Mike Hoolboom is a key member of Toronto’s fringe cinema scene since the 1980s and a prominent figure in the world of experimental filmmaking. This exhibition marks the transition of his work from the theatre to the gallery, where it will be presented as a four-part video installation, along with other short films from his prolific career.

Mike Hoolboom works primarily with appropriated images culled from Hollywood films, documentary footage and home movies. These film sequences are reconfigured into dream-like narratives depicting the cycle of life – especially of dying or foreboding death, the complexities of desire and the frailty of the human body. Threading these images together are intimate voice-overs or passages of text – both confessional and inquisitive – reflecting on the human condition both past and future. The familiarity of Hoolboom’s images underlines the impact of cinema on our conscious selves, on memory, and what we imagine our lives could be. It is life as cinema and cinema as life. Through this work, curator Philip Monk states, “Hoolboom suggests that we too are born and die through the movies.”

“In the future each moment will be photographed, doubled. Our bodies will grow transparent. We will enter each other like walking through a door, until at last we come to an end of the picture world, a world where we are also pictures. Our movies and photographs, will they help up understand our last place, teach us how to die?” (excerpt: Mike Hoolboom “In the Future,” Imitations of Life)

The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery‘s contemporary exhibition program is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Mike Hoolboom’s work is distributed by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and Vtape, Toronto.