The very first collection celebrating her work, Exovede in the Darkroom is a series of responses, critical and poetic, to Métis experimental filmmaker Rhayne Vermette’s visually explosive and materially intimate practice. It was while studying architecture that Vermette, primarily self-taught, fell into image making and storytelling. Her films are opulent collages of fiction, animation, documentary, reenactments, and divine interruption. Invoking Vermette’s two central influences—Louis Riel’s “exovede” as outsider, and Carlo Mollino’s “darkroom” as the psychic site of secluded experiment—the collection explores Vermette’s powerful shorts that engage a number of 16mm collage practices, as well as her astounding feature film Ste. Anne, a work that mesmerized the film world internationally with the visually resplendent story of a return. 

Contributors include Jennifer Smith, Claudia Sicondolfo, Suzanne Morrissette, Joshua Minsoo Kim, José Sarmiento Hinojosa, Sky Hopinka, Gwynne Fulton, Janet Blatter, Lawrence Bird, Irene Bindi, and Stephen Broomer.