Deluge Contemporary Art

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS. Deluge Contemporary Art seeks artists’ moving image works for an online exhibition in winter/spring of 2024. Working title “Aesthetic Paralysis.” Film and video that engage with the frustration of the blank page, canvas or screen; the perceived futility of art in the face of world crises; the failures and triumphs of the creative process. Artists fees will be paid. Links and info by January 31 to [email protected] or [email protected].

A preview of Deluge exhibitions in 2024.
Matt Trahan: Somewhere, Something, Sometime.
March 22 to April 26, 2024

"My work explores the possibilities and outcomes of cumulative mark-making, as well as the accidental beauty of found objects, detritus and chance. The slow accumulation of marks, which is common across the majority of my work on paper, transforms a drawing from an image into an object by way of process—sometimes arduous and mechanical, other times meditative and arbitrary. The labour invested in each piece imbues the work with a kind of humanity and the process/time spent returns my focus to the immediate present. In many ways, the work is a meditation on time and a conscious attempt to create something that doesn’t participate in a utilitarian system of meaning."

This is the last day to visit Territorial Imperative at Deluge Contemporary Art. We're open from 12 - 5pm today at 636 Yates Street in Victoria.

Poster image from the Big Top Collective's garden path, Canada.

garden path dives deeply into a meditative engagement with the forest. Shot on black and white 16mm film and hand processed with coffee-based eco-developer, the film is the first part of Big Top’s new project Wild Forest, underlining the regenerative power of nature to offer hope in the face of climate change. The soundtrack features the voices of Big Top Collective members in overlapping vocal harmony.

Big Top Collective is Trace Nelson and Peter Sandmark. Their media works often combine imagery captured from various sources while walking through forests, gardens or while travelling and feature gestural camera movements and hand painted film transformed in the post-production process via layering and abstraction. Trace Nelson is a multidisciplinary artist working in visual and media art and music who has exhibited her work in Canada, the USA and Europe. She has worked as an art educator over the past 28 years, teaching at Concordia University, Vancouver Island School of Art and the University of Victoria. Peter Sandmark has been creating single channel experimental film works since 1978. He has taught various filmmaking and film studies courses at Concordia University and the University of Victoria. Sandmark has also worked for media art centres in Canada such as Main Film and IMAA in Montreal and FLUX media gallery in Victoria. Nelson and Sandmark live and work in Victoria on the uncededed territory of the Lekwungen peoples.

This is the last week to see Territorial Imperative at Deluge Contemporary Art. 6 international moving image artists consider the tenderness, sentience and possibilities to be found through the natural and unnatural worlds surrounding us.

Poster image from Sebastian Wiedemann's Oculto [Hidden]
Colombia/Peru. Oculto can also be viewed in the transom window of the Deluge building from dusk to midnight daily.

The celestial bodies enunciate something in the midst of their mystery. The moon turns red, the planet cries, the fall is deeper than we could imagine. Hidden, something lurks. In the middle, a requiem or perhaps an elegy. The uncertain as a path that leads us to a catastrophe that we do not know is past, present or future. But which is undoubtedly a deep memory of a dark secret. The broken whispers of a wounded jungle.

Sebastian Wiedemann is a Colombian filmmaker-researcher and philosopher-practitioner of cinematic modes of experience. His works investigate liminal intersections animated through experimental cinema and philosophy, aware of a possibility for thought-cinema as living poetic ecology and a surface for the affirmation of a cosmopolitics of image. His award-winning films including Obatala Film and Deep Blue have screened in venues around the world and at retrospectives in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Spain and Ireland. In 2015 Wiedemann’s Los (De)pendientes was included in Artforum’s list of the best films of the year and in 2017 his Abismo was included in the film series Ism Ism Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America at Los Angeles Filmforum.

Wednesday through Saturday 12 - 5pm

This is the penultimate week to see Territorial Imperative at Deluge Contemporary Art, an installation of 6 media artworks considering imperialist motivations, the environmental effects of late capitalism, traditional ecological knowledge and the regenerative power of nature.
Poster Image from recortes
Kimberly Forero-Arnias, Colombia/USA

Field journal entries, both mine and others, are ground together to explore what is filtered and what remains as families of fauna and flora move from one environment to another.

