© Callum Hill, E-Minor (2024). Video still.
Callum Hill
E-Minor
From November 13, 2025 to January 17, 2026
Opening on November 13
Callum Hill’s visual essay E-Minor takes as its starting point a linoleum floor tile, which depicts Lou Jacobs, the famous American clown who became the first living person featured on a US postage stamp. Peering out from the basement at the artist’s grandparents, the clown’s ominous smile sets an anxious mood. Impressions of hidden truths permeate the film, whether in images of Rorschach’s potent inkblots or the anamorphic face-like rock formation towards which a woman reaches to touch.
E-Minor cuts in this way across time and geographies –fragmented views of urban, domestic, and natural monuments, ruins, or potentially hallucinated topographies. It’s as though Hill’s handheld shots, pointing up and down and towards the peripheries, are attempting to decipher the constellation of conditions that has led us to the constrictive precarities and divisive ideologies of our times. “Erratic clues as to how we got here,” narrates the artist, delineating “a history of human error.”
The letter E, like the clown, embodies an irrational figure, a joker reappearing in the words enumerated by interviewed passersby: Eternal! Extraordinary! Empty! Emergency!
Callum Hill (1987) is a British-Canadian artist and researcher working predominantly with analogue film. Embedded with a documentary impulse, her works take root in real characters and historical events, which are refracted through the lenses of political and psychological consciousness. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including at Images Festival (Toronto), the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Previous film awards include the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (2018) and the Artists’ Film Award at Aesthetica Short Film Festival (2016). Her work is distributed by LUX.
Dazibao thanks the artist for her generous collaboration as well as its advisory committee for their support.
Dazibao receives financial support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the ministère de la Culture et des Communications and the Ville de Montréal.
Dazibao acknowledges that it is located on the unceded territory of the Kanien'kehá: ka Nation and that Tiohtiá:ke / Montreal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations, and today, is home to a diverse population of Indigenous as well as other peoples. Guided by ethics of respect, listening, and awareness, Dazibao commits to a continued reflection regarding the deep-rooted and systemic challenges tied to accessibility and inclusivity in the arts and beyond, and endeavors to apply such reflections to all aspects of its activities and governance.