As October begins, Victoria prepares for its 29th annual Antimatter [media art] festival, during which 21 programs of short films and experimental videography pieces by 136 artists from 31 countries will be displayed to the public. (The films will also be streamed online for free for 24 hours after they screen at the festival.)
Included this year is Camosun College Visual Arts lab technologist Mike Andrew McLean, with his short film below the ghost forest – volume I. In this piece, McLean puts together some of his long-term documentation of a personally inspiring landscape: an industrial logging site he came across between Port Renfrew and Lake Cowichan. The plot had been damaged by a fire previous to its first clearcut, leaving behind a ground of only rock, “blackened stumps of old-growth trees,” and bleached-white dead trees looming up above: “it looked like a ghost forest,” he says.
“It was a really compromised place, but there was also a really strange beauty to it,” says McLean. “Something about it really captured my imagination, and I just wanted to know it a little bit better so… I started to explore and to photograph this place and I’ve been doing it ever since, so this video artwork that I’ve made is kind of a culmination of that exploration.”
McLean has been able to capture many sides to the forest he has come to know through this project, visiting regularly “not only through a calendar year, but also through 24 hours of a day,” he says.
“I had a realization that I was only seeing it when the sun is up and there was a whole other side to the life of that forest that I was not familiar with, and that was when it was dark… and so I thought, ‘Well, this is probably something that I should investigate.’”
Emphasizing the importance of challenging oneself and inspired by those who continuously evolve their creations to become unlike their previous, McLean recognizes this artwork as being a new endeavour in his artistic practices.
“As a visual artist I never want to do the same thing twice,” he explains, “because then I think that really sort of short circuits the potential to learn something new… You’re not challenging yourself as an artist, nor as a human being.”
Despite it being a new medium for him, the process of finally piecing together a section of his long-standing art project gave McLean enough confidence in his film to enter it into the Antimatter festival.
“It felt like something where I just kept collecting footage,” admits McLean. “I didn’t really know if it was any good… I wanted to take a risk and this film festival is quite renowned… I was kind of nervous, I was sort of scared about that, but that was a good place to be. I’ve never made a film, I’ve never really shown a video artwork before, so I wanted to take that risk and I sent it in and I was so excited when I heard back that it was going to be part of the festival… It just confirmed that it was a good decision. It puts a period at the end of the sentence. You can be an artist and work on a particular piece or a series for a long time and you can keep going almost indefinitely, but when you have the opportunity to maybe show your work in an exhibition, or group show, or a film festival, it kind of takes that sentence and it puts a punctuation mark at the end of it and it makes it somehow a little bit more tangible, it makes it somehow a little bit more whole.”
McLean places importance on learning and growth in art and life, and this new direction for him proves his commitment to these principles.
“All of it is just me learning about this place, and for me art-making is about learning,” he says. “It’s a learning process, so I want to be committed to that learning process.”
Antimatter [media art]
Various times, Thursday, October 15 to Sunday, October 25
Various prices and venues
antimatter.squarespace.com