‘No Long Shadows’
2020Solo exhibition at PAVED Arts, Saskatoon, SK.
‘No Long Shadows’ is a multidisciplinary parafiction project unpacking the story of a cancelled 1959 film festival co-organized by filmmaker Stan Brakhage and military-chemical giant DuPont
DuPont’s president at the time, Crawford Greenewalt, inspired by the National Film Board of Canada’s recent work, proposed the film festival as a corporate promotion – a showcase of cameraless, animated films, to be produced and screened exclusively on the chemical company’s new polyester film stock “Cronar."
They hired a young and apprehensive Stan Brakhage to run the promotion. But before the festival came to pass, Brakhage and DuPont had a falling out, Brakhage quit, and the event was canceled. In 1965, DuPont officially halted research into cinematic film products, and in 2003 Stan Brakhage died after years of battling a rare form of bladder cancer.
‘No Long Shadows’ emerges as both an expository effort and an aesthetic response to this disturbing chain of events, and to the conspiracies it spawned regarding DuPont's involvement in Brakhage's death. Investigating the material networks of sensory technology and scientific research that undergird the gleaming surfaces of art and film, these works frame aesthetic experimentation within contested histories of science, industry, capital, and war.
This project was carried out with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Monstera Foundation.
