sollang

A charming look at phone messages that more than meet the eye.

A short film by Sol Lang filmed in the fall of 2010.I was intrigued by the richness of colour and the beauty that the fall season gifts us. As a photographer, I used to avoid this kind of richness of colour. It had been to easy and quite pedestrian as far as creative photography is concerned. Every amateur photographer and tourist to this part of the world woud photograph the Canadian fall season. A good reason for me to avoid it. But this is my back yard. A place we, my wife Mary, our pets and I, use actively in the summer. So seeing it in this very temporary state, inspired me to create this short video.I just shot footage that I found visually interesting, but as I was doing the shooting, an inkling of an idea started to emerge. Once all the footage was imported into my editing set-up and I started to assemble the scenes, a concept started to emerge. A bitter sweet lamentation about endings. The end of a season, the end of youth, the end of life.But endings are needed for beginnings to exist and so the circle turns.I was lucky to find a striking piece of creative commons music by a wonderfully talented composer/pianist named Kendra Springer. It works perfectly well with my film and oddly, is called New Life.Music: New Life by Kendra Springer.

The conversion of farmland and pristine nature into destruction for the sake of industry and man's selfish needs.In this video I am showing what the land looks like around Mont St Hilaire in Québec and how the mountain is being excavated and cut down by huge machinery that is dwarfed by comparison to the massive quarry all around. The natural habitat of plant and wildlife is quickly being replaced by the desolation of the rocks and cliffs left behind.

My experience of the Plateau area in Montreal has always been of wonder and delight. Having spent my early years in Montreal on the Plateau, I grew up playing in the alleys while learning to appreciate the cross cultural environment of French and English at that time.Today this part of the city of Montreal has become a hub of diversity for art, and with the influx of cultural migration it has become a melting pot of people of multi-colours and multi-faiths. I still come to this area on a regular basis to shop, dine and find inspiration for my creativity.

Photographer, Sol Lang describes his experience of watching his own art in this composition of still photographs of model, Kimmey Ferron, during several shooting sessions in Montreal.

Jewish Clothes, a film by Sol Lang. My wife Mary Bogdan is an artist/gleaner. Much of her work consists of working with found objects, discarded items (AKA trash), that she collects from everywhere... We live in a neighborhood, in Montreal, that has a fairly large Jewish/Hassidic population. One day, as Mary was doing her rounds, she found these two large garbage bags filled with old clothes. She decided to lay them out on our back yard lawn to inspect them and air them out. In fact they were all clean. Evidently washed before bagging for the sake of whoever should find them... Soon after laying them out on the grass, a thunderstorm came and Mary was preoccupied with other things, so she just left the clothes out to get soaked and become victims to the rain and wind... The storm passed as quickly as it came. As I stepped out to look, I saw a sight that felt like a punch to my gut. The clothes were all lying, spread out as if they had been bodies that had disintegrated or separated from the clothes. My feeling was as if the souls were gone and all that was left was the memory of the people that were in them... I photographed the scene and put together what will (hopefully) one day become a photography exhibition... Here I combined the images in a video montage along with a haunting piece of music I composed and performed to convey that initial feelings I felt after the storm... As a Jew whose parents were survivors of the Holocaust in Europe, I am a second-generation survivor. I carry the collective memory and emotional trauma as do so many of my generation whose families endured similar life tragedies. This exhibition and video are representative of the depth of emotional healing that I hope to provoke with my art.

A short ambient meditation to evoke spirituality of the self on the teachings and nostalgia of the past.

My experience of the Plateau area in Montreal has always been of wonder and delight. Having spent my early years in Montreal on the Plateau, I grew up playing in the alleys while learning to appreciate the cross cultural environment of French and English at that time. Today this part of the city of Montreal has become a hub of diversity for art, and with the influx of cultural migration it has become a melting pot of people of multi-colours and multi-faiths. I still come to this area on a regular basis to shop, dine and find inspiration for my creativity.

In June of 2005, Francine Denault had a solo exhibition of her art. This consisted of paintings and assemblages. The show took place at Boréart, a gallery in the Maison de la culture of Granby, Québec, Canada. Here is our visit at the opening and a small tribute to the artist.

Our Christo experience in New York Central Park of the gates. Very memorable and inspiring. This is the long version. If you cut to the "next day", early Sunday morning, a little past the halfway point, you will see the non-crowded experiance of the gates.

This was shot during the Dominican Republic celebration in Montreal, city of multi-cultures.

Driving and shooting video. Downtown, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.