The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) is pleased to present
Seeing Double: Films by Antonia Kuo and Lily Jue Sheng
Kuo and Sheng in attendance

Antonia Kuo and Lily Jue Sheng are visiting artists from Brooklyn collaborating at LIFT from July 4 to August 17. This screening will present a number of their single and dual channel 16mm films—including Chromoflux, Seeing Double and Point, Line, Plane—as well as showcasing the work that they've done while in residency at LIFT. Their films explore the fleeting temporality of an immersive optical experience, emphasizing oscillating, flickering compositions that exploit the frame-by-frame structure of 16mm film through in-camera and stop-motion collage animation and mirror the visual world of their parallel practices in print-making and photography. The frenetic pace of shifting abstractions create visual unrest, mirroring the unstable flux inherent in natural systems, spanning all scales of matter.

Inspired by a new video from visually impaired artist Lorne Marin (his first moving-image work in over 30 years), this program envisions the act of film/video-making as an attempt to trace that which can no longer be seen. These artists explore the image’s transformation as it passes from the immediacy of seeing to the cages of memory, manipulating materials in ways that directly or indirectly evoke an array of perceptual aberrations. From common chemical reactions to encroaching blindness, these interferences remind us of the lamentable fragility of our sight. But they also reinforce the mind’s ability to capture fleeting visions that, though long lost, may never be forgotten.

The phrase "the Mechanical Paradise", coined by Robert Hughes in his book The Shock of the New, reflected new visions in painting and sculpture in the age of machines, Kino Pravda (cinema) being among the chosen mediums of this post-WWI movement.

LIFT is pleased to welcome Steven Woloshen to Toronto to present a screening of his lush and energetic hand-made films. Woloshen presents sixteen short, animated and experimental films, highlighting the mechanics and the art of the perforated film strip: cinema's direct assembly line. This 16mm/35mm film screening will cover 30 years of his unique abstract film strategies, which are scraped, glued, painted and burnt onto the surface of the film. The results dance along to their propulsive jazz soundtracks, creating a rhythmic beauty as tiny frame-by-frame gestures are writ large on the cinema screen.

Steven Woloshen in attendance