Memory Strata: Works by Sky Hopinka and Simon Liu

Logging and approximating a relationship between audio recordings of my father and videos gathered of the landscapes we have both separately traversed. The initial distance between the logger and the recordings, of recollections and of songs, new and traditional, narrows while the images become an expanding semblance of filial affect. Jáaji is a near translation for directly addressing a father in the Hočak language.

It’s any day, any year in the house of Alan and Vera in their Post-Industrial English conurbation formerly known for their world renown pottery industry, yet on this week they are interrupted by their camera toting grandson. This May is one of moving, dancing, and gliding more softly and with greater awareness. They might have been stars, they could have been famous!

In this video, drawing from Bob Dylan's song "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" layers of experiences circling loss and longing are overlaid between images of landscapes and movement. In the song, a stranger's listlessness and exhaustion are woven through and around Juarez, Mexico, and so too are these stories woven around original discontent and uncertainty as they move through an uneasy negotiation with the strangeness of the American pioneer spirit.

Upon the North Point a torrential downpour of instants tease their way into sight, but never fully form. Shutter-induced memories reduced to speckles, dissipating into fog. Here, my initial disappointments in a material defect morph into opportunity - satisfying an itch to melt instances together, to see any number of places as one. I want to go home. These images were meant to show us what goes where - but I can't make out the path. Maybe we should lay them all out on the floor and try to put the pieces back together. In another five days, I'll need to leave.

An elegy to Diane Burns on the shapes of mortality, and being, and the forms the transcendent spirit takes while descending upon landscapes of life and death. A place for new mythologies to syncopate with deterritorialized movement and song, reifying old routes of reincarnation. Where resignation gives hope for another opportunity, another form, for a return to the vicissitudes of the living and all their refractions.

They said a storm is calling this way but we’re still waiting. Lives carry on in Hong Kong as traces of civic upkeep morph into sites of remembrance. Decorative structures mimic nature then occasionally malfunction - transforming common spectacle to warning signs. The light urges to tell us something but can't quite get its point across, patience tested for another day.

Images of friends and landscapes are cut, fragmented, and reassembled on an overhead projector as hands guide their shape and construction in this film stemming from Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia.