Julie Murray – Fall 2013 Artist in Residence

LIFT ANNOUNCES FALL 2013 ARTIST IN RESIDENCE
JULIE MURRAY

LIFT ANNOUNCES FALL 2013 ARTIST IN RESIDENCE
JULIE MURRAY

Toronto, October 1, 2013—The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) announces that Irish-born, Ann Arbor-based filmmaker Julie Murray has arrived in Toronto to participate in LIFT’s international artist-in-residence program. This program, aimed at international filmmakers, focuses on the production of film-based works with equipment and facilities to which the artist would not have access to in their local region. Julie, who arrived on September 30th, will be in Toronto until October 18th and her schedule will feature programs in each of LIFT’s core areas—education, exhibition and production services. During the residency she will work with LIFT to create a 35mm photogram film using LIFT’s darkroom. She will also be presenting a photogram workshop at LIFT on Saturday October 5th. On Thursday October 17th, she will screen a selection of work at CineCycle (behind 129 Spadina Avenue, south of Queen Street West).
 
The photogram process involves placing various items onto film stock in a dark room, exposing it briefly to light and then developing and toning the film. The objects leave a shadow of themselves on the film, much in the way a tree casts its shadow on the ground. In this way the photogram is the most primal of photographic processes and in being so is surely the most expressive.
 
Julie Murray is one of the most significant female experimental filmmakers of the last twenty-five years, creating a beautiful and subtle body of work that moves between meticulously edited found footage films to richly beautiful first-person visual diary films. She studied Fine Art in Dublin, Ireland, and in 1985 moved to the US. While creating and exhibiting paintings and photographs there she began exploring moving image media and making experimental films. Continuing to work in as well as draw relationships from painting and photography, she has completed many short films and has collaborated on numerous film installation/performance events with artists, musicians and filmmakers. Her films have been included in many festivals including the New York Film Festival, Images Festival, TIFF, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, the Museum of Strasburg, the Dublin Film Festival, Ireland and the Times London Film Festival. Her work was exhibited in the Whitney Biennial in 2004.
 
Murray’s project is a reflection on her analogue archive in the face of rampant digitization of visual media. Asking, “what is the perfect inversion of nostalgia?”, Murray plans to reanimate the vast archive of physical media she has created over the years, particularly her “many pages of black and white and color still camera negatives” and reprint them onto a ribbon of 35mm motion picture stock, animating what she describes as “an inadverdant survey of a very particular and very personal time, each frame evidentiary, holding hints, signs and clues of how things were back then, and seeming to portend that to which has yet to come.”
 
Photogram Workshop with Julie Murray
Saturday, October 5, 2013
12:00pm – 6:00pm
Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT)
1137 Dupont Street (at Gladstone Avenue)
Cost: $125 LIFT members, $145 non-members
Pre-registration required.

Enrolment limit to 6
 
Films of Julie Murray

(more info TBA)
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Starts at 8:00pm
CineCycle
129 Spadina Avenue (down the lane)
Admission: $5 LIFT members, $8 non-members
 
“The films of Julie Murray are astonishing works of subtle insights and great beauty. Deftly combining her own photographed material and a variety of found footage, Murray creates speculative and other-worlds which resonate with hidden meanings and tentative connections. At the same time her films are grounded in the real world, providing a sense of familiarity and constancy. The richness of the imagery and the sensitive use of sound intersect to form complex articulations of the tenuous emotional life of the world and the individuals in it.”
—Patrick Friel, Chicago Filmmakers
 

 
The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) is Canada’s foremost artist-run production and education organization dedicated to celebrating excellence in the moving image. LIFT exists to provide support and encouragement for independent filmmakers and artists through affordable access to production, post-production and exhibition equipment; professional and creative development; workshops and courses; commissioning and exhibitions; artist-residencies; and a variety of other services. LIFT is supported by its membership, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Ontario Trillium Foundation, Ontario Arts Foundation, the Government of Ontario and the Toronto Arts Council.
 
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For additional information please see http://lift.ca and http://juliemurray.yolasite.com
or e-mail Executive Director Chris Kennedy at office@lift.on.ca

Tuesday 1 October 2013 –

Non-members:
Members:

Location:
Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) 
1137 Dupont Street 
Toronto ON Canada