Midi Onodera
Curated by Lesley Loksi Chan
The Series videos by Midi Onodera
Factory Media Centre, 366 Victoria Ave N, Hamilton, ON
June 10 to July 23, 2025 | Monday-Friday, 12 pm – 5 pm
Films + Fortunes + Toy Camera Workshop by Midi Onodera
Dandelion Pop-Up in Jackson Square, 2 King St W, Hamilton, ON (unit across from Heroes N Legends)June 7 to July 23, 2025 | Wednesday-Sunday, 11am – 6pm
This summer, moving-image artist Midi Onodera calls on her film phantoms, art pals, and past selves to produce a double-sited exhibition, inviting us to consider a vacant shopping mall unit and an historic electricity building as landscapes for the wandering spirits of experimental cinema, commerce, and time.
Through installations of analog films and videos, afternoon screenings, a toy camera workshop, and a fortune-telling hand puppet, Onodera reflects on the evolving politics of art and the undying influence of feminist film icons Joyce Wieland and Chantal Akerman on her practice.
To celebrate the opening of LANDSCAPING, Onodera will debut A Canadian Ghost Story: The Quilt for Joyce Wieland (2025), a new collaborative film made with Anna Feldman Gronau. Their creative partnership began with the making of Ten Cents a Dance (1985), directed by Onodera, and continued with Mary Mary (1989), directed by Feldman Gronau – both of which are featured in this programme. Also included are Onodera’s seminal film The Displaced View (1988), and her before/after duet Ville-quelle ville? (1984) and C’est à Qui, Cette Ville? (2022). Pathbreaking and crucial, these new and early films are presented alongside her ongoing Series project.
Since 2006, Onodera has produced an annual series of short videos known as “vidoodles,” a term she coined to describe her daily video-making discipline, exercises which function much like journaling or sketching. The full set of Series, spanning from 2006 through the latest 2024 edition, will be exhibited for the first time in its entirety. Seen together, the moving-images in this exhibition speak to Onodera’s lifelong quest to understand the relationships between media technologies, ways of seeing, and the frictional landscapes / seascapes / cityscapes of her times.
Set across two Hamilton locations – the Factory Media Centre gallery in the former Cataract Power Company Building and the Dandelion Pop-Up in a former board games shop in Jackson Square shopping mall – MIDI ONODERA: LANDSCAPING is a seasonal reshaping of the grounds of filmmaking, its counter-histories and other question-marked spaces.
Schedule
Over the course of the exhibition, Factory Media Centre will screen every annual edition from Onodera’s ongoing Series project – a total of 629 vidoodles made over 18 years and counting.
Week 1: June 10-13
A Movie A Day (2006-2007), 365 videos + 13 holiday videos = series of 378 videos
Week 2: June 16-20
Movie of the Week (2009), series of 52 videos
Baker’s Dozen (2010), series of 13 videos
24fps (2011), series of 20 videos
Week 3: June 23-27
12 X 12 X 12 (2012), series of 12 videos
Odd Socks (2012), series of 10 videos
The Classifieds (2013), series of 12 videos
Week 4: June 30 – July 4
Kicking Around (2014), series of 12 videos
Annual Report (2015), series of 12 videos
Poll or Not to Poll (2016), series of 12 videos
Week 5: July 7-11
Lonely Videos (2017), series of 12 videos
Soliloquy (2018), series of 12 videos
Senseless and Random (2019), series of 12 videos
Gently Down the Stream (2020), series of 12 videos
Week 6: July 14-23
Spam Baam (2021), series of 12 videos
You say rice, I say gohan (2022), series of 12 videos
there is superstition (2023), series of 12 videos
Project Pizzini (2024), series of 12 videos
About the Artists
Midi Onodera is an award-winning filmmaker and media artist who has been making films and videos for more than 35 years. She has produced over 25 independent shorts, ranging from 16mm film to digital video to toy camera formats. In 2018 she received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Skin Deep (1995), her theatrical feature, screened internationally at festivals including the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. Her film The Displaced View (1988) was nominated for Best Documentary at the Gemini Awards. Her experimental narrative project ALPHAGIRLS (2002) was the first Canadian interactive performance art DVD, and since 2006 she has made over 500 vidoodles (defined as bite-sized 30-second to 2-minute video doodles). Onodera’s work is held in collections around the world, and she has given lectures and workshops at galleries and institutions across North America and Japan. She currently teaches and continues to work on experimental media projects in Toronto.
As a filmmaker, writer, and cultural organizer, Anna Feldman Gronau played a vital role in shaping Toronto’s independent and co-operative filmmaking community. Born in Montreal in 1951 and raised in Hamilton, she moved to Toronto, where she became a central figure in the city’s experimental film scene. From 1980 to 1982, she served as Director and Programmer of the Funnel Experimental Film Theatre, and from 1983 to 1985, she worked as Video Distribution Manager at Art Metropole. Feldman Gronau has written and lectured extensively on feminism and the avant-garde, and is the founder of the Ontario Film and Video Against Censorship Society, an advocacy group dedicated to defending artistic freedom. Feldman Gronau’s rigorous films and contributions to local underground art scenes in the 1980s-2000s helped pave the way for contemporary cultures of critical, independent and DIY filmmaking across Canada. Feldman Gronau’s film “Mary Mary” (1989) is featured in Midi Onodera: Landscaping as a powerful work that resonates with current dialogues on the ambiguities of identity, history, theory and poetry.
About the Curator
Lesley Loksi Chan is an artist and filmmaker based in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada which is situated upon the traditional territories of the Eerie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. Shaped by the histories of anthropology and cinema, her work asks how material culture and image culture affect the particular ways we think, remember, and live together. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally including at the Vancouver International Film Festival, Textile Museum of Canada, Images Festival (Toronto), International Festival of Films on Art (Montreal), Anthology Film Archives (New York City), National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), British Film Institute (London, UK), and the Berlin International Film Festival.
MIDI ONODERA: LANDSCAPING is co-presented by Dandelion Film, Factory Media Centre and generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Curated by Lesley Loksi Chan with support of Derek Jenkins and Kaija Srilla. Dandelion Pop-Up installed by Conrad Marion. FMC coordination and installation by Eli Nolet and Alex Ramsay.