Videowork HYPER_ screening as part of Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film program 'Scary Movies&#39

Scary Movies

Curated by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan

Hanover Drive-In, Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film, August 2015

Horror connects to one of our most ancient and primal desires: Voyeurism. The imagery

of death and evil could be a metaphor for art itself - the irrepressible desire to look.

-Jenny Keane

We delight in being frightened. Ghost stories, creature-feature B movies, television

stories that focus on the paranormal… fear thrills us. Its manifestation through art has

always been a means to cope with primal terrors of life and death. We have fetishized the

objects of our fear through artmaking; we have fetishized the fears themselves.

However, in the 21st century we also live with the fears of the moment, and a pervasive

system of information delivery (mass media) that gives us information and images to

horrify on a minute-by-minute basis. News of terrorism, war, economic collapse, rising

cancer rates and global warming (to name but a few contemporary horrors) cumulatively

blanket us with sensory shock and awe. Much of contemporary Western life is predicated

upon such fears. Political systems, consumerism and world economies are informed by an

ethic of scarcity. An environment of impending loss, doom and failure in turn paralyses

and drives us.

Scary Movies realizes our complex relationship with our fears through the work of

contemporary media artists, providing scream therapy that is experimental, timely and

thoughtful. It also reflects a feminist application of the “scare genre”, to reveal on-going

cultural anxieties with respect to female sexuality, power and the body. Writ large on the

drive-in movie screen, these collective horrors with respect to normativity and gender are

revealed as what they are: camp, laughable.

This program of single channel videos plays with the tropes of mainstream suspense,

gore, ghost and monster features, and twists them in conceptual ways to terrify and

illuminate. They explore the tension between the physical and the technological, the

natural and the supernatural, the beautiful and the strange. An uneasy humour is often

present, as is the grotesque. They remind us of the joy in being scared silly, revelling in

the mysterious while examining the social construction of our fears.

The single-channel program run-time is approximately 76 minutes

Cheryl Rondeau, Les petites morts, 2007, 2:15, VTape

Freya Borg Olafson, Hyper, 2013, 3:00, Video Pool

Helen Haig-Brown, The Cave, 2009, 10:42, VTape