Toronto filmmaker Carl Brown has built up a large body of work over a quarter century of recondite filmmaking that flirts with autobiography and documentary. Brown refers to himself as a “visual alchemist,” saying:

“I thought that by working with the surface-altering and affecting it-I could leave my identity, my personality. My vision was meshed with the film’s physical makeup creating an organic surface. Also I felt it was a way to create an entirely new visual language, to be able to convey my innermost feelings and emotions in a very personal way.”

Rather than process his films using traditional labs and materials, Brown develops his films in his own bathroom, in a series of glass jars or jugs with chemicals of his own devising. He subsequently adds dyes and bleach to his film in order to create new colors, in the words of critic Mike Holbloom, “that would make Disney blush.” When Brown started experimenting with tinting the silver halide on the film surface, he found he could bring forth unexpected color combinations, ones he “had never seen before. Ever. It looked like something between psychedelia and Van Gogh.”