R. Bruce Elder

Since 1975 R Bruce Elder has been building two formidable bodies of work as an artist working in the experimental tradition and as an author of critical texts on art and cinema His artistic achievements were recognized in 2007 with a Governor Generals Award in Visual and Media Arts Canadas most prestigious award in those field and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada Jonas Mekas founder of the New York Filmmakers Coop and principle visionary of the American avantgarde cinema has dubbed him the most important North American avantgarde filmmaker to emerge during the 1980s Something similar could be said of Elders monumental works of art criticism His role as an author has in recent years assumed the task of charting the relationship between cinema and art movements through the twentieth century as we see in his recent book DADA Surrealism and the Cinematic Effect his previous Harmony Dissent Film and Avantgarde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century and the forthcoming Cubism and Futurism Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect In 2009 he received the Robert Motherwell Book Award from the Dedalus Foundation for Harmony Dissent