Broadcast Lab: BABYGURL, HILA, and BREATHING

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BABYGURL is presented as an over-the-top depiction of online female identity, styled to force the viewer to reassess what is seen as normal behavior online. Borrowing net art and music videos, the film emphasizes the internet’s fetishization of sadness through exaggerated portraits of idealized “Sad Girls”.

HILA is a collaboration between JUNO-nominated singer/dancer Tiffany Ayalik and filmmaker Adam Bentley. Using uniquely Canadian and Inuit symbols of the North, including snow shoes and a forest in winter, the dancer moves through the natural landscape accompanied by the sound of Love Song, a well-known Inuit throat-singing song.

BREATHING imagines a factory which uses breath as fuel, giving life and motion to everything which moves. In order for this factory to work there has to be a certain similarity in structure between these various players, so pipes of different sizes branch out to main chambers, transferring and re-shaping matter.

Broadcast Lab (formerly Gallery of Media Arts) is an exciting micro-cinema programming at Arts Commons that supports new experimental films, video art, animations, and short documentaries from Canadian artists.

Artist Biographies

BabyGurl$ is an artist collective composed of Chloe Collins, Khrysta Lloren and Caitlin McCann. Our videos and installations explore the impact of the Internet and pop culture on millennial Identity. Surrounded by more visual culture, advertising, and social media than ever, our generation curates our collective character by echolocating ourselves in popular media - and we receive increasingly homogenized instructions for how best to be “femme”. BABYGURL is a critique of representations of gender, sexuality and online identity.

Adam Bentley is a mid-career Edmonton filmmaker and the face of #yegfilm who writes and produces short films, experimental films, and documentaries. He has produced several short films based on personal stories about jarring experiences that occur in spaces within which people may have seemed comfortable up to that point such as the bed, the home, the city, and the nation. His short films have been featured at film festivals across Canada, the United States, Europe, on Air Canada and CBC. He received the Edmonton Arts Council’s 2016 Cultural Diversity in the Arts grant which he will use to expand one of his stories into a feature-length screenplay through the #yegfilm/FAVA Writing Academy with the hope to produce it for wide release in Canada and abroad.

Bianca Hlywa is an interdisciplinary artist based in Calgary with a degree in Studio Arts from Concordia University. While taking anchor in drawing, Bianca additionally develops her practice through performances, video, installation and participatory artwork. Over the years, Bianca has exhibited extensively in several group exhibitions in Montreal in venues such as FOFA gallery, PHI Centre, VAV gallery, Eastern Bloc, Articule and Skol Centre. She also participated in performances and exhibitions internationally, with Rufus Stone in London, at Bezalel University in Jerusalem and most recently, Bianca had a solo show at the Young Artists Association in Budapest.