Of all the film and video festivals in Toronto (and there are a lot), the Images Festival has always seemed to suffer (or benefit) from the most acute sense of an identity crisis. Combining screenings with gallery installations with performances with artist talks and panels, it sets its scope wide and forgoes any conveniently reductive focus on cultural, social, political or national affiliation. It's also the festival that cleaves closest to the sensibility of the visual art world and has in the past shown the type if work that either interests visual artists or also appears in galleries. At the same time, the strong tradition of film and video makers of the experimental or fringe bent in this city and around the world are also represented (case in point, the premiere of a new Mike Hoolboom work). But amidst all that possibility some decisions have to be made, some identity has to be established, and this is where the character of the programmers and artistic director comes in. This is the second year that Amy Fung (former Vancouver correspondent for Akimblog) has been at the curatorial helm and, along with a new Executive Director, her gradual rethinking and reinvention of the festival is coming into focus. 
Adebukola Bodunrin & Ezra Clayton Daniels, The Golden Chain, 2015, digital video
One shift that seems to be happening is a move from an emphasis on the formal qualities of media to a greater consideration of content, as in what the camera is pointing at. Robin Collyer emphatically directs our attention at stuff in his series of stationary views of piles of product on display at the soon to be no more Honest Ed’s discount store. Videos of performances performed by Bridget Moser or orchestrated by Allison Hrabluik use editing and framing to otherwise objectively document things happening in rooms. The meaning of those actions is another story. And speaking of stories, narratives can be found throughout, from the Afro-Futurist animation of Adebukola Bodunrin and Ezra Clayton Daniels’ The Golden Chain to the personal poetry of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby’s Dear Lorde. 
Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby, Dear Lorde, 2015, digital video
The Canadian duo who now reside and teach in Syracuse, New York, had their almost two decade-long career spotlighted with a program that culminated in a new work that incorporated their familiar pastiche of seemingly offhand documentary shots with close-ups of nature and text on screen. The conceit of Dear Lorde is that it is a portrait of a teenage girl living in the desert told through a series of letters she writes to her heroes – from Bishop Desmond Tutu to the pop singer Lorde. The naturalness of the non-actor who plays the lead and the authenticity of the combined angst and wonder of her voiceover combine to create the kind of art that seems effortless and true, but is in fact so hard to capture without falling into cliché or sounding fake. Vey Duke and Battersby also accomplish this in how they assemble their videos, turning the everyday into gestures of beauty. By seeming to put little thought into either form or content, they manage the magical transformation of turning both into evidence of mastery.
Images Festival: http://www.imagesfestival.com/festival.php
The 2016 Images Festival continues until April 23.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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2016 Images Festival
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