Artists
Lisa Jackson
Lisa Jackson (Anishinaabe from Aamjiwnaang Nation, born in Toronto, Canada; lives in Toronto, Canada) is a filmmaker who is interested in bringing to light environmental questions and past, present, and future Indigenous realities. In productions that combine different genres (animation, documentary, experimental) and techniques (multimedia installation, virtual reality), her hybrid, committed approach takes shape through interrelationships. Jackson envisages her work as an act of translation among humans from many horizons, but also among bodies of knowledge possessed by different forms of life.
- Born
- Toronto, Canada
- Countries / Nations
- Anishinaabe / Aamjiwnaang, Canada
- Lives
- Toronto, Canada
- Website
- lisajackson.ca
Works
Liquid Crystals
The film Lichen offers a meditative experience that transports us to a complex, enigmatic world. Casting an intimate gaze, with overlapping close shots and languid camera movements, the work explores the mysterious nature of the strange beings that lichens are. These extraordinarily resistant composite organisms are intrinsically multiple, as they are the result of symbiotic relations among fungi, algae, and bacterial communities. The film features several species of lichens that, through the use of perspective effects, suddenly become monumental landscapes, including downy light-green trees firmly gripped by sharp roots and thin scarlet-tipped stems rising up to face adversity. With the narration by Canadian lichenologist Trevor Goward, Jackson invites us to pay attention to each crack, each fine-laced texture within these stunning microenvironments, which we see with new eyes. In Lichen, Jackson merges the poetic and the scientific to make visible the interactions that ancient organisms have with their ecosystems (“conversations,” to use Goward’s term)—processes normally imperceptible to the human eye. These fertile associations echo Indigenous scientific approaches, founded on interrelations and reciprocity among nature, animals (including human beings), land, and knowledge. This capacity to be in symbiosis with the environment testifies to a perpetual state of becoming, a real lesson in resilience.