Like a Dream that Vanishes: Films by Barbara Sternberg
In collaboration with the Department of Visual Arts & Artlab Gallery at Western University, LOMAA welcomes Toronto-based filmmaker Barbara Sternberg to introduce and discuss a selection of her 16mm films spanning the past two decades.
PROGRAM
FAR FROM
Barbara Sternberg | Canada | 2014 | colour | sound | 17 minutes
"The images that constitute our memory tend to rigidify into spectres in the course of their (collective and individual) historical transmission. Hence the task is to bring them to life.” - Giorgio Agamben, “Nymphs”
Constructed with repetitions and variations, in reference to the musical form of a Nocturne, “Far From” is an accumulation of layers, a density of living, the noise of existence. Ghosts of lives lived and traces of lives being lived, rising.(B.St)
LIKE A DREAM THAT VANISHES
Barbara Sternberg | Canada | 1999 | colour | sound | 41 minutes
Like a Dream That Vanishes continues my work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, the stuff of life in the emulsion, and the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses. (Your life is like a candle burning...) Imageless emulsion is inter-cut with brief shots of natural elements and mise-en-scene of the stages of human life: a little boy runs and falls; teens hang out together at night smoking; sun shines through tree branches; men pace, waiting; flashes of lightning; an elderly man speaks philosophically about miracles. The movement between form and formlessness, appearing and withdrawing, creation and dissolution (death) are felt. The film image, as the reality behind it, is not quite graspable. (B.St)
Artist Bio
Toronto-based filmmaker Barbara Sternberg has been making films since the mid 1970's. Her films have been screened widely across Canada as well as internationally at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, The Museum of Modern Art and Millennium Workshop in New York, and theCinematheque Ontario in Toronto. Her work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. She has been a visiting artist at a number of Canadian universities and galleries and in 2011, Sternberg was made a Laureate of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Sternberg’s film work combines reflections on the medium itself with social issues and universal questions of how we experience reality, how we as humans are situated in the world. Films are themselves experiences, realities. Her films work at the intersection of film and life- questions of vision, perception, motion and temporality. Although her main practice is film, Sternberg has worked in other media including performance, installation and video.
Sternberg has been active in a number of fronts in Toronto, teaching at York University, working for Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre, serving on Toronto and Ontario Arts Council juries and committees, helping to organize the International Experimental Film Congress (May 1989), and was a founding member of Pleasure Dome, artists' film and video exhibition group. She wrote a handbook and conducted workshops on Media Literacy for high school teachers. She recently organized the "Association for Film Art" (AFFA) to actively support and promote awareness and appreciation of film art. While living in the Maritimes, Sternberg co-founded Struts, an artist-run centre in Sackville, New Brunswick.
Sternberg wrote a column, "On (experimental) Film" for several years for Cinema Canada, and has written essays on artists and on filmmakers. As well, she has written on the status of film art in galleries and museums—an issue on which she has conducted symposia and lobbied vigorously.
This program is supported in part by the London Arts Council through the City of London’s Community Arts Investment Program.