In one generation the ecological knowledge my family gained living on a coffee farm in Colombia has been filtered out. Looking to the former generation to root myself, this film is composed of observations made by family members of a place that existed as a present-tense for them over 35 years ago as well as in my current place of residence, the unceded land of the Wampanoag and Massachusett peoples (Boston). These observations take the form of Whatsapp messages, drawings, historical field journals and handwritten descriptive texts straddling multiple time periods and geographical locations. This project is in conversation with the scientific field notebook as a technology that helped structure a very specific way of engaging in the act of observation; one of categories and compartmentalization that sustains dislocation and places pressure on the nature of “belonging.” recortes intertwines personal, community and historical observations, and explores observation as a collaborative process that intermingles the past and future into present tense rhizomatic observations.

Kimberly Forero-Arnías is an experimental animator whose work has screened across the United States as well as internationally at festivals including Rotterdam, Ann Arbor, Images and Edinburgh. She is the recipient of various awards including the SMFA Traveling Fellowship, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and the Film Studies Center Fellowship at Harvard.

This is the penultimate week to see Territorial Imperative at Deluge Contemporary Art, an installation of 6 media artworks considering imperialist motivations, the environmental effects of late capitalism, traditional ecological knowledge and the regenerative power of nature.

Poster Image from Language Unknown
Janelle VanderKelen (USA/SPAIN)
Language Unknown embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans (who are far more sensorially limited). Leaves, mycelium and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world, and the (supposedly) silent watchers consider what language those swift blurs of human might possibly understand.

Janelle VanderKelen is an artist, curator and educator currently based in Knoxville TN. Her films and intermedia installations imagine alternative acts of relation between imperfect bodies (human, vegetal, geological or otherwise) and make visible the agency of plants through experimental time-based media processes. VanderKelen’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Anthology Film Archives in New York and Bow Arts in London, England. Her films have screened at Ann Arbor Film Festival, True/False, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Revelation Perth International Film Festival, IC DOCS, San Diego Underground Film Festival, and Antimatter. Recent awards include juried awards at the 2023 Ann Arbor Film Festival and the 2023 Thomas Edison Film Festival. Janelle was a Summer 2023 MacDowell resident and is currently working on new projects during a year-long Mary L. Nohl Fellowship. In addition to making time-based media, VanderKelen also co-curates a screening series called aCinema with Taka Suzuki.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Seeking artists’ moving image works for an online and outdoor (window projection) exhibition from Dec 22 to Jan 19.

GOAT will include film and video that engages and subverts ideas around saturnine impulse, the glory of aberrant vision and outsiders’ gaze—beauty, excess and revelation amidst the seasonal tyranny of hope, hype and hygge. (Needn’t include goats.)

Artists fees will be paid. Links and info to [email protected] or [email protected]. Entry deadline November 27. Please share!

Please visit us at Deluge Contemporary this week to see Territorial Imperative, a group exhibition of artists' moving image exploring issues around ecology, colonialism, commodified landscapes and interspecies communication Open Wed - Fri 12 -5pm. Closed Saturday for Remembrance Day.

Poster image from Suya Dokun [Touch the Water]
YUSUF DEMIRORS | 2023

A lost and amnesiac narrator explores the toxic and alien waterways of New York City in order to discover his relationship to this environment and what it means to be human.

Yusuf Demirors was born in Turkey, where he started his journey as a lens-based artist through film photography and alternative printing techniques. He is currently a sociology PhD student at The New School of Social Research, where he is researching the social relations of production entailed by gendered materialities under contemporary capitalism through an interdisciplinary lens. His experimental work in filmmaking and photography often explores themes of immigration, ecological imaginaries and post-industrial landscapes as ways of resituating our knowledge of the material world around us.

Thanks to Preview Art Magazine and writer Michael Turner for this thoughtful feature on the Deluge exhibition Territorial Imperative.

Territorial Imperative - Preview Art Magazine In his book The Territorial Imperative (1966), Robert Ardrey argues that the human instinct toward territory is evolutionarily determined and has

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Seeking artists’ moving image works for an online and outdoor (window projection) exhibition from Dec 22 to Jan 19.

GOAT will include film and video that engages and subverts ideas around saturnine impulse, the glory of aberrant vision and outsiders’ gaze—beauty, excess and revelation amidst the seasonal tyranny of hope, hype and hygge.

