Projects
A FEMINIST LENS: THE 1973 WOMEN & FILM INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL EXHIBITION (2024-2025)
Curated by Cléo Sallis-Parchet
TIFF Film Reference Library
27 October 2024 - March 2025
Recently celebrating 50 years, the 1973 Women & Film International Festival remains overlooked in Canadian film history. A groundbreaking 10-day event at the St. Lawrence Centre in Toronto, the festival showcased films by women in cinema from the 20th century, including Alice Guy-Blaché, Alanis Obomsawin, and Agnès Varda. The exhibition A Feminist Lens presents archival material from the collection, never before seen in Toronto. It includes Super 8 and open-reel video recordings, photos, letters, newspaper clippings, and documents, providing a glimpse into the collaborative and feminist work of those who helped bring the festival to life.
FLOATING RELICS: A CINEMATIC WALKSHOP IN SEARCH OF NIAGARA (2022)
Spanning from the 1950s-1990s, the Jacobs’ Family home film collection captures the shifting landscape of St. Catharines and the Niagara borderlands through the lens of a local family. Curators Christina Dovolis and Cleo Sallis-Parchet worked with the archive to unravel, digitize, and thread narratives related to the materiality of borders and kinship in a short experimental film. By re-mapping the landscape that surrounds us, we challenged geographic conventions and reimagined patterns of belonging in St. Catharines.
SOUND JOURNEYS (2017)
A group of musicians and visual artists came together to explore Canada's contemporary cultural landscape. In three distinct journeys, they covered the breadth of the country, from the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia to the Atlantic Ocean on the East Coast. London-based percussionist and composer Sarathy Korwar was joined by a neo-soul singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist of Métis Native American descent, David Morin. Sophia Burke, a Vancouver-born and Toronto-based visual artist, captured their experiences as they travelled from her birthplace to her current home city.
THE SNAPSHOT PROJECT
(2012-2013)
The Snapshot Project is a community-based art experiment developed around the idea of chance. This public art project provides an opportunity to investigate and explore an environment. In a world where digital photography has its primary place online, we believe that it is time to bring photography back to its roots: in film format. Through the use of disposable cameras, we offer a unique way of capturing moments and details of the everyday.
WOMEN & FILM FESTIVAL 1973
ARCHIVAL DOCUMENTARY FILM PROJECT (2021-ongoing)
In 2021 a collection of material related to the Women & Film Festival (Toronto, 1973) was uncovered in the VideoCabaret archive, including open-reel videotapes and super8 films. Digitizing the footage, I found interviews with notable feminists and filmmakers (including Nell Hall-Humpherson and Agnès Varda), and travel documentation of the festival organizers across Canada. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the festival, my project aims to gather the disparate material into a dedicated archive at the TIFF Film Reference Library for future researchers interested in feminism, festival studies, film history and production in Canada. Furthermore, a short documentary film will bring together the archival material, along with new footage shot in Summer 2023 at the Women & Film Reunion. This project is funded by Archive/Counter-Archive and developed in partnership with TIFF, LIFT, and Vtape.
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/852467201
A SENSE OF IMPENDING DOOM - A STRATAWALK FOR TURBULENT TIMES (2020)
A "walkshop" was organized by the Hamilton Perambulatory Unity (HPU) in partnership with Art and Cartography of the International Cartographic Society in July 2020. It asked the question: Can sensorial and quotidian art-making practices help us to map our way out of this impending doom?
WALKING CITIES (2017)
A digital project connecting writers in four Canadian cities to connect on a series of dialogues, in which they reflected on the relationship our thoughts have to the places that we live in and imagine.
ART BOOK WEEK, TORONTO ART BOOK FAIR (2015-2018)
The Toronto Art Book Fair is dedicated to increasing the visibility, dissemination, appreciation, and understanding of the artists' book and its contemporary manifestations within the visual arts field in Toronto and abroad. Independent artistic print culture has a rich narrative in Canadian art history, and is an often overlooked aspect of Canadian cultural identity. The goal of TOABF is to highlight these personal and collective stories, and elevate the artistic integrity of artists’ books by presenting artists’ books, multiples, and printed matter to a wide audience. The ongoing vision for TOABF is to represent the diversity of cultural production and creative expression.