Instagram Story Viewer

Modern Nature

Opening tonight (6-8pm) and on view at @uoftdaniels until July 15, 2026 🤍

Photo: @john_ker

Modern Nature, opens at @uoftdaniels at the Architecture + Design Gallery, Daniels Building, on April 30th from 6-8 pm 💌

Producer: Candice Napoleone @candicenapoleone
Cinematography: John Ker @john_ker
Editor: Andrea Franco @andreafrancob
Sound Designer & Mixer: Stefana Fratila @stefanafratila
Cast: Julia Hendrickson @juliajuliajuliajulia_ , Saffron Maeve @saffronmaeve , Mauricio Diaz @cuerpo.integrado , Iman Bundu @nymphpassing ,Chloe Leblanc @chloe.leblanc , Susannah Height @susannahaight and Camille Rojas
Assistant Director: Beth Warrian @bethwarrian
1st AC: Felipe López Gómez @altra.films
2nd AC: Ashley Mach
Camera Trainee: Evan Park
Location Sound Recordist: Ian Reynolds @ianreynolds.ca
Costume Designer: Jackie Knight @goodknighty @smokingvintage
Production Assistant: Özge Dîlan Arslan @ozge.dilan.arslan
Film Lab: MELS

My thesis exhibition, Modern Nature, opens at the @uoftdaniels Architecture + Design Gallery, Daniels Building, on April 30th from 6-8 pm. 

I have been quietly working away at this over the last year, in part with an incredible team of collaborators, for whom I have so much gratitude and admiration.

-

Modern Nature presents a series of portraits of couples and individuals, filmed in public spaces on an academic campus. Here, performers collectively rehearse a script comprising passages from Jeannette Winterson’s ‘Written on the Body’ (1992) and Derek Jarman’s ‘Modern Nature’ (1991). Written within a year of one another during the 1980s culture wars, a period marked by the hostilities of Thatcherism and government denial of the AIDS epidemic, Winterson’s and Jarman’s texts provide a framework for reflection in the present, engaging with the bifurcation of politics and illness and the exploration of spaces for queerness and desire as respite.  

The film constructs a provisional space of textual re- articulation and approaches rehearsal as a form of worldmaking with feminist, queer, and socialist lineages. Although rehearsal in theatre and filmmaking is conventionally understood as a preparatory phase, in Modern Nature it takes on a different form. Rehearsal becomes a generative site of practice, a transitional and oppositional system set in tension against institutional structures and received knowledge. 

Producer: Candice Napoleone
Cinematography: John Ker
Editor: Andrea Franco
Sound Designer & Mixer: Stefana Fratila
Cast: Julia Hendrickson, Saffron Maeve, Mauricio Diaz, Iman Bundu, Chloe Leblanc, Susannah Height, and Camille Rojas
Assistant Director: Beth Warrian
1st AC: Felipe López Gómez
2nd AC: Ashley Mach
Camera Trainee: Evan Park
Location Sound Recordist: Ian Reynolds
Costume Designer: Jackie Knight
Production Assistant: Özge Dîlan Arslan
Film Lab: MELS
Special Thanks: Smoking Vintage

My thesis exhibition, Modern Nature, opens at the @uoftdaniels Architecture + Design Gallery, Daniels Building, on April 30th from 6-8 pm. 

I have been quietly working away at this over the last year, in part with an incredible team of collaborators, for whom I have so much gratitude and admiration.

-

Modern Nature presents a series of portraits of couples and individuals, filmed in public spaces on an academic campus. Here, performers collectively rehearse a script comprising passages from Jeannette Winterson’s ‘Written on the Body’ (1992) and Derek Jarman’s ‘Modern Nature’ (1991). Written within a year of one another during the 1980s culture wars, a period marked by the hostilities of Thatcherism and government denial of the AIDS epidemic, Winterson’s and Jarman’s texts provide a framework for reflection in the present, engaging with the bifurcation of politics and illness and the exploration of spaces for queerness and desire as respite.  

The film constructs a provisional space of textual re- articulation and approaches rehearsal as a form of worldmaking with feminist, queer, and socialist lineages. Although rehearsal in theatre and filmmaking is conventionally understood as a preparatory phase, in Modern Nature it takes on a different form. Rehearsal becomes a generative site of practice, a transitional and oppositional system set in tension against institutional structures and received knowledge. 

Producer: Candice Napoleone
Cinematography: John Ker
Editor: Andrea Franco
Sound Designer & Mixer: Stefana Fratila
Cast: Julia Hendrickson, Saffron Maeve, Mauricio Diaz, Iman Bundu, Chloe Leblanc, Susannah Height, and Camille Rojas
Assistant Director: Beth Warrian
1st AC: Felipe López Gómez
2nd AC: Ashley Mach
Camera Trainee: Evan Park
Location Sound Recordist: Ian Reynolds
Costume Designer: Jackie Knight
Production Assistant: Özge Dîlan Arslan
Film Lab: MELS
Special Thanks: Smoking Vintage

My thesis exhibition, Modern Nature, opens at the @uoftdaniels Architecture + Design Gallery, Daniels Building, on April 30th from 6-8 pm. 

