Metallic: A Fish Film

By Carole Itter. At the grunt gallery until February 10

Watery images, infused with silvery light, float across the white wall onto which they’re projected. A stage set of fluttering and undulating silver fabric frames the scene. Silver waves lap on a rocky shore, a school of tubular silver forms bob and sway in the tide, a silver-costumed woman casts her net then fills her silver buckets against a background of silvery sound. Like those alien, fishlike creatures in the film, we are captured, ensnared.

Carole Itter’s Metallic: A Fish Film is on view at the grunt gallery, along with production stills, storyboards, written documentation of the project, and two large paintings on paper, produced during a live performance on the show’s opening night. One of Vancouver’s most august interdisciplinary artists, Itter has long produced mixed-media assemblages and installations, created solo and group performances, written poetry, and gathered oral histories. She has worked for years with enormous heaps and floods of discarded objects and materials, which she has gathered from Dumpsters, thrift shops, flea markets, and abandoned industrial sites. Folded into the altered found objects with which she builds her artworks is her ongoing condemnation of our continuing cycle of overconsumption, waste, and environmental degradation.

These themes run through Metallic, which is set in some indeterminate time in the future when our polluted and overfished oceans are almost bereft of life. Barnacles cling to low rocks, a few strands of seaweed shift and shimmy in the tide, the sandy beach is as bare and sterile as the surface of the moon. No other living creatures come into view—no fish, no seals, no sea birds—until suddenly, a school of strange silver forms triggers what Itter describes in her artist’s statement as an atavistic compulsion in an elder fisherwoman “to set a net and begin harvesting”.

As the fisher, Itter wears a costume that is itself a collage or assemblage, combining gold and silver sequins, a “tail” of silver lamé feathers or scales, and long strands and tubes of silver fabric and paper. This remarkable costume evokes life at the edge of a living sea—minnows, anemones, seaweed, herons crookedly stalking their prey.

The one-eyed “fish” that Itter gathers into her net, then packs into shiny metal buckets, are wooden spindles sprayed with silver paint. As the artist recounted at a recent public talk, she had stored boxes of these discarded industrial forms in her basement for years before deciding what to do with them. To stimulate her creative process, she floated some of them in Burrard Inlet and “played” with them. The idea for her film evolved from there.

Assisting in the realization of her vision are cinematographer Bo Myers and sound designer Teresa Connors. The soundtrack is a collage of industrial noises with the brilliant Peggy Lee improvising on cello, and is as significant a presence here as the film’s striking visuals, amplifying the ominous and dystopian mood. Despite its short running time (five minutes), Metallic is an individual and collaborative triumph.