Note: Unfortunately, we have had to cancel Sammy Chien’s performance. Miwa Matreyek’s performance will continue as scheduled at 9:00 pm. Doors will open at 8:00 pm.
Experience VIFF Live Resident Artists Sammy Chien and Miwa Matreyek’s interdisciplinary performances at The Ironworks. One ticket will grant you admission to both performances.
Miwa Matreyek
Further pushing her signature technique of layered projections, Miwa Matreyek creates an emotional, dreamlike meditation on climate catastrophe and the Anthropocene — the proposed current era where human influence has affected almost all realms of earth’s natural systems.
Miwa’s shadow traverses macro and micro scales, as her silhouette shape-shifts to experience the world from various perspectives. An earth overflowing with trash. A person drowning in a plastic-filled ocean. A school of fish caught in a trawling net. The work will be an emotionally impactful, embodied illustration of the news headlines we see everyday, the complex harm humanity causes to the world — and what it might mean for all of us; humanity, as well as other life, and the earth itself — to be living in this changing world.
Matreyek will perform The World Made Itself and Infinitely Yours, works that weave surreal and poetic narratives of conflict between humans, nature, and the climate crisis.
This project is supported by a 2019 Princess Grace Foundation Special Projects Grant. Winner of Golden Nica award for Computer Animation, Prix Ars Electronica 2020. All music for “Infinitely Yours” is composed, recorded and performed by Morgan Sorne.
Sammy Chien
Artistic Director of Chimerik 似不像, Sammy Chien 簡上翔 is an interdisciplinary artist pioneering ways of integrating new media into performance. As part of his practice, Chien uses the technologies of real-time performance software to produce deep connections between image, sound and movement.
Chien will present samples from ongoing research and a new work-in-progress exemplary of a practice that draws upon a composite of art forms, disciplines and lived experiences.
About the Ironworks Series
VIFF Live is giving four Resident Artists the opportunity to immerse themselves in the 2023 Festival and perform at The Ironworks.
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Guests
Miwa Matreyek
Creator, Performer
Miwa Matreyek is an animator, designer, and performer originally based in Los Angeles, now based on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver BC. She has been an internationally touring artist since 2010. Coming from a background in animation, Matreyek creates live, staged performances in which she interacts with her animations as a shadow silhouette at the intersection of cinematic and theatrical, illusionistic and physical, handmade and digital. Her work exists in a dreamlike visual space that makes invisible worlds visible, often weaving surreal and poetic narratives of conflict between humans, nature, and the climate crisis. She is an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University at the School for the Contemporary Arts. Previous presentations include TED Global, Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontiers program, MoMA, SFMoMA, and many more.
Sammy Chien
Sammy Chien 簡上翔 is a Taiwanese-Canadian immigrant and queer artist-of-colour, who is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, director, performer, researcher and mentor in film, sound art, new media, performance, movement and spiritual practice. With over 500 collaborative projects, his work has been exhibited across Canada, Western Europe, and Asia including at the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the National Centre for the Performing Arts (Beijing). Sammy has worked with pioneers of digital performance: Troika Ranch and Wong Kar Wai’s cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and is active in projects engaging various underrepresented communities. Sammy has been featured in magazines, on television and commercials such as Discorder, Keedan, CBC Arts and BenQ. Sammy is currently leading a dance research project, We Were One, and media arts project Ritual-Spective 迴融, both funded by Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. Sammy is the official instructor of Isadora, Member/Council of MotionDAO and Artistic Director of Chimerik似不像, an award winning interdisciplinary arts collective and design team.
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Chasing Time: An Evening with James Balog
Following a screening of Chasing Time (40 min), renowned environmental photographer James Balog discusses his groundbreaking visual studies of melting glaciers and how he seeks to seed hope and inspire action toward a sustainable future.
The Art of Adventure
The unbelievable adventure story of how painter Robert Bateman and ecologist Bristol Foster drove a Land Rover from Africa to Australia in 1957, developing a love of nature to last a lifetime. An inspirational love letter to the adventure of life itself.
Agatha's Almanac
Shot over six years on vibrant 16mm film, Agatha’s Almanac is an artful documentary portrait of filmmaker Amalie Atkin’s octogenarian aunt, who has fashioned herself an endearingly simple and self-sustaining lifestyle on her Manitoba farm.
Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other
This intimate and candid film by a younger husband and wife artist team is a delicate and immensely moving dual portrait of two artists, husband and wife, together and apart, at that point in life when the end casts a shadow over even the sunniest day.
Image: © Manon et Jacob and Final Cut For Real