Chris Kennedy

Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, amateur detectives took the Internet chat rooms to try to find the culprits, looking for details in photographs uploaded to the sites that could point to the guilt of potential suspects.

Shot on Mount Tamalpais, a spatial matrix replaces temporal causality with contiguous space. A view of landscape is taken apart, to be reconstituted through memory. The grid, a reference to the “veil of threads” invented by Albrecht Dürer as an aid for perspective drawing – to transfer vision to a sheet of paper – is used for an opposite effect – to disperse a landscape across time. The viewer is asked to remember the space as it passes and reconstitute it from memory, actively connecting the image across space and time.

Keiji Haino, live in Toronto, June 22, 2011. A single roll of film, shot one frame at a time. Special thanks to Keiji Haino and Adam Rosen.

“As Benjamin had predicted, nothing brings the promise of happiness encoded at the birth of a technological form to light as effectively as the fall into obsolescence of its final stages of development.” – Rosalind Krauss

Texts from the 1969 American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz and letters from supporters propel an exploration of political yearning, emancipatory architecture and failed utopias. What does it mean to claim land that has more value as a symbol than as a potential home? And how does that symbol function beyond the boundaries of its geographic limits?

Elegant and rigorous, while surprisingly playful, Chris Kennedy’s Go Between observes the Brisbane River, passing boats, and cars on the William Jolly Bridge through an intoxicating play of masking and superimpositions.

The striped pattern of the municipal bus shelters in San Francisco becomes a fixed foreground behind which the city passes. Spatial oscillations provide a constantly permutating play of figure, ground and space, imaging the possibility of being two places at once.

A study of the incongruous and iconic suspended monorail in Wuppertal Germany. Shot on super 8 and finished on 35mm film, Phantoms expertly employs the exaggerated grainy texture of the emulsion to suggest a netherworld out of time, both science fiction and ancient history, while an accompanying text muses on the vanity and folly suggested by the mysterious structure.

Shot in two downtown Toronto parks over the course of the pandemic, LINES DRAWN looks at various measures of persuasion, containment and control that were brought to bear over the course of the City’s attempts to curtail the spread of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, space was defined by how the social bond was re-formed and which barriers were designed for mutual and directional protection. What are the shapes of the pandemic and how did they shape our interactions with each other ?

Footage shot in Coba, Mexico and the Siwa Oasis in Egypt and a found film from California serve as inspiration for a series of sketches on the notion of the vanishing point.

“A digitally animated version of Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #349, which was commissioned by Toronto’s Mercer Union gallery in 1981. Recreating LeWitt’s geometric vocabulary and primary colour palette, 349 careens through emblazoned emblems, lifted from walls and transported into dialogue with LeWitt’s exploration of spatial systems and human emotion.” – Andréa Picard

Shot in the Genesee Valley of New York state last fall on regular 8mm to commemorate the last rolls of Kodachrome. The colours of the leaves and the film stock are augmented by orange colour filters, boosting the contrast and highlighting the rich saturated yellows, reds and orange of stock and season.

The Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra, Portugal is a huge estate that has two initiation wells built into the ground. This film takes us into one of them.

A simple intersection in Wuppertal, Germany becomes a microcosm of the patterns of everyday life. Cars trace the angles of the streets, pedestrians forge new paths and Wuppertal’s famed Schwebebahn turns our expectations upside-down. Shot on Super 8 in Wuppertal April 28, 2009.

Not in distribution.

A portrait of a street corner in flux.

Western Ghats is Chandan Narayan on Saraswati veena and Marshall Trammell (Music Research Strategies) on percussion.

Not in distribution.

8mm unsplit. Streetcars circle. The ferry leaves and returns in one gesture. Camera and character dance.

"Travelling the Trent-Severn Waterway by houseboat, from the Kirkfield Liftlock to Omemee." (the8fest)