Artists fees will be paid. Links and info to [email protected] or [email protected]. Entry deadline November 27th.
Please share!

As part of the group exhibition Territorial Imperative Colombian artist Sebastian Wiedemann's piece Oculto can be additionally viewed from Yates Street in Deluge Contemporary Art's transom window nightly from dusk to midnight.

The celestial bodies enunciate something in the midst of their mystery. The moon turns red, the planet cries, the fall is deeper than we could imagine. Hidden, something lurks. In the middle, a requiem or perhaps an elegy. The uncertain as a path that leads us to a catastrophe that we do not know is past, present or future. But which is undoubtedly a deep memory of a dark secret. The broken whispers of a wounded jungle.

Sebastian Wiedemann is a Colombian filmmaker-researcher and philosopher-practitioner of cinematic modes of experience. His works investigate liminal intersections animated through experimental cinema and philosophy, aware of a possibility for thought-cinema as living poetic ecology and a surface for the affirmation of a cosmopolitics of image. His award-winning films including Obatala Film and Deep Blue have screened in venues around the world and at retrospectives in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Spain and Ireland. In 2015 Wiedemann’s Los (De)pendientes was included in Artforum’s list of the best films of the year and in 2017 his Abismo was included in the film series Ism Ism Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America at Los Angeles Filmforum.

Territorial Imperative, an exhibition of artists' moving image work opens Friday, November 3rd at Deluge Contemporary Art.

Territorial Imperative explores issues around ecology, colonialism, commodified landscapes and interspecies communication with media installations by Sarah Ballard, Big Top Collective, Yusuf Demirors, Kimberly Forero-Arnías, Janelle VanderKelen and Sebastian Wiedemann. The six works presented here—all made on analog, celluloid film—engage with imperialist motivations, the environmental effects of late capitalism, traditional ecological knowledge and the regenerative power of nature.
Wednesday to Saturday 12 -5 pm through November 25th

636 Yates Street, Victoria, Canada

The 26th annual Antimatter festival starts tomorrow, October 20 with nine days of international media art and experimental cinema. In-person screenings, installations and exhibitions at Deluge Contemporary Art and environs in Victoria BC, as well as free online programs available worldwide.
Full schedule, program guide and tickets at www.antimatter.ca

Deluge Contemporary Art augments its exhibition program with public talks, class visits and links to critical writing and interviews with artists. If you wish to visit Deluge with a group outside of normal opening hours please enquire. We'll do our best to accommodate you

Images below from Todd Lambeth 's artist talk for his exhibition Night Moves in 2019, a guided UVic class visit to the Colombian duo La Decanatura's (Elkin Calderón Guevara + Diego Piñeros Garcia) media installation Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia in March 2020 and class visit from Brentwood College School to John Luna's exhibition The Servant in 2021.

This is the last week to see Barry Doupé's mind-expanding expo Folded Paintbrush: Digital Works & Sculpture at Deluge Contemporary Art. Come visit us through Saturday from 12 - 5pm.

Save the Dates! November 1–25, 2023 at Deluge Contemporary Art in Victoria, Canada

Territorial Imperative: Sarah Ballard, Big Top Collective, Yusuf Demirors, Kimberly Forero-Arnías, Janelle VanderKelen and Sebastian Wiedemann

Territorial Imperative explores issues around ecology, colonialism, commodified landscapes and interspecies communication with media installations

The six works presented —all made on analog, celluloid film—engage with imperialist motivations, the environmental effects of late capitalism, traditional ecological knowledge and the regenerative power of nature.

Image: Sarah Ballard From "Heat Spells'

Please note that Deluge Contemporary Art will be closed this Saturday, September 30th to observe the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

Join us TODAY from 2-5pm for the opening of Vancouver-based artist and filmmaker Barry Doupé’s exhibition of digital paintings, sculpture and video. Folded Paintbrush at Deluge Contemporary Art in Victoria, Canada.

