By Andrea Miller
Experimental film and video makers in Ottawa are gaining national attention but are almost invisible within the city limits.
The Available Light Screening Collective’s first 2004 screening, Worlds We Are Trying to Inhabit, takes another step towards exposing this artwork beyond the fringes of Ottawa’s artistic community.
“Experimental is a broad term – it doesn’t just mean watching paint dry. It’s work that challenges conventional notions of film and video making in form, structure and content. It can be counter-cultural; it can be revolutionary,” says Penny McCann, a Centretown resident who is a filmmaker and member of the collective.
What began in 1995 as a group of local filmmakers sharing equipment costs and their work eventually evolved into the current collective, says Phil Rose, a member of Available Light and the show’s curator. When costs escalated and money ran short, the filmmakers decided to focus more on screenings instead of production.
Though the collective is made up of only seven members, whose ages range from 26 to 46, McCann says there is a surprising amount of activity and interest in the city and beyond.
“We do try to expand audiences. We did New Tribe in October, showcasing contemporary Aboriginal work,” she says. “And there were tons of people who had never come before, a whole new audience. Curators, nationally, are approaching us with programs now, which is kind of scary.”
The first screening of the season features three films that take unconventional approaches to subjects like globalization, growing cities, and the search for identity.
In some cases, this means the use of digitally altered imagery, distorted newsreel footage, filming through a glass marble or multiple narrators.
Since the term “experimental” can be intimidating to novice viewers, the collective’s job is to “engage audiences that are not necessarily oriented to the art world,” says James Missen, a member of the collective and a film professor at Carleton University.
“It’s about how to strike a balance between popular appeal and artistic excellence. To program things that don’t water down the broader, great work that’s being done in experimental media. But at the same time, that’s not too distant and weird so people can’t get into it.”
Missen thinks the collective helps sustain an overlooked artistic niche.
“What Available Light addresses in Ottawa is an absence. I mean, SAW [Gallery] exists, quite literally, in the shadow of the National Gallery of Canada down the street. And since the mid-1990s, the National Gallery has not had any sort of media art programming. It’s not coincidental that that’s why Available Light got started and continues to exist.”
The National Gallery went from screening experimental works and charging admission to collecting them, says Josée Drouin-Brisebois, the assistant curator of Contemporary Canadian Art at the National Gallery.
“We started treating them as works of art instead of just showing them in a theatre setting. We show experimental media in any room now, not just the video room.”
Because of the modest size of Ottawa’s experimental community, Missen says there are advantages not possible in sprawling metropolises.
“In Ottawa, there is an art community, irregardless of discipline or medium that doesn’t exist in Toronto. In Toronto, you find that the video people are together, the film people are together. The community is allowed to be closer here, in terms of how people relate to each other.”
The collective’s screenings are exhibited at the SAW Gallery on Nicholas Street. Their next screening, Somethings About Love, is showing on Valentine’s Day.