‘A home as a camera, a studio as a book’ is a book launch of Barbara Sternberg’s new collection of artist books entitled ‘Every Day 1,2,3’ as they explore the relation of film to life, filmmaking to living as Sternberg sees it. Accompanying the launch is a screening of several Sternberg films. The films, books and subsequent discussion will focus on the intersection of bookmaking, photography, moving images and the handmade. Together, all of these media reflect, through text and image, on the analogous relationship of film to life – rhythm, repetition, shadow, light and time.
Barbara Sternberg’s filmmaking has been a “Kitchen-table” practice (as Joyce Wieland described her own film work) in that she makes films entirely by herself in her home studio, and she films the ‘daily’: the trees, traffic, light coming in through an open window – what’s around. Her shooting and cutting rhythms reflect the inner rhythms of body and breath. Sternberg’s film work combines reflections on the medium itself with social issues and universal questions of how we experience reality, how we as humans are situated in the world. Films are themselves experiences, realities.
Films
Love Me – 7min. silent 2014
At Present – 18min. 1990
Far From – 17 min. 2014
A Q&A moderated by Jessica Thalmann will follow the screening.
Toronto filmmaker Barbara Sternberg, co-founder of Struts Gallery, has been making films since the mid-seventies. Her films have been screened widely across Canada as well as internationally at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, The Museum of Modern Art and Millennium Workshop in New York, and the Ontario Cinematheque, Toronto. Her work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. She has been a visiting artist at a number of Canadian universities and galleries including the University of Guelph, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Dunlop Art Gallery, as well as the Universite d’Avignon, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, Sternberg was made a Laureate of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Jessica Thalmann is an artist, curator and writer currently based in Toronto and New York City. She received a MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP-Bard College and a BFA in Visual Arts from York University. She has worked at the Doris McCarthy Gallery, Toronto International Film Festival, C Magazine, the Art Gallery of York University and Yossi Milo Gallery. She has shown at various venues in Toronto, Vancouver and New York City including the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Flash Forward Festival, Gallery TPW, Hashtag Gallery, Whippersnapper Gallery, Nuit Blanche, the Artist Project, VIVO Media Arts Center, Aperture Foundation, International Centre of Photography, Photoville, Camera Club of New York and Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair.
Image: Barbara Sternberg. “LOVE ME”, 2014, 7 minutes, 16mm, silent.