A screening of works by two Montreal-based artists who embed video in multi-media environments and situations. For her 2012 installation, Anomalies, Julie Favreau took as inspiration a Soviet-era novella about science gone awry, which she then utterly transformed into a series of sci-fi scenarios with enigmatic objects, to “suggest parables about the judicious use of knowledge and technology, and about personal discipline and mindfulness” (Saelan Twerdy, Canadian Art). Dominique Sirois’s recently completed project, Alarm Songs, orchestrates the passage from modernity to the dystopian now using sampled warning sounds from a music database and texts by Freud, Stockhausen, and the Russian poet Alexei Gastev. The suite of four videos connects different epochs through quasi-allegorical figures and narratives to reveal the past function and latent memory of the locations they were filmed in, millenial pantomimes that track the development of militarism, industrialization, globalization, and leisure, as forms of social control.

Anomalies | Julie Favreau/Canada 2012. 11 min. DCP
Color Boy | Dominique Sirois/Canada 2015. 7 min. DCP
Military Techno | Dominique Sirois/Canada 2015. 8 min. DCP
Victorian Sushi | Dominique Sirois/Canada 2015. 11 min. DCP
Leisure Machine | Dominique Sirois/Canada 2015. 20 min. DCP