AgX is pleased to present Elaborate Procedures, an evening of films and poems by Hamilton, Ontario-based artists Derek Jenkins and Eugenia Zuroski. Through simple procedures – observing, writing, filming – both artists open up unexpected ways of relating to the world. Rather than treating the camera as a tool for documentation, Jenkins approaches filmmaking as a relational practice, using flowers, landscapes, and shared acts of image-making to foster connections between people. Zuroski's poems likewise begin with close observation, weaving the natural world and everyday life into incisive reflections on language, history, and the systemic structures that shape our experience. Together, their works create a thoughtful dialogue on how we inhabit, perceive, and remember the world around us. The screening will be followed by an in-person conversation with Derek Jenkins and Eugenia Zuroski. Programmed and moderated by AgX member Lilan Yang.
Bio:
Derek Jenkins (Canada/USA) is a motion picture photographer born in Monroe, Louisiana in 1980. His practice is handmade, personal, and documentary—sometimes all at once. His films have been exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries, including DocLisboa, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, McMaster Museum of Art, Antimatter Film Festival, the8fest, FRACTO Experimental Film Encounter, Media City Film Festival, Mimesis Documentary Festival, non-syntax Experimental Image Festival, Microscope Gallery, Prismatic Ground, and Crossroads among many others. Previously a technician at Niagara Custom Lab, he is Executive Director of Hamilton Artists Inc. and board chair at the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. He lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario.
Eugenia Zuroski (Canada/USA) is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Editor of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and author of A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (Oxford University Press, 2013) and A Funny Thing: Eighteenth-Century Literature Undisciplined (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Additionally, she has released two chapbooks of poetry: Hovering, Seen (Toronto: Anstruther Press, 2019) and Kintail Beach (Model Press, 2022).
Doors open at 7:00pm
Free with a suggested sliding-scale $5 - $20 donation.
The Shouting Flower
2018, 16mm, BW+Colour, Sound, 12 min.
A work about collaboration and process, "The Shouting Flower" approaches political resistance from multiple subject positions—plant, child, and filmmaker. Using images processed in plant material that was gathered at key locations throughout the city, as well as direct animation and audio recorded on a child's toy, the film documents its own creation within a landscape of hostility and neglect. A collaboration against cooperation, it becomes as it refuses. Refusing, dispersing, it shouts: "No!"
Walk
2020, 16mm, Colour, Sound, 1.5 min.
Text & Audio by Gary Barwin. Images by Derek Jenkins.
Improvisations along a walk in the woods.
Grounders
2020, 5 minutes, Super 8, Colour, wild stereo
Shot by neighbourhood children, Grounders explores rule-making and rule-breaking—and the vernacular slippage between the two. Confusion and fun go hand-in-hand on the playground.
As close as your voice can call
2023, 13.5 minutes, 16mm + video, colour/BW, sound
A film about language, about the way trauma inflects grief, and about learning to speak with the dead. This work engages a personal archive of children's books owned by my late mother, many of which feature her signature. I had encountered Deanna Bowen's "sum of the parts: what can be named" (2010), which attuned me to the lasting power of these traces, so I began to think of the signatures as a connection to my mother. I decided to use them to perform a kind of ad-hoc seance where I learned to copy her signature exactly. This forgery opened me up to other vectors of memory: A pedagogical dance, Koko the Gorilla, an old episode of Reading Rainbow. I used these elements to explore the ways that trauma interferes in the process of grieving, and the ways abuse shapes memory.
Contents
2018, 16mm, BW, Sound, 7.5 min.
An old wallet, abandoned intact, kept for unknown reasons. Uncorroborated memories of a close (but distant) relation. How are these documents speaking to each other? What is the nature of their harmony? Official versus living memory: each useless, unstable, disintegrating. Is memory the bureaucracy of the self? How does it order our lives?
Letter from Blackhawk Island
2024, 16mm, Colour, Wild Stereo, 2 min.
From her home in Blackhawk Island WI, the poet Lorine Niedecker traded lively and impactful letters with numerous peers, most notably Louis Zukofsky and, later, Cid Corman. After a brief sojourn in New York, she lived alone in a one-room cabin for much of her adult life, often walking several miles into nearby Fort Atkinson to work as a copy editor at a dairy industry trade journal until failing eyesight reduced her to menial labour. Niedecker connected to the outside world by post, and among the small shelf of books she kept for herself in later years were several collections of letters, including those of the composer Franz Liszt and his lover, the scholar Marie Catherine Sophie, Comtesse d'Agoult.
“Letter from Blackhawk Island” assembles images and sound gathered on the small plot of land by the Rock River where Niedecker lived, along with ambient audio from the sole existing recording of the poet's voice, into the filmmaker's own condensed record of prismatic correspondences.
A Semiotic Square for Violent Bear
2025, 13 minutes, 16mm + video, colour/BW, sound.
A collaboration with Eugenia Zuroski.
What does our culture dream? How can we locate that dream within the logics which govern our lives? Half collage, half essay, half serious, "A Semiotic Square for Violent Bear" is a busy, referential riff on the political moment.
