Jeffrey Langille 2025 Longlist

Artist Bio

Jeffrey Langille began filmmaking in the 1990s using super-8, editing film by hand on his kitchen table. His practice has retained this connection to materiality, including work with tape loops, analog synthesizers, and 16 mm film. His areas of interest include landscape, poetic language, experimental electronic music, noise music, and field recording. He attended film school in the 1990s, and completed an MFA at Simon Fraser University in 2015.

His work has been exhibited in Canada and internationally and has received support from SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts, the BC Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Yukon Advanced Artist Award, the Yukon Permanent Art Collection, and the Canada Council for the Arts. After many years in Vancouver, he now lives on the traditional territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation, in Dawson City.

Artist Statement

Before working in experimental music, my film and video work was landscape based. I used long camera takes to explore subjective perceptions of time and bodily awareness of place. I wanted to decenter human perspectives by allowing cameras to assert their agency in various ways, revealing their capacity to register events differently from human perception.

My video “everything under the sun, no. 2,” (2018) is an example of this. It is a conceptual work that originated with a structural constraint: that various field recordings be paired with images of the sun shot at different locations. The field recordings were made on industrial land at the edge of Vancouver, at a large urban park in London, UK, in Dawson City, in wilderness settings, and at mining sites in the Yukon.

My most recent work begins with experiments using modular and semi-modular synthesizers and effects pedals—instruments where the signal path is not fixed. Some have described the process of using a modular synthesizer as akin to creating a new instrument with every new performance, because the components of the instrument (modules) can be connected in novel, temporary configurations each time.

As I play the instrument—using patch cables and turning knobs—it is like a conversation. I get immediate feedback. Shifts in timbre, dynamics, rhythm, and texture can be subtle or dramatic, gradual or completely surprising. Both composing and performance are interactive and can be unpredictable. The instrument requires that I embrace chance and relinquish some control. My video “untitled” (2024) is perhaps emblematic of this: a manic improvisation with a highly responsive desktop noise synthesizer, where the outcome is not known in advance.

Prioritizing sound over image inverts conventional filmmaking practice which tends to put sound (especially music) in the service of the visual. Images are powerful and tend to harness sound to their purposes, such as supporting a narrative or heightening emotional responses, effectively pushing sound into the background. My videos put sound and picture on a more equal footing.

In my work I attempt to create a space outside the incessant, predictable, linear momentum of narrative. I’m looking for a space for listening and for sensation without the cause-and-effect strictures of linguistic thought. Sound is always experienced in the ‘now’, immediate, and ephemeral. And where we might hold an image at a distance, sound is always immersive.