FACES

Solo exhibition by Temenuga Trifonova

February 27th - March 12th, 2014

Opening Reception

Thursday, February 27, 2013

6 pm - 10:30 pm

Complimentary Steamwhistle will be provided

2186 Dundas Street West, Toronto

ABOUT THE WORK

“When the film close-up strips the veil of our imperceptiveness and insensitivity from the little hidden things and shows us the face of objects, it still shows us man, for what makes objects expressive are the human expressions projected unto them. […] What was more important, however, than the discovery of the physiognomy of things, was the discovery of the human face. Facial expression is the most subjective manifestation of man, more subjective even than speech, for vocabulary and grammar are subject to more or less universally valid rules and conventions.”

Balázs, Theory of the Film, p.60, p.65

“The face is this organ-carrying plate of nerves which has sacrificed most of its global mobility and which gathers or expresses in a free way all kinds of tiny local movements which the rest of the body usually keeps hidden. Each time we discover these two poles in something—reflecting surface and intensive micro-movement—we can say that this things has been treated as a face [visage]: it has been ‘envisaged’ or rather ‘faceified’ and in turn it stares at us…it looks at us…even if it does not resemble a face.”

Deleuze, The Movement-Image, p.87-88

What is a face? How do we ‘read’ a face? How do we respond to another’s face? Can ‘faceified’ things return our gaze? How do mental states become manifest in non-human faces?

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Temenuga Trifonova is a film scholar and filmmaker. She is the author of The Image in French Philosophy (Rodopi, 2007), European Film Theory (Routledge, 2008), Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming in 2014), and numerous scholarly articles. Her first feature film, Man of Glass (drama, 2012), developed at the Berlinale Talent Campus, won the Cinematic Vision Award at the 2013 Amsterdam Film Festival and was screened at the 2013 Deboshir International Festival of Independent Cinema in St. Petersburg (Russia) in the special program Canada in Focus. Her first novel, Rewrite, is forthcoming in Fall 2014. She teaches film studies at York University.

CREATIVE WORK

Man of Glass (drama, 2012)

Rewrite, a novel (2014)

Crime and Punishment: Raskolnikov in Hollywood, Solo Photography Exhibition, St. Petersburg, Russia: May 18-30, 2013

quadriART group exhibition, EAGL gallery Berlin, February 2-March 22, 2013

8 x 8 Photography Exhibit, Silver Eye Center for Photography, May 2013, Pittsburgh

Writer for the experimental theater project ALTBAU, Berlin, Theater am Tisch, April-October, 2013

Against Nature, semi-finalist in the 2010 British Feature Screenplay Competition; shortlisted for the Courage and Fortitude Award in the 2010 Fresh Voices Screenwriting Contest

Finalist, 2009 World Nomads Travel Photography Scholarship

Art Square Gallery group exhibition, Contact Photography Festival, Toronto, 2009