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Bio
Clive Holden, born in Nanaimo, British Columbia (Canada) in 1959. After leaving high school at 16 to work in a sawmill, he studied under the painter Don Harvey at the University of Victoria. He moved to Montreal in 1980 to study avant garde cinema at Concordia University, living there until 1989 when he met his long-time partner, the novelist Alissa York.
Holden then lived in the Yukon, where he drove Greyhound bus, and in Vancouver where he made an experimental short film about his schizophrenic brother. Filmed in the notorious Riverview Hospital, and completed in 1994 with a lab production grant from the National Film Board, Hitler! was officially selected by the London International Film Festival and screened at the Pacific Cinematheque.
In 1998, he moved to Winnipeg where he founded a literary press and worked at Video Pool Media Arts Centre. He also released, between 2001 and 2004, the various components of the multidisciplinary project, Trains of Winnipeg. The project’s CD was a collaboration with musicians Christine Fellows, Jason Tait, John K. Samson, and Steve Bates, and received heavy rotation at college stations throughout North America. The project’s feature-length film cycle was screened at: transmediale, Berlin; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Images Festival, Toronto; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Kosmopolis, Barcelona; European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück; Send + Receive – a Festival of Sound/Winnipeg Cinematheque; and CPH:DOX Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival (winner of the New Vision Award).
Holden moved to Toronto in 2007, where his art practice is focussed on “visual art + time + chance”. His long-duration video loops and generative (software-based) artworks are primarily shown on lightboxes, but also as projections. His print series often relate to his moving image works, and show the charged relationship between time-based and plastic art. Holden’s work has been exhibited at: Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke; PLATFORM centre for photographic and digital arts, Winnipeg; Art Gallery of Mississauga; Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto; Gardiner Museum, Toronto; Holland Festival, Amsterdam; Whyte Museum, Banff; Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam; Toronto International Film Festival/Stephen Bulger Gallery; and the Bienal Internacional del Cartel en México, Mexico City. He’s been represented by Stephen Bulger since 2008.
Reading
Sky Goodden: “Clive Holden Grounds the Digital in Aura”, MOMUS A Return to Art Criticism, 2016
James Fowler: “UNAMERICAN UNFAMOUS: An Interview With Clive Holden”, akimbo.ca Art + Tech Blog, 2013
Scott MacDonald : “Adventures of Perception – Cinema as Exploration”, U. of California Press, 2009
Larissa Fan: “Place: 13 Essays, 13 Filmmakers, 1 City”, Winnipeg Film Group, 2009