Screening | in motion: a video performance screening
Updated: 5 days ago
in motion: a video performance screening Friday, Sept 11, 7pm Free Admission
Join us for the screening of in motion, a collection of video works that explore the intersection of performance and video art. Featuring works by Maryse Arseneault, Jade Ariana, JoAnna Howlett, Rachel Kalpana James, Tamara Jones, Julie-Isabelle Laurin, Laura Ohio, and Leslie Predy, each artist use performance and the lens to explore systems of power, identity, and transformation.
Photo credit: JoAnna Howlett, Still from Domain, 2024.
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PROGRAM
Maryse Arseneault, GARGANTUA AND THE SACRED HEART, 2026. 4m 26s.
Jade Ariana, Citizen, 2026. 3m 46s.
Rachel Kalpana James, Caste Shadow, 2025. 8m 20s.
Tamara Jones, This is a crisis, 2023. 4m 5s.
Leslie Predy, Removing The Demon, 2025. 6m 59s.
Julie-Isabelle Laurin, The Mollusk Era, 2026. 8m 29s.
JoAnna Howlett, Domain, 2024. 1m 49s.
Laura Ohio, Hello, Whale, 2023. 13m 48s.
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Maryse Arseneault
GARGANTUA AND THE SACRED HEART (2026)
4m 24s
Gargantua and the Sacred Heart is first set up as a participative performance where the audience is invited to wear the Sacred Heart symbol, reinventing collectively its spiritual interpretation through guided meditation. During the happening, each participant sits before the camera and performs a three-minute ritual, which is projected live through an open broadcaster software onto an existing projection, creating a closed-circuit experience. Connecting to one’s breath and becoming aware of the path between heart and ego, we can stay true to our authentic self, maintaining equilibrium between ego driven individualism and collective strength which stems from the heart. This project was made possible through the generous support of ArtsNB and the Struts Gallery community.
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Jade Ariana
Citizen (2026)
3m 46s
Citizen (2026) is a projected video combining performance, green-screen collage, and painting, creating a layered visual language that moves between constructed and embodied space. The work moves fluidly across temporal and symbolic strata, drawing on historical visual traditions while reconfiguring them through a speculative lens. Within this shifting framework, the artist performs as an Afro-futurist oracular figure—part witness, part prophet—channeling knowledge across time. The project engages medieval modes of image-making and storytelling, particularly their use of allegory, archetype, and cosmological world-building, to construct a visual language where past, present, and imagined futures co-exist. Through this interplay, Citizen situates the body as both site and conduit, embedding it within a continuum of myth, history, and projection.
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Rachel Kalpana James
Caste Shadow (2025)
8m 20s
In theory, India is a secular state as envisioned in the constitution drafted by BR Ambedkar, who claimed “Caste is a state of mind. It is a disease of the mind.”
I made this video diptych to challenge ideas of caste pollution and the promise of equality through religious conversion. The right screen shows the act of sweeping, a traditional occupation of outcaste groups in India. Here I attempt to sweep away my shadow, as it is believed by some, that even one’s shadow pollutes. The absurd action changes to thrashing as I ascend the steps of a church. In contrast, improvised actions in the left screen consider the simple chore of sweeping as whimsical, imaginative and perhaps approaching divinity likened to the ecstasy experienced by a whirling dervish. In any case, one’s shadow is benign, a fact of physics, with no bearing on human worth.
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Tamara Jones
This is a crisis (2023)
4m 5s
An anonymous bureaucrat traipses around the City of Toronto, contorting themselves while repurposing hostile architecture as their playground. Featuring spliced audio of former mayor John Tory’s victory speeches from 2014, 2018, and 2022 municipal election nights, bleak scenes are juxtaposed with a heavy-handed narrative of progress and inclusion. Documented on January 31, 2023—weeks before Tory would resign—this public performance and accompanying video artwork offer a critique of procedural fetishism, the surveillance and criminalization of poverty, and what cities become when they leave the most marginalized behind.
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Leslie Predy
Removing The Demon (2025)
6m 59s
Removing the Demon (2025) is a single channel performance video that explores agency and connection in a technologically mediated world. It imagines a future where an obsolete AI assistant is brought to life as a middle-aged woman. She longs to find meaning in the world and deal with her anxiety, exploring personal wellness and creative expression. Ultimately, she struggles to break free from her patterns of algorithmic thinking in a capitalist system that prioritizes productivity above all else. Frustrated by her situation, she seeks solace in other obsolete artificial intelligences.
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Julie-Isabelle Laurin
The Mollusk Era (2026)
8m 29s
The Mollusk Era (2026) was created between a three-month residency at Projet Borgitte in Cap-Pelé, New Brunswick, overlooking the Northumberland Strait, and Gare de Matapédia in Quebec, in relation to Matapedia River. Through self-documented performances, I attempt to inhabit these territories through the body and temporalities of mollusks. My human form becomes strange and unstable: waves crash against me, ice collapses beneath my feet, and I trace slime-like paths inspired by periwinkles at low tide.
Rather than treating the landscape as a backdrop, the film destabilizes the separation between body and environment, human and nonhuman. Ice becomes an active presence - moving, cracking, melting - while a theremin soundtrack amplifies this attempted metamorphosis. Displaced to Matapedia, the process reverses: sea becomes river and melting ice reforms before disappearing again. Through mimicry, temporal reversal, and bodily vulnerability, The Mollusk Era unsettles human-centered narratives of territory, permanence, and environmental transformation.
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JoAnna Howlett
Domain (2024)
1m 49s
The artist’s late grandfather believed that women were bad luck aboard fishing vessels. A few years after his death, she began fishing lobster on his boat. She addresses his superstition by adopting a countermeasure drawn from David Cordingly's Women Sailors and Sailors' Women: An Untold Story. Historically, many large ships used figureheads of nude women because they believed they would calm the seas (and the Gods that controlled them) and allow for a safe voyage. The artist was inspired by this practice and fabricated transparent oil gear (workwear used in the fishing industry) to transform herself into a symbol of good luck. Field recordings taken from a day lobster fishing as well as a poem written and recited by the artist accompany video from a performance in which the artist coils lengths of rope aboard her grandfather’s boat.
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Laura Ohio
Hello, Whale (2023)
13m 48s
Hello, Whale (2023) follows the artist’s encounter with three distinct whales. Using intimate documentation of Ohio’s life, the film forms a concentric narrative about sex work, 18th-century whale oil extraction, and the complex alienation of those who choose to leave land behind.
Whales have hip bones that do not serve a biological purpose, indicating that they once dwelled on land. They are mammals that decided to leave land behind. I pin a wish for myself on this image of the whale whose experience I can never really know. Then I ask, what is the difference between out-casting yourself and truly leaving land behind? How do you come above deck and find your own spotting cry? A sound that isn't an urge to capture or possess but an invitation (“hello”) to step into the other’s world and be changed.
