Snow Screening 2023
Happening March 30th @8pm
The Cloud Factory Artist-Run Centre is pleased to present our second annual SNOW SCREENING at Blow Me Down Trails Ski Club. This one-night event will showcase a number of digital works and short films from artists locally and across the world presented on a large-scale screen built from snow! This event is open to all ages and will be presented for free.
ACCESS NOTES
The screening will take place near the cafe at Blow Me Down Trails Cross Country Ski Club in Corner Brook, NL. The screening will take place outdoors and after dark. Blow Me Down is most easily accessible by car, and parking is available within a reasonable walking distance to the screening location. While a limited amount of bench and picnic table seating is available, attendees are encouraged to bring lawn chairs, picnic blankets or something to sit on comfortably and should dress warmly. The cafe will remain open, serving meals, snacks, hot beverages and alcohol for purchase. If you have specific questions about amenities and accessibility at Blow Me Down, please contact them for the fastest response.
More information on the location can be found here: https://blowmedown.ca/
This year’s SNOW SCREENING IS A 42-MINUTE SCREENING FEATURING THE FOLLOWING WORKS:
Adam Hill: Jack’s Trail
Chris Wicker: 640 x 480 (299.99!)
Dallas Cant: Hot Plastic Suits
Dayna Mcleod: Secrets (shh!)
Effy Adar: Shea, by NASRA
Elaine Frigon: S’en Sortir
Jessica Hefford: A Recreation of Memories
Jeremy Wills: May-December
Karen Trask: 20 20
Kate Lain: Yellow Jubilee P260-5
Kim Kielhofner: The Decameron
Marsel Reddick: FLOW
Megan Arnold/Penny Hallas: The Future of the Universe / Mae Dyfodol Y Bydysawd
Sarah Barstead: This Town has Snapped
Shan Leigh Pomeroy: Hedgehog Dilemma
Tiffany E.A Lyver: Ghost Town
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Adam Hill
Adam Hill is a sound artist living in Charlottetown, PEI. He has received awards and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, SCI/ASCAP, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Sitka Centre for Art and Ecology, and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. His work has been presented and installed at the Charlottetown Film Festival (PE), Visible Verse Festival (BC), New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NY), Sonic Boom Festival (BC), New Horizons Music Festival (MO), Electroacoustic Barn Dance (FL), and the Murau International Music Festival (AUT), among others. As a composer for live performers, his music has been presented by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Atlantic String Machine, and the Vancouver Chamber Choir; and, he has been commissioned by the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, the Whatcom Symphony Orchestra, and the Vancouver Chinese Music Ensemble. He holds a doctorate from the University of British Columbia and currently teaches at Holland College. http://www.adamhillmusic.com/
Jack’s Trail is a video-poem featuring author Bren Simmers reading her poem of the same title. In only a minute of fast frames-per-second forest bathing, the film will leave viewers chamoised by cedar boughs and scrubbed clean by bottlebrush.
Chris Wicker
Chris Wicker is a New Media artist from Texarkana, TX. Chris received his BFA from Stephen F. Austin State University in 2018 and his MFA from Texas Christian University in 2021. Chris has had solo exhibitions at Blind Alley in Fort Worth, TX, Common Space in Bartlett, TX. and recently in the New Media Gallery at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts in Lubbock, TX. His work has also been included in multiple group exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Creative Exchange Gallery in Ruston, LA, and in the recent exhibition titled Script IV hosted here https://www.envisionartshow.com/script-iv. Internationally, Chris has been a part of exhibitions in Hiroshima, the Khodynka Gallery in Moscow, Russia, and included in The One Minutes Foundation showing of The Fields of Algorithms in The Netherlands. Currently practicing in Texarkana, TX, Chris maintains his role as the Visual Arts Director for the Texarkana Regional Arts and Humanities Council.
Within “640 x 480 (299.99!)” commercial breaks from the early 2000’s are overlaid on top of one another to create new and mesmerizing compositions while keeping the original intention of the footage intact.
