Vtape Video Snaps is a Vtape screening room, accessible only through our website, that presents five titles recently added to Vtape’s catalogue. This screening room showcases a variety of careers, approaches, and voices working in video art today, highlighting new works by Marisa Hoicka, TJ Cuthhand, Tasman Richardson, Shary Boyle, and naakita feldman-kiss!
1. Marisa Hoicka, Sisters, 2022, 02:27
Sisters run wild when an incident unveils how their paths will diverge. This ethereal film, created using archival footage, composes a fresh narrative that eerily subverts past expectations.
2. Tasman Richardson, Wish you were here, 2022, 04:07
Time-lapse recording of live, 24-hour webcams projected on 6 walls, our vision is evenly distanced in all time zones. The surface of the earth is folded in on itself giving us an omnipresent perspective to witness day chasing night.
3. TJ Cuthand, The Lost Art of the Future, 2022, 04:08
In “The Lost Art of the Future,” Cuthand talks about artists he has known who have passed while living with HIV/AIDS, and the art he wishes he had been able to see them make if their lifetimes had been longer.
4. Shary Boyle, The Trampled Devil, 2023, 13:46
Featuring handmade costumes, masks, and analogue overhead projection animations, The Trampled Devil presents a metamorphizing multiplicity of selves to reimagine the absent wooden body of the Archangel. Dizzying character transitions and a super-dynamic soundtrack pulls the viewer into a tender, ecstatic and harrowing ritual, confronting our own moral masquerades.
5. naakita feldman-kiss, Remaking Edgware, 2021, 19:33
Centered around a family’s pre-war life in Leipzig and the experience of their flight path to the Caribbean, “Remaking Edgware” is a video artwork that aims to rediscover and reimagine a history made quiet by time, diaspora, and trauma.
Marisa Hoicka is an artist and filmmaker from Canada. She holds a master’s degree in digital media from Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) and a bachelor’s in studio arts from Concordia University. Her work has been exhibited internationally in many venues, museums, and festivals. Hoicka integrates paintings, compelling tactile elements, performance art, interactive video, and other forms of digital media in artworks.
Tasman Richardson began his practice in 1996 by pioneering his audio/visual cut up method known as Jawa. He went on to revise the technique from a strictly studio-based edit to live MIDI-triggered performances and has since taught workshops on scavenging and structuring content with the technique. He co-founded the FAMEFAME media arts collective in 2002 and launched the international a/v tournament Videodrome with his FAMEFAME cohorts Jubal Brown, Elenore Chesnutt, and Josh Avery.
TJ Cuthand was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, and grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995, he has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, youth, love, and race, which have screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Mix Brasil Festival of Sexual Diversity in Sao Paolo, Hot Docs in Toronto, imagineNATIVE in Toronto, Frameline in San Francisco, Outfest in Los Angeles, and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in Germany, where his short Helpless Maiden Makes an ‘I” Statement won honourable mention. His work has also screened at galleries including the Mendel in Saskatoon, The National Gallery in Ottawa, and Urban Shaman in Winnipeg.
Shary Boyle works across diverse media, including sculpture, drawing, installation and performance. Her work considers the social history of ceramic figurines, animist mythologies and folk-art forms to create a symbolic, feminist and politically charged language uniquely her own. She is the recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize for her contribution to the visual arts in Canada. Her work has been featured in the Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale (South Korea, 2017), the Kaunas Biennial (Lithuania, 2021), as well as in the National Gallery of Canada’s previous three Canadian Biennales. In 2013 she represented Canada at the 55th Venice Biennale with her project Music for Silence. Outside the Palace of Me, a thematic solo exhibition of Boyle’s work commissioned by Toronto’s Gardiner Museum, traveled to The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Fall 2022, and The Vancouver Art Gallery in 2023.
naakita feldman-kis (they/she) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Tio’Tia:Ke/Mooniyang/Montreal, Quebec. Notable presentations of their work include MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2012); Trinity Square Video, Toronto, ON (2016); Knot Project Space, Ottawa, ON (2018); Mémoire de l’Avenir, Paris, FR (2019); EXPRESSION, Saint-Hyacinthe, QC (2020); and Fonderie Darling, Montreal, QC (2022). They have received research and production grants from Saw Video (2018), Museum of Jewish Montreal (2020), Jardins de Métis (2021), Canada Council for the Arts (2020, 2021, 2022), and Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (2022).
Image credit: Marisa Hoicka, Sisters, (2022)