Shock, Fear, and Belief: The Films and Videos of Madi Piller

Beyond the Pleasure Dome, in the various underground cinemas where comrades gather to watch flms, lies the realm of the unknown, the space in which strange and unique visions are realized. Despite the joy of creation, art making can be quite difcult and, as the song goes, we often get by with a little help from our friends. In addition to being a wonderful moving image artist, Madi Piller is one of the most generous people working in the Toronto moving image community. She embodies selfessness, always willing to provide an eye, an ear, and a shoulder, in addition to friendship and resources, to any artist working in the fringe moving image scene. Her encouragement of other artists’ practices has led to the creation of a substantial number of fringe moving image works, including the artwork commissioned for her major curatorial projects, namely, Eleven in Motion (2009), Hello Amiga (2012), OP ART Re-Imaged (2014), and Te Frame is the Keyframe (2016). Madi began her work on the other side of the lens, as a producer of commercials in Colombia. A chance Toronto connection led her to the grail of super 8, and the small miracle of Exclusive Film Lab (and the Splice Tis! Fest), twin engines of practice that helped bring her to Canada, where she embraced a materialist practice. Steeped in the frame-by-frame wonders of animation, her work began to migrate between analogue video, digital way stations, and flm emulsion. Her animated comrades taught her that the best movies were short, condensations of experience, whether ofering personal portraits, landscape retakes, or abstract reveries. This publication was a response to Madi’s new black and white trilogy, a work inspired by her grandfather’s long ago trek from Romania to Peru, and of course by the inner and outer treks she has made as an artist. She’s entered a new moment of prolifc risk-taking, ofering up a lifetime of close attentions with typical generosity. We at Pleasure Dome are so pleased to be able to present her work on a special evening when we’ll all raise a glass and wonder how she managed it. For those who couldn’t make the show, no worries, the pages to come bear witness, and of course there are the movies themselves: living memorials, dream science.