lindsay’s films, mounted into lightboxes.

“Hands are the tool of tools,” Lindsay says in her exhibition statement.

“They represent work and time. They tell stories. They are the record of our lives. They represent guilt and things unsaid. They dismiss, threaten, summon, feed, and signal friendship and love. They are how a mother shows love to her child.”

Lindsay, who is of Inuk/settler Scottish descent, draws a line between her ongoing formal inquiries, and the particular resonance her subject holds for Inuit communities and individuals.

“For Inuit, hands and the tools they make have always been a concrete part of life,” she continues, noting how her formal concerns as a filmmaker work in concert with that textual focus.

“These film frames and extracts from a decade of film work bring to light the interplay between surface and subject, frame and content and shed light on the recurrent depiction of hands in my body of film works. Working primarily with high-contrast black and white 16mm film, these images stem from a series of motion picture works produced between 2005-2013. The bounding box of the 16mm film frame enters the picture, normally withheld from view; it sees light at last.”

In its own exhibition statement, the Marion Scott Gallery’s spotlights this ongoing, twofold inquiry — into both subject and form — in Lindsay’s work:

“Much of McIntyre’s extensive catalogue represents a parallel investigation into her personal identity and family history as well as celluloid itself, its processes and associated mechanisms—manipulating the various steps in the hand-developing process of 16mm film and being the “one-woman machine” responsible for every role behind the camera. McIntyre’s richly textured, grainy, or diaphanous imagery is more visual art than cinema, with marks and signature characteristics showing the hand of the artist as much one would expect to see in a carving or painting.”

Because of COVID-19, Marion Scott Gallery held a virtual opening for the show in early April. Lindsay notes that video tours of the exhibition are still accessible via the gallery’s Instagram. A selection of works from the show are also available for viewing on Capture Photo Festival’s website.

Full article by Perrin Grauer:https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2020/lindsay-mcintyre-solo-show-featured-as-part-of-capture-photo-fest

Canadian Art Magazine Features Cover Artwork by Mimi Gellman

Artwork by artist and ECU Associate Professor Mimi Gellman was selected to appear on the cover of the current issue of Canadian Art magazine.

The gleaming, otherworldly image graces the magazine’s issue on antimatter — a subject which “presents a mirror world of abstract phenomena: time reversals, mutual annihilation, cosmic rays, cloud chambers, an infinite sea of sub-atomic particles that parallels our ‘real’ world of matter,” according to the issue’s editors.

Mimi describes her work as approaching some of the affinities between the biological, the perceptual, the cultural and the astronomical. “My drawings do not explore the exterior world we perceive but rather what I call the ‘architecture of consciousness’ which permits us to perceive it,” she says. 
”Recalling astronomical diagrams and reflecting the mixture of hybrid cultural worldviews in my background, they reveal deep similarities between the dimension explored by sub-atomic physics and the implicit interiority of contemporary art.”

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2020/canadian-art-magazine-features-cover-artwork-by-mimi-gellman