MONTREAL.- The Phi Centre presents y2o, a highly evocative six-screen film installation by media artist, photographer and director Dominique T Skoltz on an uninterrupted, six-screen loop in the second floor space.

Since having its world premiere at the Festival du nouveau cinéma in 2013, y2o has screened around the world and won numerous prizes, including Best Experimental Film honours at the 67th Yorkton Film Festival (Yorkton, SK) and the PRIM prize at the 2014 Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois/Prends ça court event. Having been showcased far and wide on the international media arts circuit, at events such as the Venice Biennale, Transmediale (Berlin), Sonar (Barcelona), and MUTEK (Canada, Mexico, China), the Phi Centre now gets the chance to shine a spotlight on Skoltz’s brand of mutant cinema, which falls into the cracks between genres.

Navigating troubled waters between suffocation and exaltation, consummation and relinquishment, yes and no, from both under the skin and on its surface, y2o explores a love on the verge of drifting. The film installation, which pairs host/actress Vanessa Pilon with composer/dancer Jacques Poulin-Denis, features glimpses of bodies in motion, submerged in water, as two inner worlds start to collide, suspended outside the real in an elastic space-time. y2o finds its rhythm in intimate and treacherous territory where we unceasingly hesitate between what we conceal from the other’s gaze and what we choose to reveal.

Dominique T Skoltz’s polymorphous work carries an immediately discernable signature. Whatever her avatar, we recognize the lively, sensitive gaze, which is most often turned on the invisible and is fascinated by the intersections between hyper-control and breakdown, and the intimate and the clinical. She has created numerous installations, performances and films that delve into the organic relationship between sound and image, as half of skoltz_kolgen, in collaboration with Herman Kolgen.

Skoltz’s current work continues to manipulate organic matter as readily as digital. Her practice simultaneously occupies numerous territories with porous borders: the photocinetic, animation, performance, installation, sound art and music videos. Her synergistic practice, which questions the elasticity of time and fiddles with perception, is articulated between accident and intent.