Lesley Loksi Chan

A documentary about maximalist Toronto media artist and sculptor Allyson Mitchell as she preps her Ladies Sasquatch installation – a fake fur creature wonderland. The large-bodied sasquatch ladies are feminist exclamation marks and icons, celebrating their “different bodies,” as the artist explains in a winning voice-over that drives the movie. Thrift store accumulations and found handicrafts are repurposed, blurring ideas of craft and art, high and low. How to turn what is overlooked, discarded and without value, or even feared and despised, and put these bodies at the centre of a new conversation? Mitchell’s work provides a blueprint for how to love our monsters.

A lonely young woman is selected as a finalist in an international competition to send four civilians to Mars, forever.

In the 1990s, Chinese-Canadian artist Lloyd Wong began a video work about his living with HIV. It remained unfinished. Thirty years after his death, filmmaker Lesley Loksi Chan discovers and edits the material.

The arrival of a new worker to a jeans factory causes changes to the rhythms of the workplace. This mysterious narrative integrates personal and collective history with fiction. The visuals were created with both found images and original photography reproduced on acetate sheets which were subsequently sewn together and projected onto a wall and video-taped. This mixed-media work is a reflection on the repetitive labour and materiality of textile work and the im/possibilities for resistance to challenging working conditions.

In this coming-of-age tale, adolescent Miles narrates his memories of his single mother, Wanda, an eye patch–wearing, former sex worker. Both mother and child are a nomadic unit, regularly relocating their home base with stuffed suitcases in hand. Paired with the invisible handiwork of stop-motion animation, Chan visually choreographs her characters in artful tableaux, intimating both depth and distance in Miles’ filial bond with Wanda. Marrying an endearing voiceover with elegantly lit and intricately stylized visual compositions, Chan’s tender, parental ode employs hand-constructed dollhouses and hand gestures to illustrate the migratory tethers of memory and family.

Imprinting on the archival photographs of Frank S. Matsura, a Japanese immigrant who arrived in Okanogan County, Washington, in 1903, Chan constructs a lyrical, experimental documentary that flits between fact and fabrication. While Matsura worked as a kitchen helper during the day and developed his negatives in the same kitchen’s sinks at night, in the present day, a young woman gazes upon Matsura’s centuried images, reflecting on the disappearance of someone in her own life, her longing for escape, and sights that cannot be documented. While making this work, Chan hand-processed film but mistakenly scrunched it into a ball in her bag while going about her day. The accidental effect, catalyzed by rhythms of the quotidian, is scratched, sonorous, inky blue in hue.

A documentary about maximalist Toronto media artist and sculptor Allyson Mitchell as she preps her Ladies Sasquatch installation – a fake fur creature wonderland. The large-bodied sasquatch ladies are feminist exclamation marks and icons, celebrating their “different bodies,” as the artist explains in a winning voice-over that drives the movie. Thrift store accumulations and found handicrafts are repurposed, blurring ideas of craft and art, high and low. How to turn what is overlooked, discarded and without value, or even feared and despised, and put these bodies at the centre of a new conversation? Mitchell’s work provides a blueprint for how to love our monsters.

A lonely young woman is selected as a finalist in an international competition to send four civilians to Mars, forever.

In the 1990s, Chinese-Canadian artist Lloyd Wong began a video work about his living with HIV. It remained unfinished. Thirty years after his death, filmmaker Lesley Loksi Chan discovers and edits the material.

In the 1990s, Chinese-Canadian artist Lloyd Wong began a video work about his living with HIV. It remained unfinished. Thirty years after his death, filmmaker Lesley Loksi Chan discovers and edits the material.

The arrival of a new worker to a jeans factory causes changes to the rhythms of the workplace. This mysterious narrative integrates personal and collective history with fiction. The visuals were created with both found images and original photography reproduced on acetate sheets which were subsequently sewn together and projected onto a wall and video-taped. This mixed-media work is a reflection on the repetitive labour and materiality of textile work and the im/possibilities for resistance to challenging working conditions.

In this coming-of-age tale, adolescent Miles narrates his memories of his single mother, Wanda, an eye patch–wearing, former sex worker. Both mother and child are a nomadic unit, regularly relocating their home base with stuffed suitcases in hand. Paired with the invisible handiwork of stop-motion animation, Chan visually choreographs her characters in artful tableaux, intimating both depth and distance in Miles’ filial bond with Wanda. Marrying an endearing voiceover with elegantly lit and intricately stylized visual compositions, Chan’s tender, parental ode employs hand-constructed dollhouses and hand gestures to illustrate the migratory tethers of memory and family.

Imprinting on the archival photographs of Frank S. Matsura, a Japanese immigrant who arrived in Okanogan County, Washington, in 1903, Chan constructs a lyrical, experimental documentary that flits between fact and fabrication. While Matsura worked as a kitchen helper during the day and developed his negatives in the same kitchen’s sinks at night, in the present day, a young woman gazes upon Matsura’s centuried images, reflecting on the disappearance of someone in her own life, her longing for escape, and sights that cannot be documented. While making this work, Chan hand-processed film but mistakenly scrunched it into a ball in her bag while going about her day. The accidental effect, catalyzed by rhythms of the quotidian, is scratched, sonorous, inky blue in hue.

A rumination on the Toronto-based artist and video maker Lloyd Wong whose unfinished tapes from the early '90s Chan collages together.

A woman returns to the home where she lived as a pregnant teenager. Told through text, found objects, found footage and assemblage sculpture, this work questions and challenges conventional images and narratives of “teen pregnancy” and reflects on contemporary experiences of self-representation and ways of remembering.