Cinematic Film Installation & Exhibition, 2019
16 mm and 35 mm film projections, optical sound, eight-colour screen print on Stonehenge paper, chromogenic print on paper, photographs, and textile installation

Diamond Eye Assembly is a cinematic installation and exhibition built around a trilogy of films: The Diamond Eye Assembly, Transvection, and Requiem for Wind and Water. Shot on film in and around the rural community of Petrofka in Saskatchewan’s North Saskatchewan River Valley, the works unfold within a fictional landscape shaped by ancestral memory, superstition, ritual, persecution, and survival.

At the centre of this world is a community of women whose ancestral knowledge is threatened by the return of a witch. As she cuts away their braids one by one, her power grows and their collective strength is tested. Nine-year-old twin sisters witness a tragedy that leaves them initially powerless, but their resilience grows over time.

The Installation

The exhibition extends the films into the physical space of the gallery, allowing viewers to enter the geography of Atkins’ fictional world.

Before entering the installation, visitors encounter Map of Locations, charting strange landmarks including Disappearing Island, Witch’s Cave, and Krydor: Village of Abandoned Churches. A corresponding credit work acknowledges the many people involved in creating the films.

Within the gallery, the three films are projected simultaneously in distinct spaces divided by long panels of flowing red wool. A narrow central passage runs through the installation like a corpus callosum, dividing the space into two hemispheres while allowing viewers to move freely between them. The sound of the projectors, moving film, textile partitions, and overlapping narratives transform the gallery into an immersive extension of the films themselves.

The Films

The Diamond Eye Assembly installation is a series of three projected films exploring ancestral connectivity, collective memory, and the retrieval of distant histories:

The Diamond Eye Assembly 2019, 16 mm film with optical track, 25:16 minutes. Collection of Remai Modern.

Transvection 2019, 35 mm film with optical track, 4:25 minutes, looped. Collection of Remai Modern.

Requiem for Wind and Water 2019, 16 mm film with optical track, 25:16 min. Collection of Remai Modern.

From Galleries West

“A map of strange landmarks – Disappearing Island, Witch’s Cave and Krydor: Village of Abandoned Churches – introduces visitors to the latest work from the hallucinatory world of Saskatchewan artist Amalie Atkins. The boundaries of this world are charted as a cloud of hypnagogic smoke billowing from an oven fed with diamonds by a hunchbacked grandmother. Two 25-minute films, The Diamond Eye Assembly and Requiem for Wind and Water, echo Atkins’ previous fantastical films. The central chamber provides respite from their action with Transvection. Panels of thick, red wool draped from ceiling to floor divide the gallery into three muffled chambers. Inside each, a projector clicks through a loop of 16mm film like a monster noisily devouring fantastical images. Atkins’ vision speaks to persecution and the precarity of subsistence farming. In a world without justice or causal logic, superstition gives form to fears that are warded off with the everyday alchemy of embroidery and baking.

— Sandee Moore, Galleries West