Chyrons for the Future

17 February 2022 – 5 March 2023

About the Exhibition

Curated By

Crystal Mowry

Organized & Circulated By

The MacKenzie Art Gallery

Galleries

Schumiatcher Theatre

It is impossible to watch broadcast news without encountering a chyron. Since their introduction in the 1970s, these ubiquitous text graphics have taken up residence in the lower third of television screens. What was once a simple means to superimpose one news story on another has transformed into a zone where real-time fact-checking or other counternarratives can emerge. What if the chyron is the final evolutionary move for a waning medium shaped by corporate interests? If the post-internet era means that anyone who has a cell phone is capable of journalism, how does that stand to change what we understand to be worthy of public record?  

In concert with the forthcoming exhibition titled What the Bat Knows and in response to the 50th anniversary of the influential Ways of Seeing television series, the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s 2022/2023 theatre programming will explore experimental approaches to documentary filmmaking and attempts to glitch the public record. The series will launch with Episode 1 of Ways of Something, a kaleidoscopic visual collage compiled and curated by Toronto-based Lorna Mills. Other works by a selection of contemporary artists will explore themes such as the false neutrality of the artist’s gaze, hidden knowledge, and lateral networks. Reflecting a range of visual and auditory sensibilities, the works in Chyrons for the Future encourage us to see narration as a complex and often contradictory mission. 

a so-called archive

13 December 2022 – 5 March 2023

a so-called archive, 2020 

Onyeka Igwe

Courtesy of the artist

19:40 

In Lagos, the former Nigerian Film Unit building was one of the first self-directed outposts of the British visual propaganda engine, the Colonial Film Unit (1932–1955). Today it stands empty. Its rooms are full of dust, cobwebs, stopped clocks, and rusty and rotting celluloid film cans. The films found in this building are hard to see, not only because of their condition, but also because there may be an effort afoot to keep them hidden. They reveal a colonial residue, echoed in the walls of the building itself. 

Meanwhile, in Bristol Temple Meads, the former British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (2002-2009) was previously housed in the vaults of one of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s most famous railway designs. The museum included photographic, film, sound, and object collections from across the former British Empire. However, the alleged illegal sale of several items from its collection led to its closing in disgrace. Obscure and yet of value, the fate of this collection reminds us of the entangled relations between empires and colonies that form the foundation of many museums. 

a so-called archive imagines the ‘lost’ films from both of these archives, using distinctive soundscapes, choral arrangements, and a radio play alongside a disembodied tour of the ‘exquisite corpse’ that can be a physical archive and its contents. 

 

Co-commission by Mercer Union, Toronto; Plug-In ICA, Winnipeg; and KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, with support from Julia Stoschek Collection and Outset Germany_Switzerland. Additional support from Adam Pugh and Tess Denman-Cleaver for the Projections programme. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England. 

Still from

Onyeka Igwe, still from a so-called archive, 2020. Courtesy of the artist. Co-commission by Mercer Union, Toronto; Plug-In ICA, Winnipeg; and KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, with support from Julia Stoschek Collection and Outset Germany_Switzerland. Additional support from Adam Pugh and Tess Denman-Cleaver for the Projections programme. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Medium Earth

Still from

The Otolith Group, still from Medium Earth, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and LUX, London.

10 October - 11 December 2022

Medium Earth, 2013 

The Otolith Group 

Courtesy of the artist and LUX, London 

41:20

The accumulation of moving images and sounds that make up Medium Earth comprise an audiovisual essay on the millennial time of geology and the infrastructural unconscious of Southern California. Focused on the ways in which tectonic forces express themselves in boulder outcrops and the hairline fractures of cast concrete, Medium Earth participates in the cultures of prophecy and forecasting that mediate the experience of seismic upheaval. The desire to evoke the hidden substrata of the planet gives way to amorphological interpretation of the face of the earth. As an experiment in channelling the system of fault lines buried below California, Medium Earth animates the stresses and strains of physical geographies undergoing continental pressures. 

Still from

The Otolith Group, still from Medium Earth, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and LUX, London

The Two Faces of Tomorrow

20 July - 3 October 2022

The Two Faces of  Tomorrow, 2021 

Patrick Hough 

Courtesy of the artist 

99:00 

Directed by Patrick Hough, The Two Faces of Tomorrow is an experimental documentary-fiction film about algae; how they have shaped all life on Earth, from the deep past to the near future. The film follows an unseen researcher as they discover ancient Roman baths plagued by toxic blooms; cutting-edge laboratories developing biofuel and food supplements; collections of fossilised seaweeds and hominin skulls; and a Mars rover preparing for its exploration of the red planet. As the researcher learns more about the relationship between Capitalism and algae, algae and the Earth, the Earth and humans, they begin to understand the vast web of violence, extraction and exploitation, across human and non-human lives, that has led to our current moment of climate crisis.

Essential Credits: 
Commissioned by FLAMIN Productions through Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network with funding from Arts Council England. Co-commissioned by the National Sculpture Factory, Cork. Produced by Tracy Bass. Supported by The Arts Council of Ireland and Cork International Film Festival. 

