Artist In Residence
Currently in residence…
DRIL ART COLLECTIVE
DRIL is a Vancouver-based artist collective comprised of Dylan McHugh, Rachel White, Ian Prentice and Leisha O’Donohue. Drawing from diverse backgrounds in the trades, craft traditions, and the visual arts, our collective was founded in 2009 to exchange skills and resources through collaboration on multimedia artworks. In working together, we have developed a practice that navigates the intersections between fine art, craft, cinema and the everyday.
DRIL's collaborative practice comes together as a culmination of shared labor and an intertwining of ideas, knowledge and disciplines. Project development hinges on the unanimous agreement of all members of the group. In this sense, the nature of the collective is akin to a small community working in solidarity.
UNION HOUSE / process shots / EXTERIOR
The Union House residency has offered us a unique opportunity to undertake creative research through process-based experimentation, adopting techniques from analog film special effects and stop motion animation.
INTERIOR / hallways
From our research we are creating a video work that examines the history and vitality of the house in an allegorical context, embarking on a process that will serve as a meditation on mortality and notions of an afterlife. Within this context, the house becomes the stage in which we are choreographing and constructing the scenes of our film. In this setting, we are experimenting with video and photography as a means to give form and dimension to the immateriality of time, light, and memory.
SHADOW ROOM / process shots
We have been cultivating our own effects inspired by the horror film genre from the 1930's era, with the house functioning equally as both a central thematic subject and an important technical apparatus.
The house itself serves as a familiar trope for examining the mechanisms of the cinematic experience, horror film, and signifiers of the domestic. In relation to its affect on our psyche, this genre of cinema inhabits our deepest memories and subconscious mind, tapping into our latent anxieties of change, loss and the unknown. These cinematic effects inform the content of this research, and are central to our phenomenological examination of the home.
CAMERA OBSCURA / process shots
One of our methods uses the interior rooms of the house to further develop our cinematic approach to the camera obscura. Instead of channeling the available light of the sun to project the outside in, our interior camera obscura makes use of high-intensity lights to project an image of one interior space onto another. These projections are animated through simple stop motion techniques as we choreograph scenes to create dreamscapes that are captured and translated through low-light video and photographic equipment. The results of this process produce an eerie and disorienting effect that hovers between appearing three dimensional and ethereal.
THE ATTIC
DRIL would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Denbigh Fine Art Services, Lobby Studio, Tetherstone Construction Inc. and The Union House for making this project possible.
