IMAX Screening: Outer Worlds

Outer Worlds is an extra-ordinary film program that features five, experimental IMAX films by Canada’s leading artists: Oliver Husain, Lisa Jackson, Kelly Richardson, Michael Snow, and Leila Sujir. The theme of the commissioned program is in keeping with the cinematic genre typical of IMAX films—the larger-than-life landscape that forms an outer world beyond the limits of the human sensorium. Each of the films explores expanded cinema through different ecologies of the non-human: the forest, lichen, snails, water, and sky. The works propose different worlds of experience and distinct grammars of immersion through a meeting with the camera. The films imagine common worlds by reflecting upon the exigencies of intercultural and interspecies communication, a task that has taken on great urgency in the 21st century as we grapple with how to adapt to the ecological realities brought about by anthropogenic climate change.
www.xlouterworlds.ca

This IMAX screening requires a ticket. Please register on Eventbrite:

Program:

• Embers and the Giant (Kelly Richardson, 2019, Canada, IMAX Laser, 7 min)
• Lichen (Lisa Jackson, 2019, IMAX Laser 3D, Canada, 10 min)
• Garden of the Legend of the Golden Snail (Oliver Husain, 2019, IMAX Laser 3D, Canada, 13min) 
• Aerial (Leila Sujir, 2019, Canada, IMAX Laser, 9 min 20 sec)
• Cityscape (Michael Snow, 2019, Canada, IMAX Laser, 8 min 30 sec)

The screening will take place from 7pm to 8pm, following with a Q&A session from 8pm to 8:30pm.

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Bios

Taking cues from 19th-century landscape painting, 20th-century cinema, and 21st-century planetary research, Kelly Richardson crafts video installations and photographs that offer imaginative glimpses into the future and prompt careful considerations of the present. Her work has been selected for the Beijing, Busan, Canadian, Gwangju and Montréal biennales, as well as major moving image exhibitions including TIFF and Sundance. She is represented in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (USA), National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Arts Council Collection (England), Southampton City Art Gallery (England), Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art (England), among others. After 14 years in the United Kingdom, in 2017 Richardson emigrated back to Canada to live and work in the unceded traditional territory of the W̱SÁNEĆ peoples on Vancouver Island.

Lisa Jackson is an Anishinaabe (Aamjiwnaang) award-winning creator of documentary and fiction film and television, VR, and multimedia installation work. As a director, her projects have won a Genie and Canadian Screen Award, been nominated for a Webby and Canadian Association of Journalists Award, broadcast throughout Canada, and screened at Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, Berlinale, and Hot Docs. In 2020 she launched Door Number 3 Productions and is currently in post-production on feature hybrid documentary WILFRED BUCK and was a producer of Hot Docs’ Citizen Minutes in 2021.  She’s received the 2022 Chicken & Egg Award, the 2021 Documentary Organization of Canada Vanguard Award, sat on the NFB’s Indigenous Advisory, and is a member of the Indigenous Screen Office’s Membership Circle. She lives in Toronto, has an MFA from York University, and attended the CFC Directors Lab and TIFF Talent Lab and Writers Studio.

Oliver Husain is an artist and filmmaker. His projects are often collaborations with other artists and friends; and often begin with a fragment of history, a rumour, a personal encounter or a distant memory. He uses a wide range of cinematic languages, technical experiments and visual pleasures — such as dance, puppetry, costume, special effects — to animate his research and fold the viewers into complex narrative set-ups. Recent exhibitions include Beauties of Lucknow,  a site-specific installation commissioned by Massey College, Toronto; Lenticoolers at Gallery Susan Hobbs, Toronto (with Malik McCoy); I don’t know you like that at University of Buffalo Art Galleries and Exposure at Camera Austria, Graz (Both with Kerstin Schroedinger); all 2023. His website is husain.de; his livestream performances (with Amy Lam) are available on drip-drop.tv

Leila Sujir is an artist working in video and video installation. Over the last forty years, Sujir has been building a body of video art works using a mix of fiction, fantasy and documentary with visual and audio collage techniques. Her video art works have been shown in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Tate Gallery  (Liverpool), as well as galleries all over the world. Her work is in collections including the National Gallery of Canada and the Glenbow Museum. Leila Sujir is a professor emerita in the Studio Arts Department at Concordia University. She leads an art research studio-lab based at Concordia University, Elastic 3D Spaces, that most recently received a SSHRC grant, Thinking Allowed (2022), and a Canada Council production grant (2022).

Renowned visual artist and musician, Michael Snow’s paintings, sculpture, films, videos, photoworks, holograms and sound installations have been exhibited at, and are in the collections of, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Tate (London), the Philadelphia Museum of Fine arts, the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and many others. His films have been presented at festivals around the world and are in the collections of several film archives, including Anthology Film Archives in New York City, the Royal Belgian Film Archives, Brussels, and the Österreichisches Film Museum, Vienna. In 2018, he premiered a composition for the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, presented a sound-work based exhibition at Culturgest in Lisbon and installed an exhibition of sculpture at the Bilbao Guggenheim.