Amanda DAwn Christie
Spectres of Shortwave / Ombres des ondes courtes is the first feature length film by Amanda Dawn Christie.
Since 1999 Amanda Dawn Christie has created dozens of experimental films, videos, expanded cinema performances, and installations, that have been presented around the world. She works with 35mm, 16mm, and super 8 film as well as analogue video, digital media, photography, installation art, sound art, electronics, and performance. Her work not only spans across these mediums but also brings them together in ways that blur the boundaries of where one discipline ends and the next begins.
She has spent the last two years working as a full time artist on various projects related to Spectres of Shortwave and Requiem for Radio. During this time, she traveled to various arts residencies to develop these works further. Returning from residencies in New York to Atlantic Canada, she plans to stay rooted in New Brunswick this fall where she will be teaching two digital arts courses at Université de Moncton while putting the finishing touches on Requiem for Radio, a suite of five interactive radio projects, at the Centre Culturel Aberdeen.
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Amanda Dawn Christie has exhibited and performed in art galleries across Canada, and her films have screened internationally from Cannes to Korea to San Fransisco and beyond. She was the 2014 Atlantic finalist for the National Media Art prize, and recently had a 10 year retrospective exhibition of her work, called Land Lost, curated by Mireille Bourgeois, at the Galerie d’art Louise et Reuben Cohen. She was also included in the Marion McCain Biennale of Atlantic Contemporary Art, called Writing Topography, curated by Corinna Ghaznavi. Her films are distributed by the CFMDC (Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre) in Canada, the Dutchfilmbank in Amseterdam, and Lightcone in Paris.
Another 10 year retrospective of her work, "Dividing Roadmaps by Timezones: 10 years of moving pictures 1999-2009", focused on her experimental films and screened at the Canadian Film Institute (Ottawa), the Winnipeg Cinematheque (Winnipeg), the Vogue Cinema (Sackville), the Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival (Halifax), Amherst College (Massachussets), the Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester, NY), and Spectacle Microcinema (Brooklyn, New York).
She has been an artist in residence at the Rotterdam International Film Festival (Netherlands), the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative (Halifax), the Wave Farm (Acra, New York), the Millennium Film Workshop (New York, New York), MDocs Storyteller's Institute (Saratoga Springs, New York), and is currently on a residency at the Island Media Arts Co-op (Charlottetown PEI) where she is creating a new three channel 16mm film installation, called "Where Ocean Meets Air", for Art in the Open.
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Since 1997, she has been actively involved with artist run centres, in both volunteer and staff positions: serving on various boards, working as both a technician and later as a director, teaching workshops, publishing articles, and serving on juries across Canada.
She completed her MFA at the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts in Vancouver, before moving to Amsterdam. Upon her return to Canada she worked at the Faucet Media Arts Centre & Struts Gallery. She later worked as the director of the Galerie Sans Nom and the RE:FLUX Festival of Music and Sound Art. She left the Galerie Sans Nom in 2014 to work full time as an artist with the support of a new media creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts and a category A creation grant from Arts NB.
Concepts and themes explored in her work focus primarily on the relationship between the human body and analogue technology in a digital age.
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Taking a relatively solitary approach, like a painter or a poet, Amanda Dawn Christie, often works alone making her films with the detritus of the capitalist entertainment industry. Many of her past works were made with short ends from industry films and were then hand processed with "found" chemistry in make-shift darkrooms.
Spectres of shortwave marks new territory for Christie in its size and scope. A two hour experimental documentary, filmed on 35mm, involving driving and aerial shots as well as working in extreme weather conditions. She was very fortunate to work with a small crew of industry professionals on the more difficult shoots, for 9 out of the 46 filming days.
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You can view more of her work on her website: www.amandadawnchristie.ca