Below a link to Q&A: Barry Doupé
Curator Deborah de Boer in conversation with Barry Doupé
on Folded Paintbrush: Digital Works & Sculpture

Strawberry (Barry Doupé and Dennis Ha) at the Astoria in 2015. Photo by Casey Wei.
www.deluge.squarespace.com/s/QA-Doupe.pdf

Please join is at Deluge Contemporary Art on Saturday, September 9th from 2-5pm for the opening of Barry Doupé's exhibition Folded Paintbrush: Digital Works & Sculpture. Until October 7, 2023 at 636 Yates Street, Victoria, Canada.

Below: N**e, 2021, plaster, drywall compound, aluminium foil, acrylic paint, 42 x 31 x 23 cm

Save the date! Barry Doupé's exhibition Folded Paintbrush:
Digital Works & Sculpture opens the fall/winter season at Deluge Contemporary Art, 2-5pm on Saturday, September 9th in Victoria, Canada.

Barry Doupé (b. 1982 Victoria, BC) is a Vancouver based artist primarily working with computer animation. His films use imagery and language derived from the subconscious; developed through writing exercises and automatic drawing. He often creates settings within which a characters' self-expression or action is challenged and thwarted, resulting in comic, violent and poetic spectacles. His films have been screened throughout Canada and Internationally.

We got a plaque (and we're 🔥)!

This is the last week to visit Deluge Contemporary Art's exhibition Fred Douglas: An un-containing of things—a fluttering, a dispersal, a profusion, curated by Nellie Lamb. Wednesday through Saturday, 12 - 5pm and air conditioned! At 636 Yates Street, in Victoria, Canada.

The end of the beginning: a final nod to the past as we move into the future. 1991 - 2004
https://deluge.squarespace.com/19912004

The years between 1991—when we operated as Rogue Art—and our re-imagination as Deluge Contemporary Art in 2005 were chaotic times of experimentation and growth. Three years were spent in Market Square, one year itinerantly organizing the behemoth survey show Bumper Crop and founding Antimatter, then a decade of programming in a vast undeveloped industrial space in the upper reaches of the Eaton Centre. We organized and hosted 176 exhibitions of visual art alongside punk rock gigs, cabarets, ’zine launches, fractious literary readings, classical music recitals and international tours of media art.

With little or no financial support, these years of programming relied on the free labour and side gigs of Deluge founders, reduced or no rent, bar sales, volunteers and fundraisers for survival. Ultimately, our über-provisional existence at the mercy of market forces became untenable and in 2006, with the first infusion of limited operating funds, we moved to our current location in the former Deluge Engine Company #1, a historic building in Victoria’s downtown.

Usable documentation of these 14 frenetic and unruly years of activity is understandably incomplete, with many exhibitions and almost all events lost to time and memory/infamy. Although we remain firmly focused on evolution vs nostalgia, we offer here some images of that time.

Deluge Contemporary Art The years between 1991—when we operated as Rogue Art—and our re-imagination as Deluge Contemporary Art in 2005 were chaotic times of experimentation and growth. Three years were spent in Market Square, one year itinerantly organizing the behemoth survey show Bumper Crop and founding Antimatter, ...

Deluge Contemporary Art: Always has been always will be

At Deluge Contemporary Art through July 8th, Fred Douglas: An un-containing of things—a fluttering, a dispersal, a profusion, curated by Nellie Lamb.

“My stories and pictures emerge out of arrays or lists. They are a condition of compilations. I add one thing to the other until a kind of catastrophe occurs. The catastrophe is a picture or story. Of course, stories and pictures can be invented, for once a model exists variations can be contrived from it. But this is not the process I refer to. What I’m interested in is the condition that existed before the picture and story emerged and how this emergence occurs.” – A Menu for Sunset, Fred Douglas

Photo: Todd Eacrett

Fred Douglas: An un-containing of things—a fluttering, a dispersal, a profusion is open at Deluge Contemporary Art In Victoria, Canada Wednesdays through Fridays, 12 - 5 until July 8th.

Nellie Lamb and Deluge Contemporary Art are proud to offer a catalogue to accompany the exhibition Fred Douglas: An un-containing of things—a fluttering, a dispersal, a profusion with texts by Nellie Lamb, Martin Arnold and Fred Douglas designed by Josefina Contin Zapata. Link to order here: https://deluge.squarespace.com/now

Below, a video thumb-through of the catalogue mockup.

