Vines Emerging Creatives (VEC) program challenged 21 artists on the verge of entering a drastically different artistic world to reimagine their new ‘normal.’ This showcase explores the curiosities of what that future may look like.
HANDHELD
Kimberly Ho, Montserrat Videla, Santana Berryman, Thuja Quickstad, and Zhanger
mentored by Jen Sungshine,
Handheld is a video collage centering on our changing relationship with touch. Through the use of consumer-based technology and distanced collaboration, this project conveys our shared feelings of fear and loss towards physical intimacy. In eliciting visceral reactions to texture, sound, and touch, Handheld provides a sensory experience for the sense-starved viewer.
United by the Vines Emerging Creatives program and mentored by Jen Sungshine, we are a young artist collective consisting of Kimberly Ho, Montserrat Videla, Santana Berryman, Thuja Quickstad, and Zhanger. Supporting each other through the awkwardness of the program’s initial Zoom meetings, we championed the motto ‘If one of us starts crying, another will carry the torch.’ Thus, our WhatsApp video relay process began as a way to create content and respond to one another using the accessible film medium of smartphone recordings. We are tickled by creating multi-discliplinary work within the limitations of physical distancing and implementing new modalities of distanced collaboration.
In the absence of linear narrative, Handheld creates the elicitation of affective memory through images and sound. Affect, in this case, refers to an instinctual reaction to stimulation that occurs before complex thought. Much like videos in the ASMR genre, this film is focused on the somatic experience of the viewer. What does yearning for different ways of touch say about our desire to build new and different realities and worlds?
In the socio-political context of 2020, touch is intertwined with danger, and tactility becomes a forbidden indulgence. How does limitation create or force new desires? What are the unexpected pleasures that we have discovered in this moment of restricted touch? How much of this reflects a nostalgia and hope to return to moments in which a wider range of touch was possible?
The Alexander Simulation
Alexander Zavorotny – mentored by Anjela Magpantay
I’m Alexander Zavorotny and for my project, The Alexander Simulation, I allowed my audiences to control my every action for five minutes. Through Zoom, the audience gave me verbal comands to interact with the physical space I occupy. With the guidance of my mentor, Anjela Magpantay, and a group of my peers, I developed this performance art piece to confront the human need for control, the ethics of commanding others’ bodies, and the dynamics of the audience interaction during the digital-only performance. How do we connect on a deeper level when being together in-person isn’t possible? What do will people do when given control of a body that is not theirs? These are the questions I set out to explore in The Alexander Simulation.
IT’S THE RITUAL
Red Fawkes – mentored by Anjela Magpantay
Red Fawkes (pronouns: ze/zer) is an emerging multidisciplinary artist who utilizes written, visual, performance, and improvisational elements to zer work, often focussing on themes such as queerness, the environment, and spirit. Ze began directing plays while studying Drama and Psychology at Bishop’s University, has written and directed shows through there as well The Cultch’s IGNITE! Festival, and helped to facilitate a variety of other artistic and performative work for young artists, such as working as youth mentor with Kelly McInnes’ project Epoch and with MACHiNENOiSY Dance Society on various iterations of PROX:iMiTY RE:MiX. Red moved to these unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples from the lands of the Algonquin and feels blessed to be able to live and work here. Red was mentored through this process by Anjela Magpantay, creating a ritualistic and slightly interactive performance piece incorporating film, dance, visual art, poetry, and a language of zer own creation. There is a poem that is a jumbled mess of English and Red’s language, alla Jabberwocky, and rocks painted with non-toxic paints bearing words in Red’s language. The piece was filmed on Burnaby Mountain in three locations with the help of Cole Schmidt, and this was Red’s first attempt at video editing. Please have a pen and paper ready for this piece.
RITUAL EARTH
Aneesha B, Nritya G, Yin Xzi Ho (何吟曦), Ogheneofegor Obuwoma, Josh O and Tasha Rosa – Mentored by Jillian Christmas
Under the mentorship of Jillian Christmas, the works of Aneesha B, Nritya G, Yin Xzi Ho (何吟曦), Ogheneofegor Obuwoma, Josh O and Tasha Rosa have been collected to be showcased for the Vines 2020 Art festival. Our project is a collaborative video that encompasses breathwork, poetry, still photos, and visual representation. Shot across multiple days and geographies, it is a commentary on what grounds us in times of uncertainty. It is a depiction of the things we call sacred, what we adorn our altars with, how we move our bodies, where we make art. What it means to be embraced by the earth and offer our bodies as a site of worship.
We explore through watercolor, oil pastels, crayons. Film, body paint, words. Photography, dance, and listening to ourselves breathe.
UNDER THE WILLOW TREE
Jackson Wai-Chung Tse, Lexi Mellish-Mingo, Madisen Hilligoss, Sarah U and Ren Gomez Montoya – Mentored By Marisa Gold
Mentored by spoken word artist and dancer Marisa Antoinette Gold, a group of five emerging interdisciplinary artists– Lexi Mellish-Mingo (she/her/they), Ren Gomez Montoya (they/them), Madisen Hilligoss (she/her), Sarah U (she/her), and Jackson Wai-Chung Tse (she/he/they)– move to the rhythm of the seasons in a circle around the Tree of Life, asking sensory questions about themselves and to the audience.
THE GIFT OF SPACE TIME
By Alex Masse – mentored by Anjela Magpantay
The Gift of Spacetime” is a short film featuring a poem and some musical accompaniment. It was created by Alex Masse as part of the Vines Emerging Artists program.
Don’t let the format fool you: at its core, “Spare Spacetime” is a poem, simply a poem with musical and visual aids in getting its message across. Everything was created in Masse’s own home, from the shots of rippling waters to the shots of dancing on her balcony. All musical accompaniment was also Masse’s, brought to life through her Suzuki QChord, a digital songcard guitar with a dreamy, nostalgic sound like nothing you’ve heard before. Like the visuals, though, its purpose is to elevate the message within Masse’s words.
cRackEd_PiEce
Krys Yuan and Andi Velezla – mentored by Anjela Magpantay
The act of recall asks you to forget. The act of forgetting asks you to remember.
cRackEd_PiEce is a filmic, audio visual experience created by Andrea Velez and Krys Yuan, under the mentorship of Anjela Magpantay. cRack+PiEce invites viewers on a dreamwalk, reflecting on diasporic self-image, memory recall, and beings that crawl where you’re not looking.
Andrea Velez is an emerging Filipina filmmaker and artist based in Vancouver, currently pursuing a BFA in Film Production at Simon Fraser University. Her practice aims to create dialogues around the physicality of art mediums used, which is primarily painting and analog film. Some recurring themes within her work are the home and domestic settings, created through a lens that reimagines the feelings these places evoke. Her films have exhibited in festivals such as the Vancouver Queer Film Festival.
Krys Yuan is an emerging theatre artist born and raised in Singapore, who dances between disciplines as a performer, writer, creator, producer and vocalist. She is currently investing her practice into otherworldly worlds, human failures and therapy for millenials at the end of the world (according to late-stage capitalism). Her work has previously been featured in Vancouver Fringe and Vines Arts Festival. On a good day, you can find her doodling in the park and chasing other people’s cats, sometimes at the same time.
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