Film by Barbara Sternberg!
Sunday, September 15, 2019 - Sunday, September 15, 2019
Barbara Sternberg's Untitled #1 (sun vision)
Sunday, September 15, 2019 @ 8:00 PM
EMMEDIA Gallery & Production Society - 2005 10 Ave SW, Calgary, AB
Admission by donation (pay what you can)
Untitled #1 (sun vision) (2019)
Barbara Sternberg
16mm | Silent - 43 minutes
Admission is by donation (pay what you can)
MONOGRAPH is pleased to present Barbara Sternberg’s 2019 silent 16mm film Untitled #1 (sun vision). The film will be preceded by Sternberg’s 16mm short Colour Theory (2014).
“Everlasting and powerful is the theatre of life, without substance, but forever in motion, forever doing battle with death.” Hermann Hesse
There were two initial impulses for the film: the paintings of John Turner (whence the bracketed title ”sun vision”) whose almost-not-there paintings dovetail with the space I find myself in at this stage of life: at the frontier between youth and old age, not all-is-still-to-come but not all-is-over yet either; and the spirit-filled paintings of Emily Carr, particularly her later swirling treetops and skies.
Untitled #1 is a film of liminal thresholds, borders, amorphous states - sky, clouds, fog, lake, snow. A film in motion - camera gestures and emulsion activity. People and seasons pass in the daily repetitive cycles- repetitions and reprises and beginnings again - sameness amidst the fleeting. Blurring, merging - the world as it is forming and disappearing…Not nothing, everything.
The film speaks to the shifting changes from youthful summer’s high activity to faded wintry old age - and calmer waters. Every ending moves to a new beginning.
Toronto filmmaker Barbara Sternberg has been making films since the mid-seventies. Her films have been screened widely across Canada as well as internationally at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, The Museum of Modern Art and Millennium Workshop in New York, and the Ontario Cinematheque, Toronto. Her work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. She has been a visiting artist at a number of Canadian universities and galleries including the University of Guelph, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Dunlop Art Gallery, as well as the Universite d'Avignon, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, Sternberg was made a Laureate of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Sternberg’s film work combines reflections on the medium itself with social issues and universal questions of how we experience reality, how we as humans are situated in the world. Films are themselves experiences, realities. Her films work at the intersection of film and life- questions of vision, perception, motion and temporality. Although her main practice is film, Sternberg has worked in other media including performance, installation and video.
MONOGRAPH would like to thank EMMEDIA Gallery & Production Society for graciously hosting this presentation in their screening room space.
