Christina Battle: Acts of Resistance
Art & Trash, episode 21
Christina Battle: Acts of Resistance
Stephen Broomer, November 17, 2022
Christina Battle’s first films engaged with the politics and imagination of the West; with landscapes marked by industry, commerce, and trauma; and with material strategies that bear a furious momentum, dense with action, objects bursting from the frame. Battle embraced video and installation early in her practice, but this direction became increasingly total in the 2010s. Her approach to video is distinct in its patient, clinical rhythms; in attending to the medium’s inherent ability to communicate information; and in her manipulation of its plasticity. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer surveys the evolution of Battle's filmmaking.
SCRIPT:
Christina Battle’s first films engaged with the politics and imagination of the West; with landscapes marked by industry, commerce, and trauma; and with material strategies that bear a furious momentum, dense with action, objects bursting from the frame. This approach is evident as early as oil wells (sturgeon road & 97th street) (2002), in which oil well pumpjacks—an iconic symbol of Alberta—cleave downward, pumping crude oil from the ground, the motion of the well a slow mirror to the camera’s own intermittent mechanism; in the final minute, the pump is superimposed over itself with the frame line shifting, as if the damage being done to the earth is being done to the foundation of the frame itself. Such crossings of technique and theme continue in buffalo lifts (2004): Battle applies the technique of “emulsion lift” to found footage of a herd of buffalo galloping in profile. The material went through a long translation, from video to black and white film, printed to colour stock and then manipulated by chemistry. The emulsion is loosened on the film strip, lifted and rearranged, crumpling on the strip to dry; the effect of this is an abstract collage, a redistribution of subject such that the buffalo are overtaken by a substructure of colour layers (a brilliant yellow emerges), and by the splintering texture of distressed emulsion. Within moments the frame itself is violently shrunken so that its edges seem to veer inwards in the composition, the herd subject to an “accordion bellows” effect that elasticizes their silhouettes and frays the source frame such that it becomes an intensely activated mass within the fixed boundaries of the composition.
This defiance of the frame’s boundaries continues with following the line of the web (2004), in which a web pattern, splintered into kernels of light against a black background, restlessly tilts, shifting with each passing frame. The pattern has been photogrammed onto the film strip, and as such the dimensions of the image being cast do not fit the tiny frames of 16mm, forcing the eye to reconstitute the parts of this web as it leaps from frame to frame. The photogram became one of Battle’s primary techniques for a number of years following this: in the distance between here and there (2005), another abstract work, Battle creates a discontinuous red and yellow pattern of horizontal bars and triangles that persist for the film’s seven-minute duration, the fuzzy granularity of the film strip coming to the fore. Behind the Walls and Under the Stairs (2006) likewise continues Battle’s interest in the photogram, this time with a shape that resembles a spider that maintains an unsteady focus in the centre of the frame, its viscera shifting between brown, pink, green, and yellow, offset by a dense black background. This frenzy of photogram animation is replaced in hysteria (2006) with static, rephotographed illustrations of the Salem witch trials, storybook illustrations of condemned women among the Puritan judges and witness. Although these images are stable and centered, Battle’s hand-processing and solarizing of the image animates it: light courses through the face of a figure to shift between positive and negative. When the illustrations turn violent, so too does Battle’s style, as silhouettes of hanging women shake through the frame, and images of the Puritan patriarchs are crumpled by way of emulsion lift.
Battle was no stranger to multi-screen composition when she made Behind the Shadows (2009), having previously created diptych works early in her career; but it expanded the stylistic turn her films had taken with hysteria, using rephotographed imagery, solarizing found images, which casts them between negative and positive and augments them with the dynamic, chance rhythms of rough hand-processing. The bulk of the diptych is mirrored, but at times distinct images appear to be in dialogue or relief; action also seems to cross from right to left, as in the forms of birds and bats that seem to fly from one frame to the other, continuing Battle’s subversion of the frame boundaries. It is in this same imagery that colour first begins to bleed into the image, as the photonegative silhouettes of creatures in flight, clear against a black background, are tinted pink and later green. As the film ends, this selective colour gives way to a symphony of colour collisions, as butterflies of various hues are cast over one another, creating even more colours.
