Private Project

Awash

We begin along Vancouver's foreshore beaches, where people play and relax. Gradually the waters rise and waves swamp the picnicking and play areas; the inundation begins and fires flare. Alien creatures appear in our waters. The film ends with us swimming with the fishes through a tropical kelp forest.

The film's unnatural coloration and technological processes (such as infrared photography) suggest our mutating relationship with nature and its consequences. Images of natural beauty console us that everything we love about our everyday environment is not being lost, while the slight psychic dislocation caused by the technological interventions - curious colour palette and image inversions – hints at decay and dissolution.

  • Lisa MacLean
    Director
  • Lisa MacLean
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short, Web / New Media
  • Genres:
    experimental, art house, video, infrared photography, landscape, environmental
  • Runtime:
    7 minutes 29 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 5, 2016
  • Production Budget:
    1,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Canada
  • Country of Filming:
    Canada
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
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Director Biography - Lisa MacLean

Lisa MacLean has an MFA in Studio Art and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies (Art History, English, and Sociology) from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She has exhibited her art work and created installations locally, nationally, and internationally for many years and has been an artist in residence at institutions in Belgium, France, Turkey, and Italy. In addition to teaching in several post-secondary institutions in Canada and producing her own work, Lisa has curated a range of exhibitions and taken part in many collaborative projects. Spanning a variety of disciplines including digital media, photography, video, and mixed media installation, her practice confronts concerns related to cultural and natural history, gender, landscape and the body, architectural space, the environment, and memory.

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Director Statement

This film is part of a series of art works entitled Urban Pastoral focusing on Vancouver’s seaside landscapes. In this work my interest is in the ways pastoral green spaces such as parks, gardens, nature walks, forest preserves, and others reconnect humans with nature and how such spaces might change with global climate change, high waters, and heat. A constellation of forces, including economic pressures, rising sea levels, extreme weather, and shoreline erosion, is affecting coastal areas worldwide. In Vancouver, the consequences of these changes for our society are beginning to register in the collective consciousness with recent reports that our city is one of the top ten around the world threatened by high waters.

Sorrow at vanishing species, anxiety about global climate change, and hope for some new and better human relationship with nature and our fellow beings motivates me. As a small contribution to the fight against environmental desolation and its costs, this body of work is created with hope for a reconfigured way of being on and with the earth.