The Dikeou Collection is pleased to welcome Collective Misnomer as they present a screening about the non neutrality of landscape, Terra Nullius. The screening will take place Friday, December 16 at Dikeou Pop-Up, 312 E Colfax Ave. Doors open at 7:30 pm. This event is open to the public.
The works in Terra Nullius demarcate a separation from traditional and purely representational depictions of the landscape and re-envision ways to contribute to that artistic history. Refusing to simply gander aimlessly into the landscape these pieces jut forward and explore the possibilities, personality, turmoil and narratives that exist within nature. Terra Nullius addresses excessive human residue and false expectations of how nature should serve our needs.
Nicholas O’Brien is a researcher and cultural producer. He received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his MFA in Integrated Media Art Practice from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His film Three Ways of Evaluating Landscape as a Work of Art looks at landscape in three different ways: silently, narrated, and loudly.
Scottish filmmaker, Emma Finn’s film Double Mountain was commissioned by the Edinburgh Art Festival as part of the Improbable City programme in 2015. Situated in the mountains, places which by their very nature create boundaries and divide up space. The ‘Marks’ are currently up in the mountain, dwelling on how to get out of broken cable cars, find their lost tickets and making endless paper airplanes. The air is thin and they move slowly and quietly; the mountain itself is making all the noise.
Isabelle Hayeur lives and works in Quebec, Canada. Hayeur’s 2014 film Mirages was filmed in a residential development on Montreal’s South Shore and in the surrounding agricultural lands. We are gradually transported from one site to another, going from a fertile meadow to a desolate construction site. Transitory spaces appear, ephemeral places are set up; these metamorphoses evoke the urban sprawl that replaces rural life with suburban conditions. Those landscapes in mutation reflect the upheavals affecting our living environments and our ecosystems. They hold a mirror to the illusion of having the capacity to build when we do not even have the ability to dwell.
Ali Cherri’s 2013 film The Disquiet investigates the geological situation in Lebanon, trying to look for the traces of the imminent disaster. Earth-shattering events are relatively par for the course in Lebanon, with war, political upheaval and a number of social revolts. While the Lebanese focus on surface level events that could rock the nation, few realize that below the ground we walk on, an actual shattering of the earth is mounting. Lebanon stands on several major fault lines, which are cracks in the earth’s crust.