Fred Douglas: An un-containing of things—a fluttering, a dispersal, a profusion Publication with texts by Nellie Lamb, Martin Arnold, Fred Douglas. Designed by Josefina Contin Zapata. Artwork documented by Laura Gildner.

Fred Douglas recites WH Auden’s As I Walked Out One evening on the CFUV radio program Melancholy on a Saturday Afternoon co-hosted with the artist Yvette Poorter on October 23, 1993. An un-containing of things—a fluttering, a dispersal, a profusion opens this Friday at 7pm at Deluge Contemporary Art.

Fred Douglas reads Auden Fred reading W.H. Auden's "As I Walked Out One Evening" on CFUV radio—Melancholy on a Saturday Afternoon, October 23, 1993.

Opening June 9th at Deluge Contemporary Art, An un-containing of things—a fluttering, a dispersal, a profusion is a gathering of works and archival material by the Canadian photographer Fred Douglas whose larger output has enigmatically defied any easy location, beyond noted works to be found in institutional collections and those residing with his friends and peers. Curated by his daughter Nellie Lamb, this posthumous exhibition re-draws and revisits Douglas' obsessions as an artist and his largely unheralded legacy as part of The Vancouver School.

Fog is a cloud on the ground.

This is the very last day to experience Laura Dutton's installation Staring Into Fog at Deluge Contemporary Art.

We're opening at noon today for the continuation of Laura Dutton's exhibition Staring Into Fog. Deluge Contemporary Art is open Wednesdays through Saturdays 12-5 until May 28th.

Opening next month at Deluge Contemporary Art "An un-containing of things—a fluttering, a dispersal" is a posthumous mini-restrospective of work by the vital but under-recognized Canadian artist Fred Douglas, curated by his daughter Nellie Lamb.

As a teenager, Fred Douglas was a self-described “hooligan” who spent his time racing stock cars in Vancouver’s East Side. Through the 1950s and 60s, he worked as a sign painter, commercial photographer, and exhibition designer. During this time, he explored abstract painting and performed poetry at the Cellar Jazz Club. In 1972, he co-founded the Leonard Frank Memorial Society of Documentary Photographers, a street photography group concerned with the “unglamorous depiction of everyday life.” Those who remember Fred from this time tell stories about him and his friend Curt Lang—particularly their creativity and proclivity for mischief. Between painting and writing poetry, they worked as night-time janitors at the Vancouver Art Gallery. While on the clock the duo wrote the “janitor’s report”—reviews of exhibitions left for staff to find the following morning. In return, they would receive notes begging them to clean.

From 1980 to 2000, Fred taught photography and drawing at the University of Victoria. He believed art education should “allow students to flower in relation to their own sensibility.” His former students have spoken of his ability to nurture their understanding of their own imaginative capabilities through engagement with current critical theory.

In his later artistic career, he was concerned with combining “pictures and stories,” which created an imaginative space in which “the act of constructing meanings becomes an active part of the subject.” Bodies of work from this time include Redeemed Plates (a series of photographs of decorative brass plates found in thrift stores and yard sales that interested Fred for their banal, dead imagery that he sought to enliven through a process of photographing the plates and painting the photographs), Crossfade (a series of painting and photograph diptychs that are poetic little worlds rendered in the style of mid-century commercial art) and The Van (a 1963 Morris van outfitted as a camper van for the purpose of photographing but reluctantly exhibited as an installation/performance piece). After retiring from teaching, he focused on the production of Flutter, a now-lost “magazine” about Vancouver, which brought together hand-tinted photographs, photograms, drawings, paintings, digitally produced images and writing including a narrative sourced from a practice of lucid dreaming. Fred died in 2005, aged 69 before completing Flutter.

Fred Douglas: Once, from Crossfade series (1998), diptych, oil on canvas and Cibachrome photographic print, 25x11"

For something stellar (and meta) to accompany the actual fog horns in the distance here in Victoria visit Deluge Contemporary Art to see Laura Dutton's exhibition Staring Into Fog

Video triptych:
The Narrows
2013-2023
Looping videos on 8” LED screens, MDF frames, wires
Photo credit: Todd Eacrett

Please join us at Deluge Contemporary on this first warm night of spring for the opening of Staring Into Fog, Laura Dutton's exploration, study and documentation of the ineffable via photography and moving image. 7pm @ 636 Yates Street in Victoria, Canada.