Nanaimo Art Gallery
by Brady Tighe
Cartoonist and film enthusiast
George Oliver has teamed up with
the Nanaimo Art Gallery, located
at 150 Commercial St., to bring a
presentation of animated films to
a lunchtime audience every Wed.
starting Apr. 7 until June 30. This
free showing of short films will include
classic animation from Eastern
Europe, the U.S., and Canada.
Oliver will thread up his 16mm
film projector and light up the gallery
screen at 12:15 p.m. precisely.
The show runs for thirty minutes.
The projectionist-cartoonist
has recently moved here looking to
draw editorial cartoons for the local
papers. Oliver, a long time renovator,
says, “There has to be a way to
make a living at art, or you end up
painting houses instead of pictures.”
The small reels of film to be unspooled
represent brief moments of
fantasy in an otherwise funless daily
grind. He says, “In this space at the
gallery people will enjoy watching a
cast of ephemeral graphic actors on
a moving canvas.”
Our shared social dilemmas can
be fought out on the movie screen
by little daubs of paint which are
part of the thrill of this art format.
Each five-minute film is an intensely
compressed bundle of ideas. Our
minds know that these are just
graphic symbols moving around
to music and sound effects, but our
hearts take sides in the struggle.
Aggressive abstract squares
take on the movements of police as
they surround some bad guys while
treacherous triangles fight back
with high-calibre dots. “It’s not all
high-falluting art films. There are
some funny animals too,” says Oliver.
Among the films to be projected
over the three-month long series,
a total of 12 screenings will be
classic caustic animation by legendary
Vancouver animator Al Sens,
whose quirky sense of humour and
visual pantomime, as seen in his
commercials for Van City Savings
for example, has amused viewers
from the beatnik era to the gadget
generation.
Ed Poli, the Nanaimo Art Gallery’s
Manager states, “Films, especially
ones where clever use is made
of paint or drawing materials, can
encapsulate that magic moment
when art and technology produce
something exciting.” Poli hopes
other art enthusiasts come forward
with more proposals of this kind
for consideration.