Lisa Jackson and Jonathan Schipper have created two landscapes : one in the digital realm, the other in the physical realm. One work reflects the value of connections, the other reflects the value of objects. Each of these places describes a reclaiming of earth, time and meaning; exposing cycles of destruction, loss and renewal.

Lisa Jackson (Anishinaabe / Canada), Mathew Borrett, the National Film Board of Canada, and Jam3 (Canada)

Anishinaabe artist Lisa Jackson explores First Peoples' identity and language in all her work. In Biidaaban; First Light she has created an interactive, Virtual Reality (VR) animation. A headset allows the visitor to become immersed in a 7 minute film depicting a future landscape in flux: a fallen city being reclaimed by nature. Jackson has said... “Biidaaban First Light grew out of my musings on what a future would look like guided by the ideas in Toronto’s original languages. Indigenous North American languages are radically different from European languages and embody sets of relationships to the land, to each other, and to time itself." "These languages grow on this land in the same way that plants do. The languages have been spoken here for thousands of years; they capture this land more than any other languages," Biidaaban is the Anishinaabemowin word for dawn; more specifically the first light of dawn, the feeling of a night still there, yet a new day is coming.



Jonathan Schipper, NYC

Jonathan Schipper focusses on the desire of humans to shape, and reshape the world in a bid to find permanence. Detritus shows an environment being actively constructed from rock salt and technology. The installation consists of nine tons of salt heaped in a terrain that covers 1000 square feet of gallery space. An extruder is suspended from the ceiling by cables. By varying the length of the cables, the extruder is able to move around the room and print small objects out of salt mixed with water. Human effort is required to keep the process going. Schipper has noted that these salt constructions represent the human-made objects in our physical world. They are fragile and unstable constructions, crumbling almost as soon as they are built. With sisyphean effort, the extruder labours; constantly rebuilding new constructions to replace those which have fallen. Those which have collapsed return to their natural state only to be scooped up and rebuilt again.

Lisa Jackson (Canada)

Biidaaban:First Light
Coming soon
Image
Coming soon
Biography
With a background in documentary, including acclaimed short SUCKERFISH and RESERVATION SOLDIERS for CTV, Lisa Jackson expanded into fiction with SAVAGE, which won a 2010 Genie award for Best Short Film. She is known for her cross-genre projects including VR, animation, performance art film and a musical. Playback Magazine named her one of 10 to Watch in 2012 and her work has played at festivals internationally, including Berlinale, Hot Docs, SXSW, Tribeca, and London BFI, as well as airing on many networks in Canada.

Her VR work BIIDAABAN: FIRST LIGHT, made with the National Film Board and 3D artist Mathew Borrett, premiered at Tribeca in April 2018, is in great demand internationally, and has garnered high praise from press and viewers. She is at work on TRANSMISSIONS, a large-scale immersive audio-visual installation on the power of indigenous languages, as well as LICHEN, a 3D IMAX film as part of the XL Outer Worlds Project. She is also developing more traditional broadcast and film work including an animated feature film and a feature cinematic documentary.

In 2016, she directed the 360-degree film HIGHWAY OF TEARS for CBC Radio's The Current and in 2017 she co-directed (with Shane Belcourt) the CBC one-hour doc INDICTMENT: THE CRIMES OF SHELLY CHARTIER which won Best Doc at imagineNATIVE. She field directed 21 drama segments for the 8-part APTN/ZDF docudrama series 1491: The Untold Story of the Americas Before Columbus, based on the best-selling book by Charles C. Mann. She was the Director of the Gladue Video Project with Osgoode Hall Law School, programming consultant and juror for Hotdocs, sits on the NFB's Indigenous Advisory Committee, and is the Director Mentor for the National Screen Institute's IndigiDocs Program. She is Anishinaabe, has a BFA in Film Production from SFU, is completing her MFA at York University and is an alumna of the Canadian Film Centre's Directors Lab, TIFF Talent Lab, and IDFA Doc Summer School. She works in both fiction and documentary.
Credits
Coming soon

Jonathan Schipper (USA)

Detritus
Coming soon
Image
Coming soon
Biography
Credits
Coming soon