Additional Key Credits: 

Script: Daisy Hildyard 

Voice of the Researcher:  Jade Anouka 

Director of Photography: Brian Fawcett 

Editor and Sound Designer: Daniel Goddard 

Music composed and performed by: Sian O’Gorman for NYX: electronic drone choir 

Post-production: Absolute 

Dubbing Mixer: Ben Young 

Still from

PHOTOPHAGIA: The Secret Life of Plants

4 May - 17 July, 2022

PHOTOPHAGIA: The Secret Life of Plants, 2019 

Aislinn Thomas 

Courtesy of the artist 

99:00 

The Secret Life of Plants is a 1979 documentary based on a book of the same name. The content has been critiqued as pseudoscience, yet it continues to inspire reverence for plant life and a sense of cosmic interconnectedness. 

The soundtrack was created by Stevie Wonder, a fact that conspiracy theorists offer as evidence that Stevie Wonder is not actually blind. Yet Stevie Wonder was able to experience the visual aspects of The Secret Life of Plants through a simple technology: audio description, provided in a casual way. 

Gardeners, florists, plant-scientists, herbalists, master gardeners, farmers, foragers, plant-eaters, and plant enthusiasts were invited to each describe a scene of the film. Much like conventional audio description, these informal descriptions are woven into the documentary which is screened without the picture, inviting “viewers” to sit in the dark together.Aislinn Thomas 

Community description by Rachael Chong, Yvonne Ip, Aura Linsley, Theo Linsley, Maya Linsley, Sara Brubacher, Patti Lennox, Abhi Dewan, Kai Reimer Watts, Clara Jenner, Rodger Tschanz, Fan-Ling Suen, Janet L’Abbe, David Shumaker, Chris Earley, Candace McCutcheon, Anna-Marie Larsen, Marcel Visser, Dennis Murphy, Stephanie Jenner, Felix Morrell, Marlene deGroot-Maggetti, Sally Ludwig, Lea Tran, & Maria Brown. 

Editing and tech support by Nathan Saliwonchyk. 

Produced by Ontario Culture Days, 2019. 

The artist gratefully acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts’ support of the research and creation of this work. 

Still from

Ways of Something, Episode 1

17 February - 1 May, 2022

Ways of Something, Episode 1 

Curated and compiled by Lorna Mills 

Courtesy of the artist and TRANSFER, Brooklyn 

31:02 

Mature Content Advisory: nudity and sexuality. 

 

Ways of Something is a contemporary remake of John Berger’s BBC documentary, Ways of Seeing (1972). The project consists of one-minute videos by over 114 network-based artists who commonly work with 3D rendering, gifs, film remix, webcam performances, and websites to describe the cacophonous conditions of artmaking after the internet.  

Curated and compiled by Lorna Mills, this remake is based on a four-part series of thirty-minute films created by art theorist John Berger and produced by Mike Dibb. In the original films, voice-of-God narration over iconic European paintings offer a careful dissection of traditional “fine art” media and the way society has come to understand them as art. This current project invited artists to respond to what Berger called “learned assumptions” about art in dialogue with the camera and the screen in its reproduction. 

It is, in effect, art about art about television about the internet.  

Featuring formal, figural and kitsch practices to videomaking, Ways of Something consists of aesthetically diverse interpretations of Berger’s ideas on looking at art after the introduction of digital media. Ultimately, it turns the highbrow nature of documentary film into a wondrous and disjointed series of alternative outlooks on how artists understand art today. – Lorna Mills 

Still from

Joe MacKay, still from Ways of Something, Episode 1, Minute 15, 2014. Complied by Lorna Mills and commissioned by arts organization The One Minutes for the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam. © Lorna Mills

Participating Artists:  

Episode 1  

Minute 1:  Daniel Temkin  

Minute 2:  Rollin Leonard  

Minute 3:  Sara Ludy  

Minute 4:  Rhett Jones  

Minute 5:  Jaakko Pallasvuo  

Minute 6:  Dafna Ganani  

Minute 7:  Jennifer Chan  

Minute 8:  Rea McNamara    

Minute 9:  Theodore Darst  

Minute 10: Matthew Williamson  

Minute 11: Hector Llanquin  

Minute 12: Christina Entcheva  

Minute 13: V5MT a.k.a Małgosia Woźnica  

Minute 14: Marisa Olson  

Minute 15: Joe McKay  

Minute 16: Carla Gannis  

Minute 17: Nicholas O’Brien  

Minute 18: Eva Papamargariti  

Minute 19: Rosa Menkman  

Minute 20: Kristin Lucas 

Minute 21: Jeremy Bailey & Kristen D. Schaffer  

Minute 22: Giselle Zatonyl  

Minute 23: Paul Wong  

Minute 24: Alfredo Salazar-Caro  

Minute 25: Sally McKay  

Minute 26: RM Vaughan & Keith Cole & Jared Mitchell  

Minute 27: Andrew Benson  

Minute 28: Christian Petersen  

Minute 29: Faith Holland  

Minute 30: Jennifer McMackon 

Still from

Jennifer Chan, still from Ways of Something, Episode 1, Minute 7, 2014. Complied by Lorna Mills and commissioned by arts organization The One Minutes for the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam. © Lorna Mills

Still from

Carla Gannis, still from Ways of Something, Episode 1, Minute 16, 2014. Complied by Lorna Mills and commissioned by arts organization The One Minutes for the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam. © Lorna Mills