Christina Battle
2021Nostalgia (April 2001 to Present)
Christina Battle
In a colour fest of broken emulsions, the artist reconvenes a suite of feel good 50s adverts for a better life. A young boy on a bicycle, a blonde smiler on a tricycle, two men at a clothesline, the crisp border of neighborhood lawns appearing as if no one had ever set foot on them. The world is blank and the first line I lay across it is perfect, and then the second marks an intersection and the town is born. Everything recognizable as a picture arrives via drawings, stills, which are gathered here in a restless, teeming movement. Animation but not Saturday morning cartoons. [Mike Hoolboom, 2007]
Nostalgia (April 2001 to Present)
Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road & 97th Street
Christina Battle
Christina Battle’s Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road & 97th Street (2003) hand-manipulates 16mm footage of oil fields on the Canadian prairies, simultaneously managing to recall Cécile Fontaine’s delicacy of emulsion-layering technique, pay visual homage to Pat O’Neill’s early 7362 (1967), and evoke with marvellous understatement the grand prize at the heart of the imperialist resource wars. [senses of cinema “Been Underground So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me: New York Underground Film Festival 2004” [Ioannis Mookas (review of programme: ‘patriot games’ – nyuff 2004)]
Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road & 97th Street
Behind The Shadows
Christina Battle
Outside the window a storm like no other is taking shape. Behind the Shadows documents the imagined moment when the delicate balance between natural and developed worlds began to shift. Looking back upon an event yet to occur, time inside this threatened world is caught in an endless loop. Seeming to have no end, it stutters… repeats… extends. As if caught in a void between dream and reality, characters struggle to reconcile threats from the outside environment
Behind The Shadows
Water Once Ruled
Christina Battle
Collaging appropriated footage with original imagery, Water once ruled collapses the past, present and future into a single repeating loop. Linking the introduction of satellite imagery with the colonization of our own as well as other planets, the video considers water – and the lack there of – as the distressed resource connecting Mars’ history with Earth’s present and future.
Water Once Ruled
Bad Stars: Chemical Valley
Christina Battle
Seeing warnings about past disasters as a way to bypass potential disasters of the future; and considering disaster as a series of linkages extending from the environmental, cultural, political, economic, and social, Bad Stars draws threads between these connections and wonders how they might be realigned in ways that will help to move beyond them. The project sees the framework of disaster as an active strategy that can aid in the shifts in perspective necessary to advance beyond the causes of disasters themselves.
Bad Stars: Chemical Valley
