Ben Rivers: We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.

Ben River’s films picture a young world in the early morning of time. A world where the clamour of human invention echoes in the deep mountain passes of geological evolution. River’s recent films are portraits of people in the interstices of society and their relationship to insular, hermetic spaces. Curator and writer Mark Waugh observes that River’s films are “a documentary series, a eulogy and evocation of a dream of the wilderness. The post-apocalyptic hallucinogenic world beyond the noise of the market place.” Waugh describes River’s ways of world-making as a “psychic return to an elaborate universe made up of imaginary possibility…”

Through River’s cinematic time-travels into the past and the future, temporality and perception collapse. The pandemonium of cosmic becoming rattles through auto scrap yards and tin-can compost heaps. In these worlds, there is a seamless lineage between a lone horse tumbling in a snowy landscape and children driving race carts around a detritus-strewn homestead. The imaginary possibility has existed since the beginning of time and is visible in every natural and human invention and incidence of destruction.

http://lux.org.uk/collection/artists/ben-rivers-0

Origin of the Species | 2008. 16mm. 15 mins. 
This is My Land | 2006. 16mm. 14 mins.
Ah Liberty! | 2008. 16mm. 19 mins.

Intermission

Astika | 2006. 16mm. 8 mins.
Sordal | 2008. 16mm. 8 mins. 
I Know Where I'm Going | 2009. 16mm. 30 mins.

Related Event: A salon on the theme of journeying, featuring Ben Rivers, will be hosted by VIVO Media Arts Centre. See www.dimcinema.com for more information.