I have been quietly working away at this over the last year, in part with an incredible team of collaborators, for whom I have so much gratitude and admiration.

-

Modern Nature presents a series of portraits of couples and individuals, filmed in public spaces on an academic campus. Here, performers collectively rehearse a script comprising passages from Jeannette Winterson’s ‘Written on the Body’ (1992) and Derek Jarman’s ‘Modern Nature’ (1991). Written within a year of one another during the 1980s culture wars, a period marked by the hostilities of Thatcherism and government denial of the AIDS epidemic, Winterson’s and Jarman’s texts provide a framework for reflection in the present, engaging with the bifurcation of politics and illness and the exploration of spaces for queerness and desire as respite.  

The film constructs a provisional space of textual re- articulation and approaches rehearsal as a form of worldmaking with feminist, queer, and socialist lineages. Although rehearsal in theatre and filmmaking is conventionally understood as a preparatory phase, in Modern Nature it takes on a different form. Rehearsal becomes a generative site of practice, a transitional and oppositional system set in tension against institutional structures and received knowledge. 

Producer: Candice Napoleone
Cinematography: John Ker
Editor: Andrea Franco
Sound Designer & Mixer: Stefana Fratila
Cast: Julia Hendrickson, Saffron Maeve, Mauricio Diaz, Iman Bundu, Chloe Leblanc, Susannah Height, and Camille Rojas
Assistant Director: Beth Warrian
1st AC: Felipe López Gómez
2nd AC: Ashley Mach
Camera Trainee: Evan Park
Location Sound Recordist: Ian Reynolds
Costume Designer: Jackie Knight
Production Assistant: Özge Dîlan Arslan
Film Lab: MELS
Special Thanks: Smoking Vintage

Thesis inspiration

Thesis inspiration

Pine Flat

Pine Flat

Pine Flat

Thrilled to be guest curating a paired screening of Robert Bresson’s Mouchette and Gillian Garcia’s Nadine Nortier for TIFF Wavelengths on June 11th.

~

Placed in dialogue, these two films explore themes of subjectivity, agency, portraiture, and gesture. Bresson’s Mouchette, a poignant and austere study of a young woman on the margins of society, forms the foundation for Garcia’s speculative reimagining in Nadine Nortier.

The screening will be joined by filmmaker Gillian Garcia in a recorded Q&A following the screening.

~

Merci @andrea_tavie for all your support and encouragement.

Thank you @gilliangarcia for this tender and expansive film.

Poster by the brilliant @carolmontpartstudio

Tickets in bio.

First semester of my MA complete 🤍

First semester of my MA complete 🤍

First semester of my MA complete 🤍

First semester of my MA complete 🤍

First semester of my MA complete 🤍

First semester of my MA complete 🤍

First semester of my MA complete 🤍

First semester of my MA complete 🤍

First semester of my MA complete 🤍

First semester of my MA complete 🤍

@pazelduayen 🤍

Bts x angel @claralacra

@pazelduayen 🤍

Bts x angel @claralacra

@pazelduayen 🤍

Bts x angel @claralacra

🤍

IKEBANA will be playing in a retrospective of @lilyjshhh films: WORK AND PLACE IN THE WORKPLACE: THE FILMS OF LILY JUE SHENG at @anthologyfilmarchives on June 6th at 7:30.

I am looking forward to observing Lily’s poetic work in conversation with moderator Steff Hui Ci Ling.

~
The moving-image works of Lily Jue Sheng are distinguished by their richly multi-layered quality (visually, thematically, and conceptually), and by their achievement in creating a sensory-driven cinema that’s as piercing as it is poetic, imaginative, and strange. Whether working with experimental animation, collage, documentary, text, or some combination thereof, Sheng’s films devise polyphonic compositions that link the totality of their ideas to the unassuming, common spaces they frequent day-to-day. Their earlier films coincided with a temporary job cataloging the works of Japanese filmmaker Stom Sogo, which not only informs their cinematic and occupational habits of rephotographing images to the punctuated beat of a hair-raising soundtrack, but also renders categorically illegible, thereby neglected, the kind of work performed by filmmakers doubling as cinema’s conditionally documented and perpetually alien technical workers. In their later films, Sheng starts to more explicitly circumvent, recontextualize, and unravel the symbolic tensions permeating language, specifically focusing on deteriorated or vernacular inflections of Chinese. In these works, written characters function simultaneously as the primary image, text caption, oral tradition, and somatic drawing of their personal lineage toward a more critical consciousness, bearing the spirit of Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s rigorously reframed subtitles and anthropological studies.

LA 🌞

LA 🌞

LA 🌞

LA 🌞

LA 🌞

LA 🌞

LA 🌞

LA 🌞

LA 🌞

To sleep under a eucalyptus tree