Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Silence Awareness Existence program / FEBRUARY 2022
Kourtney Jackson
Canada
kourtneyjackson.net
About
I am an emerging writer and filmmaker interested in
experimental forms of storytelling that exist within and
transcend the physical body, particularly in its relation to
societal norms and religious dogma. Centred in the sociocultural
collisions of subjectivity, surveillance, and societal
prescriptions of identity, my films 1 versus 1 (2018) and
Wash Day (2020) have screened locally and internationally at
festivals including TIFF Next Wave, BlackStar Film Festival,
Sundance Film Festival (Ignite x Adobe), Breakthroughs Film
Festival, and Columbus Black International Film Festival. I’ve
most recently understood that the content of my previous
work, and that which I am currently developing, is grounded
in the metaphysical. I’m interested in how I may encounter
and refine broad, abstract, philosophical or spiritual ideas
to its more granular parts, and combine them to create
a narrative. I have also learned there’s an inherent autotheoretical
aspect to my emerging filmmaking practice. I
suspect that I can only fulfil the needs of the work as best as
I know myself, as best as I can articulate why I’m here, and
why I make the work that I do.
Creation Story Research
I came to Arteles with the intention of creating a robust
thematic encyclopedia (if you will) for a short film I was
developing. This work was in preparation for a somatic
workshop I would coordinate with actors when I returned
home. I brought my own texts to burrow in throughout
the month, but when I got to Arteles, the landscape that
surrounded me—the snow-covered fields, the trees, the
breathtaking sunsets, the starry night skies—proved to be
more inspirational in my creative process than the small
stack of books I brought. The landscape invited me to be still
and tune in, and the questions I had about my work became
more about the cosmos and my place in it. Although I couldn’t
quite articulate it until the very end of my stay, through my
work at Arteles, I was investigating the intersection of human
evolution and the origins of spirituality, to better understand
what it meant to be an “artist” or “creator”. Much of these
investigations manifested in quiet rumination and allowing
myself to settle in the atmosphere of artistic creation without
the frenzied energy of “productivity”. That time of stillness is
still influential in how I show up in my artistic practice.