Kelly Egan

Exploring écriture feminine and women’s structural narratives, the Custom Trailer Series reimagines Hollywood films through the structure of a traditional quilt pattern. Here, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me has been recut to construct a starburst quilt, and then scanned as a film. The work exists both as a material object (the quilt) and the visual representation (the film), drawing attention to the materiality of the filmstrip and the patriarchal biases still present in commercial cinema.

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« Athyrium Filix-Femina » , the 2nd "quilt film" paying homage to pioneering female artists, was created using Atkins' original cyanotype recipe, coating 35mm film, and exposing each filmstrip to sun. The images are a combination of botanical photograms like Atkins’ images and found footage that tells the story of a young girl tormented by a gang of bullies that, weaved together, produce a feminist narrative that questions malecentrism within the history of the photographic arts and sciences.

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The filmmaker's response to her experience of the hijacking of her city during the Toronto G20 Summit, "Ransom Notes" re-appropriates language and meaning through the act of collage. The film combines new and old media (film, newsprint, print-outs of twitter feeds) to explore social mobilization through mass media. The soundtrack of the film was created by placing letters, words and sentences directly on the optical soundtrack.

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transparent “c” is a formal investigation into the structure of language and meaning. Not only does transparent “c” break down the language structure to the basic common denominators, but it also flushes out the direct correlation between sound and image in my work. transparent “c” demonstrates the range of the sonic palette in animated sound through the mechanical performance of the projector optically reading the alphabet.

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c: won eyed jail is a 35mm film project consisting of two parts: a quilt patterned out of 35mm still negatives and 35mm found motion picture, and a traditional film print of the quilt that is screened through a 35mm motion picture projector.

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“Cockroach is a handmade, cameraless animated film constructed with basic materials found around the home - newspaper, ink and Kool-Aid. Using cockroaches as a metaphor for language, it chronicles the pervasiveness and endurance of these primordial creatures. Text by Christian Cotroneo ("It's a bug's life in downtown Toronto," originally printed in the Toronto Star) is used to create the soundtrack.”

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Egan’s first film and her first experiment in translating written text/language into an aural object. “finger petals” is a handmade cameraless film which uses collage techniques to sculpt the images and sound. The visual composition was made by meticulously cutting, shaping and collaging flowers onto the filmstrip. The sound treatment is created by pasting e.e. cummings’ poem “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond,” the letters themselves forming the audio as their graphic shape is translated into sound.

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Old Stud is a short film about a man who has one last chance to secure his legacy before the industry he devoted himself to passes him by.

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