Canadian Architect
Shot in Paris, São Paulo and Toronto, Invention is the first feature film by Mark Lewis. From famous corners of the Louvre Museum to the Modernist buildings of Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil and Mies van der Rohe in Canada, Lewis takes us on a dynamic tour of fluctuating cityscapes, capturing the texture of these places, their landmarks, and the people who inhabit their streets and buildings, with images of glass, light, reflections, concrete, spiral staircases—and paintings. An homage to the City Symphony films of the 1920s, Invention offers a searching love letter to urban spaces, art and cinema.
Mark Lewis is a leading contemporary visual artist. In 2009, he represented Canada at the Venice Biennale and his work was the subject of a retrospective at the Toronto International Film Festival. Lewis started as a photographer then moved into making film-based installations, forming part of the 1980s photo conceptual movement The Vancouver School. Much of his work focuses on the technology of film and different genres that have developed in the 100+ years of cinema history.
He has participated in museum shows at the National Gallery of Canada, MoMA (New York), BFI Southbank (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), amongst others, and has shot a film at the National Gallery (London). In 2014, he was part of the city-wide Sculpture International Rotterdam, he shot and exhibited Tiger as part of a DMZ project on the North/South Korean border, and created Invention, a series of films shown as part of the São Paulo Biennale and in a solo show at the Musée du Louvre (Paris). In 2015, Lewis completed the Invention films and edited them into a feature-length piece.