Dallas Cant
Dallas Cant is a white queer sex worker and self-taught artist compelled with manipulations of the digital gaze. In fusing methods of hand embroidery, textile sculpture, performance, and videography, Dallas explores how to address the realities of transactional sex through the body, queer fabrication, and digitally fragmented portraiture. https://vucavu.com/en/artists/c/dallas-cant
The quite literally hot plastic suit serves as catalyst to parody the language and individualized rhetoric of green capitalism and take seriously the mundane emotionality of living with materially informed environments. By incorporating paid erotic gestures, Hot Plastic Suits complicates overtly simplistic critiques of commerciality, calling for a queer environmental politics that works to unravel the greed and destruction of colonialism without forgetting the legitimacy of sex work.
Dayna Mcleod
Dayna McLeod is a middle-ageing queer performance-based media artist. Her work often uses humour and capitalizes on exploiting the body's social and material conditions. She also uses remix practices to mashup mainstream culture to create counter narratives. www.Daynarama.com
Secrets (shh!) is a 1-minute micro supercut of instances in film and television where characters shh each other and talk about the telling and not telling of secrets.
Effy Adar
Effy Adar is a Black self taught multidisciplinary artist, DJ, organizer and curator based in Amiskwaciwaskahikan on Treaty 6 territory. She is the co-creator of Night Comfort and deejays under EFFY IN THE SKY. Effy also styles and directs music videos and photo shoots. She has worked in theatre as an actor, sound and video designer. She uses dance, art and education for community building, healing, and celebration. She loves making art, teaching workshops, and working on grass roots projects. Effy believes in creating the world we want to live in by finding imaginative ways to learn, connect, express, and contribute. https://vucavu.com/en/artists/a/effy-adar
"Shea" follows a family displaced by greed searching for a new home in a foreign place. As they explore they stumble upon pieces of home, orbiting around one specific finding; a traditional African couch. As the poem continues the family "nests" and adorns themselves in the magical gifts of the land. The bass, the ululation, the tall grass, and the beautiful, visibily queer and/or intergenerational cast was all meant to show the array of Blackness present in our families. Made or born into. It is the second last piece on NASRA's debut EP "Salve". A project invested in Black Indigenous healing; every song or poem representing a different herb and its medicine. "Shea" speaks to the belief that no matter where Black/African/Indigenous peoples land, we carry our beauty, joy, resilience and magic with us. Just as the shea tree has, all these generations later.
Elaine Frigon
Élaine Frigon has explored the parameters that have defined our identity for more than 25 years. Her works reflect on society and the human condition. After studying Architecture and Plastic Arts in Quebec and California, she became involved in the Montreal artistic community as coordinator of the artist center La Centrale in the early 90s. She currently teaches visual arts and media at the post-secondary level. Her videos have been presented in numerous festivals and conferences in Canada, Europe and South America, notably at the Video Art Festival of Camagüey in Cuba, at the Rencontres internationales des Instants Vidéo de Marseille and at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, Berlin. http://elainefrigon.com/
S’en sortir features the exploration of a confined space. It suggests a return to the place of refuge. Driven by the wind of change blowing through her room, a woman looks up.
Jessica Hefford
Jessica Hefford is an interdisciplinary artist from Buchans, Newfoundland with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from Grenfell Campus in Corner Brook. During her childhood she grew up close to nature, which still influences how she looks at the world today and her practice while producing art. In Jessica's University studies she became intrigued with folklore associated with plants, along with the scientific studies correlated with them as well. Jessica’s education at Grenfell Campus has given her the opportunity to learn many valuable skills, allowing her to pursue a future as an artist. This includes experience in printmaking, sculpture, textiles, and photography. Along with plants, mushrooms influence Jessica’s work tremendously. Particularly she explores the rich history fungi have in society and how they can benefit our planet. Especially their ability to consume plastic and toxic waste, and grow from this waste. Instagram: @jessh_draws
Through this series I wanted to express my own personal connection with home and its intimacy, along with a sense of separation or longing for these times as well. During the pandemic I was stuck in the home I grew up in, which I have a lot of fond memories of but it felt lacking somehow. Especially since I rarely went outside, did activities I often did in the past, or got to see my friends or family as frequently. By recreating these memories it helped me revive this sense of home and experience it once again. I created this video entirely with paper by cutting out silhouettes, and layering them on top of each other to change its colored tone. I also used stop motion photography to animate each scene. Accompanying this I applied sound to further bring these memories to life. The animation itself is imperfect, but I chose to embrace them. In a way the blurriness and choppiness reflect memories and how they can feel faded or remembered incorrectly.
