AD HOC #84: Derek Jenkins: Vulgar Reliquaries
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Artist in person!
Derek Jenkins’ films are handmade documentaries in the most literal sense: they insist that the moving image is a set of transactions between tools and bodies, chemicals and weather, labour and testimony. In Jenkins’ films, the camera is a collaborator, the lab is a site of thought, and the artifact is inseparable from the conditions that produce it.
Across his filmography, Jenkins returns to the stubborn intelligence of materials. Grain, emulsion, abrasion, density: these are not decorative textures, but evidence of contact, handling, and time spent. His practice is one of accountability-to-process. Images arrive bearing the marks of their making, and that making is folded into larger networks of work and extraction: the industrial and the domestic, the ecological and the technological. Throughout we encounter Jenkins’ attention to labour - in terms of what it requires, what it conceals, and what it normalizes.
These vulgar reliquaries reflect a cinema of reciprocal relations. Jenkins asks how knowledge is shaped by our instruments, and how those instruments, in turn, reshape what can be seen. They are personal without being confessional; observational without pretending to neutrality. In an era of frictionless images, Jenkins emphasizes frictions.
Programme:
Livestock
The Shouting Flower
As Close as Your Voice Can Call
Walk
Letter from Blackhawk Island
Contents
TRT: 48 minutes
Followed by a special preview of a work in progress!
AD HOC aims to rethink what an experience of cinema can be. We seek to reposition historical landmarks and buried treasures within the on-going tradition of experimental and other non- commercial modes of filmmaking, drawing on work from Toronto, throughout Canada, and internationally. Within these parameters, we aspire to diversity in programming, as well as to multimedia and interdisciplinary screening events that bring together varied communities.
AD HOC = Stephen Broomer, Madi Piller, Jim Shedden, Bart Testa.
AD HOC would like to thank Alberto Zambenedetti, Denise Ing, Charlie Keil, and the staff of Innis College and the Cinema Studies Institute.