Weronika Stepien and Stephen Wichuk examine the operations of food production and how this activity has been represented in literature, industrial films, and popular cinema.

A selection of related movement images are disassembled and their various motivations and structural components reconstituted to produce a series of new video works.

In one instance, a set of inexpensive consumer goods haunted by physical, mimetic and mythic affinities to sausage making are summoned, to reenact a centuries old sight-gag. In another, movements captured in a tradition of scientific management are pushed through the tedious yet fantastical mill of cel animation.

The resultant images collapse historical time with the time of production, and in so doing reveal uncanny movements of capital and desire.

ARTIST BIO

Weronika Stepien is a Polish-American interdisciplinary artist who graduated from Emily Carr University’s Film and Video + Integrated Media program in 2009. In 2007 she studied audio visual art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Her artwork incorporates forms of visual storytelling, psychology and experiments in shape and movement. Her work has been exhibited in Chicago, Germany, Singapore, and Vancouver. She has been teaching animation to children and youth since 2008.

Stephen Wichuk is an animator and arts educator born in Edmonton, Alberta. He received a Bachelor of Media Arts at the Emily Carr Institute in 2005 and a an MFA from the University of British Columbia in 2013. His works have been exhibited and screened at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (2013), Little Mountain Studios (2012), Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society (2010) and VIVO Media Arts (2008). He has taught animation principles to people of all ages through Arts Umbrella, Reel2Real, VSB, Cineworks, Emily Carr, and the Purple Thistle.

*Image credit: Sausage Machine Single Channel Digital Video 2016 by Stephen Wichuk.

Curated by Tarah Hogue and Vanessa Kwan.