Jeremy Wills
After Jeremy Wills participated in 2021’s CB Nuit festival, he began creating music and video work under the name Umbrella State Broadcasting (USB). USB has a more of an atmospheric focus than his poetry/performance-oriented work under his own name, and is more concerned with the relationship between sound and image, particularly music and film. Jeremy also produces graphic art, working with marker and ink, and sometimes paint. Instagram: @jeremyfwills24
“May-December” is an audiovisual collage between western Newfoundland and Nova Scotia (in some cases literally, as some of the footage was captured while crossing the Cabot Strait) in the summer and fall of 2022. The audio is just as much a collage as the visuals, because both were created by layering recordings captured while exploring a variety of settings. The video’s central image, the drone against a grey sky, is based on a series of photographs I took during a surprise interaction with a drone operated by an anonymous pilot near my home in Corner Brook. The title of the piece, along with this image, references the relationship between present and future in terms of human identity and technological advancement, as well as technology and the voyeuristic impulse.
Karen Trask
Karen Trask is a multidisciplinary artist living in Montreal. Creating works in installation, video and performance, she has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada, Japan, India, Mexico, USA and Europe as well as artist residencies in Helsinki, Paris and Tokyo. Her videos have been presented in festivals and museums in Canada, South America and Europe. Her work is in public and private collections: Qube Arts, Oswestry, UK, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. USA, The National Library of Quebec and The National Library of Canada. She has a BFA from the University of Waterloo, Ontario and a Masters Degree in Sculpture from Concordia University, Montreal. https://karentrask.com/
20-20 is a compilation of 5 short, video-journal reflections on 2020. Each was created as Karen Trask’s contribution to an exquisite corpse video project called 2GatherApart. It was organized by a group of Montreal artists as a way to stay connected and creative during the pandemic. 20-20 is a personal and humorous look at an unusual year.
Kate Lain
Kate Lain is a Los Angeles–area artist working in digital video, film, photography, paper, fabric, and other media. Much of her work involves collaboration with materials, conditions, and sites. Her films and videos have screened at festivals and venues internationally including the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Videoex Experimental Film & Video Festival, Black Maria Film + Video Festival, Experiments in Cinema, Echo Park Film Center, Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival, and Athens International Film + Video Festival. She has an MFA in Science & Natural History Filmmaking.
In Yellow Jubilee P260-5 paint sample cards normally trapped in a rigid grid of capitalism find new life when freed to dance across time.
Kim Kielhofner
Kim Kielhofner works in video, drawing, collage, and textiles. She is interested in how we understand narratives and how we place ourselves into them. Her process is based on interests in layered narrative, cinema, and literature through which she has developed an archive of images and ideas. Her work has been presented in solo shows at Dazibao (Montréal, CA), LUX (London, UK), VOX (Montréal, CA), Sporobole (Sherbrooke, CA) and k48 (Vienna, AT). Her work has also been shown widely in group exhibitions and screenings including Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, WRO Biennale, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, and Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, Buenos Aires. She has been an artist in residence at KulturKontakt (Vienna, AT), Aberystwyth Arts Centre (UK), the Red Mansion Foundation (Beijing, CN), and International Studio and Curatorial Program (Brooklyn, US). https://www.kimkielhofner.com/
Made during the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic, “The Decameron I” brings together short videos documenting thoughts, dreams and anxieties. They were made in the style of the Decameron, a collection of one hundred short stories written by Boccaccio in the 14th century. The short stories follow a structural framework with ten characters fleeing the Black Death outside of Florence. To entertain themselves, the characters establish a rule that everyone must tell a story daily. “The Decameron I” is the first volume of an ongoing project. It also contains selections created for 2GatherApart, an exquisite corpse video project for the times of the pandemic.
Marsel Reddick
Marsel Reddick is a transgender artist, based in Moh'kins'tsis, whose research focuses on the constitution and dissolution of the self. In their practice, they aim to unravel the entanglements of gender, sexuality, identity, body, and otherness through claymation, spatialized sound, comics, and interactive performance/installation. To demonstrate the instability of our realities, they attempt to facilitate experiences that challenge automatic distinctions between self and other, offering alternate modes of moving through the world. Instagram: @goobrainpalace.
