Artist on Fire: The Work of Joyce Wieland
Please join us at Good Sport on Tuesday February 2nd at 7pm for a 16mm screening of Kay Armatage's 1987 film, 'Artist on Fire: The Work of Joyce Wieland'.
PROGRAM
Artist on Fire: The Work of Joyce Wieland
Kay Armatage | Canada | 1987 | colour | 54 minutes
Joyce Wieland was, for well over thirty years, one of Canada's most exciting and innovative artists. She worked in virtually every artistic medium, including cloth works, pastels, coloured pencils, oils, bronze, watercolours, and films of all gauges. One of the founding group of what came to be known as structural filmmakers in New York in the late 60s, she was also one of the first artists of this century to break into women's traditional crafts as an art form, and used both film and cloth works as platforms for her principal political subjects - ecology, Canadian nationalism, and feminism.
This documentary film combines expressionistic uses of cinematography and sound to examine Wieland's work in all media. Avoiding both the chronological treatment usually found in retrospective considerations of artists' work and the conventional voice-over narration common to films on art, “Artist on Fire” offers an analysis of thirty years of Wieland's work that is rich in both detail and contextual information. --(info courtesy of CFMDC)
"The central structuring devices of the film are the direct address of the artist to camera/audience and the multiple, fragmented and unscripted voice-overs which combine various discourses: personal, academic, descriptive, analytical, and something approaching the poetic. In contrast to Wieland's voice, which is mixed clearly, completes sentences, speaks alone, and is corporealized (synchronized to her lip movements on screen), the unidentified, disembodied and inter-cut voice-overs are treated with an hallucinatory reverb and embedded in multiple tracks including sounds from Wieland's films, additional sound effects, and music. The intended effect is of contrasting modes of address, identification, and subjectivity." -- Kay Armatage, "Joyce Wieland, Feminist Documentary, and the Body of the Work." Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 13, no. 1-2 (1989). (pp. 99-100)
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THE PARABLE OF THE TULIP PAINTER AND THE FLY
An intoxicating flower; a metaphorical insect; a longing reach across the centuries.
The film is a philosophical search drenched in luminous colors and sparkling light.
Having grown the beautiful tulip I fell
deeply under its spell -
an affliction shared by an artist from another time and place.
In such luxurious and temporary
beauty we crossed paths, sharing
fear (a reminder - a fly) of the transience of life.
The film is entirely hand processed.
--Charotte Pryce
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Kay Armatage is a Professor at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed to Cinema Studies Institute, Innis College and The Women and Gender Studies Institute. She is a member of the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama.
Author of The Girl from God's Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema (University of Toronto Press 2003). Co-editor of Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women's Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). Armatage is the Editor of Equity and How to Get It (Toronto: Inanna Press, 1999). Also, she is the author of articles on women filmmakers, feminist theory and Canadian cinema in books, film magazines and refereed journals.
Armatage acts as international programmer, Toronto International Film Festival, 1983-2004. Vice-Chair of the Ontario Arts Council, 1991-1997. She was also the Director of Undergraduate Women's Studies Program, and the founding Director of the Graduate Collaborative Program in Women's Studies.
Charlotte Pryce has been making films and optical objects since 1986 and her works have screened throughout the world. She has taught experimental film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Academy of Art (San Francisco), Kent Institute of Design (Canterbury, England), and is currently a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles). In 2013 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association honored her with the Douglass Edwards Award for best experimental cinema achievement.