CIRCUIT is delighted to announce Sites of Connection, a three-part series for CIRCUIT Cast of conversations with artists who work at the intersection of filmic language, poetry, and metaphor, hosted by artist Dani McIntosh.
Sites of Connection follows the whakataukī "the words are small, but the meaning is big."(1) In these conversations, Dani and filmmakers James Tapsell-Kururangi, Selina Ershadi, and Hana Pera Aoake seek to consider the ways in which moving image artworks take on the potential of poetic language and metaphor.
The work of French film theorist Christian Metz suggests that the gap between moving images and life is that the audience is aware of the scene as constructed for viewing. When written or spoken words are included in a film work, this notion is complicated. What happens when filmic language is considered alongside abstraction and poetry?
How does the vocabulary of film and the sequential nature of shots hold poetry and images in a temporal relationship, to point to moments before and beyond the present?
Is it that the moving images ground, reconnect, or make specific what poetry and metaphor suggest?
Can an image be a metaphor if it is already so close to life?
(1) See Hona Black, He Iti te Kupu: Māori Metaphors and Similes. Oratia Media, 2021.
Dani McIntosh is an artist living and working in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her body of work consists of moving image artworks, installation, and poetry, and responds to ideas about the dual cultural perspectives of being Pākehā in Aotearoa and the artist's adolescence in England. Compelled by moments of connection and the myriad of emotional states possible in any one day, Dani uses her practice as a space to collaborate and connect with artists, practitioners, and friends. In this way she asks, how can we be encouraged to look more closely, slowly, and thoughtfully, to better understand our place within Aotearoa and broader socio-political, cultural, and ecological contexts?