Flow is a claymation about the melancholia of intimacy and desire. Over an electronic ambient soundtrack, plasticine oceans and faces appear on the screen intermittently with dancing shadows and text. The tone of the text is sentimental and emotionally ambiguous, riding a line of relief and grief toward the loss of another. Two stringy shadows become indistinguishable as they overlap, while text written in clay reads “we flowed in and out of being one/two…and yet we never touched”. According to Barad, when we sense that we are touching another, what we actually feel is magnetic repulsion between two atoms. Even in our most desirous and satisfactory moments, part of us always fights against the other. When we share a relationship with another, we become intertwined; to relate to another is to find oneself existing in the other. This intertwining creates distance; if having a distinct sense of self is necessary for connecting with another, losing oneself in the other amounts to a loss of other as well. Flow is an exploration of the attempts we make to become one with another, and the nuanced processes that unfold in lieu of absolute unity.
Megan Arnold/Penny Hallas
Megan Arnold is a Filipinx-Canadian multidisciplinary artist living in Guelph, Ontario. In her work, she uses humour as a coping mechanism to deal with anxiety in the face of an impending apocalypse.
Penny Hallas was born in Yorkshire, England and now resides in the Black Mountains, Wales - an area typically seen as a site of natural beauty but which is riddled with the scars of industrial activity. Sources/theoretical underpinnings include: art historical interrogations of landscape: art psychotherapy/systemic psychotherapy frameworks: archival material, poetry, myth and ritual.
After talking about the paths laid out for us, whether on the land or in our stars, we decided to follow will o' the wisps. The Future of the Universe / Mae Dyfodol y Bydysawd is a karaoke-inspired video that subverts ideas of pre-determined futures on a personal, global, and galactic level. Guided by instinct, embracing risk and open to accident we found ourselves playing in the margins between freedom and restraint, gravity and absurdity. This work was created as part of the virtual long-distance collaboration Reframing the Past >>> Emerging Futures through Elysium Gallery in Swansea, Wales.
Sarah Barstead
Sarah Barstead is an emerging artist living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. https://linktr.ee/sarahbarstead
"This Town Has Snapped" is a film shot in 2022 on 8mm Kodachrome for the WNDX festival of moving images 1 take super 8 challenge. It was digitally altered and completed in January of this year. It is a surrealist portraiture (like much of my work,) of a green man dealing with an unwanted guest.
Shan Leigh Pomeroy
Shan Leigh Pomeroy (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer based out of St. John’s, Newfoundland. They hold a BFA with distinction in Studio Art & Art History from Concordia University and a diploma in Graphic Design from CNA. Shan works in various media, including painting, drawing, design, animation, music, photography, and textiles. Their creative interests incorporate archival imagery and documentation, gender, anatomy, geography, kitsch, as well as the contrast of media and style. Their artistic output deals heavily with body politics and the human relationship to sickness, health, and space, employing tongue-in-cheek methods and clever juxtaposition to communicate these themes effectively. In 2015, Shan spent two years in Hong Kong teaching English and Art to kids aged 2-12 and carries a childlike, playful quality into her work to this day. Since 2007, they have won several awards and grants and contributed written and visual projects to exhibitions, screenings, markets, and publications across Canada, Italy, Hong Kong, Greece, and Quebec. Shan currently lives and works in St. John’s, Newfoundland with her partner and two cats.
Hedgehog Dilemma is a collaged stop-motion animation that parallels the hedgehog dilemma metaphor with the physical distancing enforced by the COVID-19 pandemic. (Intimacy cannot occur without the inevitability of substantial mutual harm)
Tiffany E.A Lyver
Tiffany Elizabeth was influenced from a young age into a career in the arts. Family and friends fostered a love of creating where others learned destruction. Now an interdisciplinary artist based in Newfoundland, she recently graduated the Visual Arts Program at Grenfell Campus. Instagram: @tiffanymadeanartaccount
Ghost Town was made during lockdown, when I was musing on growing up and returning home.