After forty years of filmmaking, Guy Maddin has come to think of his life only in visual terms, in jumbled sketches remembered poorly. His autobiography could never be a series of sentences packed into a memoir on a bookshelf. Rather, he recalls life in sequences of something like movie storyboards, those elemental blueprints of filmic preparation, the syntax of cinematic expression itself. Maddin revisits and rereads his past, shuffling through these clustered, disorganized narratives, sometimes intensely emotional, sometimes utterly inconsequential—always fragmented. Sometimes the memories of his parents have surely been collaged onto his own. Maybe a memory is born only when two or more sensations collide? And all non-impacts are swiftly forgotten?

Guy Maddin has directed thirteen feature-length movies, most recently Rumours (2024), starring Cate Blanchett and Roy Dupuis; as well as The Forbidden Room (2015), My Winnipeg (2007), and The Saddest Music in the World (2003). He has also mounted over 70 performances of his films around the world, featuring live elements—orchestra, sound effects, singing, and narration—most recently The Green Fog (2016), which was accompanied live by the Kronos Quartet. His screenplay collaborators include Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro and poet John Ashbery. His movies Archangel (1990)& The Heart of the World (2000)bothwon America’s National Society of Film Critics awards for Best Experimental Film. For the past 15 years, he has partnered with co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson. Maddin started making collage to inspire screenplay ideas, plan shoots, teach himself about colour, and calm his nerves. He is now hooked on the practice.

For more than three decades, David Hoffos has been known for immersive, multi-channel installations- dark walk-through environments and dreamlike nocturnal dioramas eerily brought to life through their signature low-tech illusionism. In a departure from their usual sculptural video installations and dark dioramas, David Hoffos presents a series of hand-cut photographic constructions. These artworks explore the artist’s ongoing quest for new, lost, undiscovered, and unlikely analog techniques.

--

David Hoffos was born in Montréal and grew up in many cities in Ontario, Alberta, and Australia. Hoffos received their Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Lethbridge in 1994. Since 1992, Hoffos has maintained an active multi-disciplinary practice – with over 50 group shows, dozens of school and community collaborations, a few works for the stage, and over 40 solo exhibitions at public institutions in Canada, the U.S.A., Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal. In 2009, their sprawling 6-year installation series, Scenes from the House Dream, debuted at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, before a cross-country tour that included the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto. In 2014, Hoffos completed permanent public sculpture projects in Grande Prairie and Lethbridge. Hoffos has led international residencies twice at the Banff Centre. They have received awards, including the Images Grand Prize in 2007, and the inaugural 2002 Sobey Art Award (2nd place).