Lindsay McIntyre: the tool of tools

Hands are the tool of tools. They represent work and time. They tell stories. They are the record of our lives. They represent guilt and things unsaid. They dismiss, threaten, summon, feed, and signal friendship and love. They are how a mother shows love to her child. For Inuit, hands and the tools they make have always been a concrete part of life. These film frames and extracts from a decade of film work bring to light the interplay between surface and subject, frame and content and shed light on the recurrent depiction of hands in my body of film works. Working primarily with high-contrast black and white 16mm film, these images stem from a series of motion picture works produced between 2005-2013. The bounding box of the 16mm film frame enters the picture, normally withheld from view; it sees light at last.

– Lindsay McIntyre

In recent years, artists of Inuit heritage have been moving to the forefront of the art world in Canada. Long known for their carving, printmaking and drawing practices, today Inuit voices are being heard across the country and around the world as they tell their stories of personal and cultural change in the modern age of colonialism.

Set within the context of a commercial gallery with a forty-five year history of working with Inuit artists, Lindsay McIntyre’s deeply intimate filmic explorations of family history are part of a new wave of contemporary expression. Inuit artists today speak not only of life on the land in the North but also of the diasporic experience.

Much of McIntyre’s extensive catalogue represents a parellel investigation into her personal identity and family history as well as celluloid itself, its processess and associated mechanisms—manipulating the various steps in the hand-developing process of 16mm film and being the “one-woman machine” responsible for every role behind the camera. McIntyre’s richly textured, grainy, or diaphanous imagery is more visual art than cinema, with marks and signature characteristics showing the hand of the artist as much one would expect to see in a carving or painting.

For this exhibition, outtakes from films are mounted into lightboxes, bringing the work into the discourse now intrinsic to that form and inseparable from Vancouver’s history of photography.