Battle embraced video and installation early in her practice, but this direction became increasingly total in the 2010s. Her approach to video is distinct in its patient, clinical rhythms; in attending to the medium’s inherent ability to communicate information; and in her manipulation of its plasticity. The Tracking Sasquatch series is notable in this regard, for its workflow transitioned over time from film to video; in the first part (2010), shot on 16mm, the camera surveys woods and fields, accompanied by text that speculates without skepticism about the titular Sasquatch, casually insisting, in text against a black screen, that the author has repeatedly witnessed these cryptozoological creatures (the text is taken from various Sasquatch field guides). The image offers no corroboration, suggesting that the apparatus’s ability to verify information is not all-inclusive. That this work is playing with notions of visual evidence, technology as witness, and burdens of proof becomes explicit as the series continues: by Tracking Sasquatch (field report #4) (2016), Battle is using Google earth images to survey landscapes where Bigfoot has been sighted; the satellite maps that she magnifies and drags are noticeable for their vacancy, with little evidence of human activity save for roads. As the video continues, Battle’s narration offers a history of satellite imagery and its faults and inefficiencies, and further to that, speculates on the nature of gathering evidence to support the existence of what is doubted and hidden. That the Sasquatch eludes our most prized tools for factual verification speaks more to our perception of verification and what is knowable than it does to the particular facts of Bigfoot.
The role of text magnified in Battle’s work after 2010, and likewise the poetic character of Battle’s films, shifted with her turn to video: a greater emphasis is placed on on-screen texts that are fragmented into verse. This arrives in hand with a redoubling of attention to landscape. In To reveal the fourteen windows (2011), she collaborates with the poet Julie Carr, whose text appears against static shots of telephone lines, treetops, buildings slated for demolition, and a clear white screen. This approach recurs with found text in on the day it started there wasn’t a cloud in sight (2012), in which static shots of fields in Saskatchewan are overtaken with light, and animated beams of light travel between power lines, towards fields of still windmills, towards fields of glowing wheat. The plains are full of energy and menace, the sounds of industrial farming. The energy of Battle’s earlier films has been changed by embracing a digital workflow. The resulting videos remains intense in their vision, but that intensity has gone from the harsh dispersal of forms that Battle pursued with film, to a probing stasis that draws from the more carefully machined illusionism of video.
Since 2012, Battle’s output has often been defined by themes of information and transparency. What she composes for the white cube of the gallery tends to emphasize strategies of resistance that retain the recurring themes of her work, posing a broad inquiry against injustice. Much of this work is conceived for multi-projection and mixed media, but Battle has continued to pursue single-channel video, more often for looping in galleries than for screening in theatres. A number of ongoing series demonstrate this shift in her work from the chance operations of hand-processed film to the confrontation of conceptual art: her notes to self (2014-) are emblematic of this, an open series in which statements written on slips of paper are burned, a ceremonial, funereal act. The project arose as a response to the pithiness of social media “updates,” and the featured statements range from the memorial, to the prosaic, to personal expression, to sloganeering.
The dominant themes of Christina Battle’s films and videos—landscape, visibility, and the nature of truth—persist even as their ultimate forms change. In water once ruled (2018), Battle again occupies panoramic Google Earth images, appropriated news footage, and photography of Mars to draw parallels between the crisis of water and air quality on earth and the red deserts of Mars. As a camera careens through a digital model of Mars, text tells of the planet’s transformation over time before images of terrestrial floods flash over it. In its final moments, a rolling matte makes direct visual parallels between terrestrial bedrock and antique illustrations of a human conquest of Mars. This is a central character in Battle’s cinema: speculation on catastrophe, and through such anticipation and by bearing witness—of moving images, data, surveillance, illustration—she builds acts of resistance.
