Collage Crimes: Maddin Remixed

Indie film favorite Guy Maddin trades the director’s chair for a seat at the curatorial helm of “Collage Crimes,” an exhibition featuring new and reimagined versions of the Winnipeg artist’s films as well as a spotlight on the collaborative image constructions of artist collective Ordnance Pictures. The three-part show opens with the rapid-fire intensity of a bizarre waking dream in Maddin’s Lullaby, a new projection work that hones in on the “pure form” of melodrama with a staccato montage of clips taken from the sub-genre films that have influenced his own famously fantastical work. In the second part of the exhibition Maddin re-presents his film Cowards Bend the Knee, this time as an assemblage interspersed with a selection of unconnected short films. The viewer is left to wonder which film is framing which in a non-linear sequence of disrupted imagery that spins the original film’s surrealist plot of murder into ever-deepening narrative complexities. Finally, Maddin brings together a set of 20 Dadaist- and Surrealist-inspired collage works and a silent video produced by Ordnance Pictures, a group of artists that includes Maddin, Paul Butler, Michael Dumontier, Brad Phillips, Simon Hughes, Jeff Funnell, Alicia Smith and Caelum Vatnsdal. Also of note is the gallery’s publication of a “special dossier” on Maddin’s work complete with the first-ever DVD collection of his short films. (4001 rue Berri #202, Montreal QC)

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