No
Place: Queer Geographies on Screen
presents the work of 15 Canadian and international queer and transgender
artists who examine ways in which queer notions of place, mapping, and
geography are realized on screen. According to project curator Anthea Black,
queerness is "simultaneously everywhere and nowhere", echoing the
dual meaning of utopia as both an ideal and non-existent place. Path asks us
to begin with a queerly re-embodied movement: the hand-held camera becomes an
“orientation device” to document the artist’s position within a pleasant rural
site. With this first work, I ask: “how do we find our way?” and “how far (and
in which directions) can the collective path of queerness itself take us?” to
touch on current dialogues of queer assimilation, liberation and spatial
politics as they are represented in current film and video. 2. Guillermo Gómez-Peña
and Gustavo Vazquez
A collaborative road-movie-cum-dance-video set in
various locations, from the Arizona desert to abandoned industrial areas and
old-growth forests. Dance duo robbinschilds (Layla
Childs and Sonya Robbins) perform sympathetic, raucous investigations of space.
They move in ways that put their bodies in danger, question freedom of
movement, and confront isolation in vast spaces.
7. b.h. Yael
If the body is supposed to
be our metaphorical “home” and the place from which our orientation in the
world begins, how do our inner dialogues speak to the spaces around us? Without
a fixed position, the artist poetically addresses the vulnerable intersections
of culture, gender and geography: “I’m making it up as I go along, but I know
that there’s a place, where I really come from…”
9. Dara Gellman and Leslie
Peters
10. Ali El-Darsa
During a long-distance
telephone conversation, the artist and his mother recount details of their
lives marked by civil war in Lebanon. In this piece, personal and geographical
distances become so closely intertwined that the idea of “home” becomes a
journey punctuated by past memories and reminiscences, rather than fixed place.
11. Noam Gonick
In this one-take road movie,
Gonick loosely adapts a mythological journey from a fourteenth century satirical French novel about a
shipwrecked explorer who stumbles upon a lost island civilization. The road-trippers arrive at the artist’s idyllic
“Beaconia Research Station” on Lake Winnipeg, a personal and cultural site that
connects across generations and geographies with Michael Morris and Vincent
Trasov’s “Babyland”, Radical Faerie retreats, and other hidden paradises.
12. Kajsa Dahlberg
Located on a small island in Denmark, FemØ Women’s Camp was founded
in 1971 and is the oldest ongoing women’s
camp in the world. The camp is an important model for feminist and
lesbian-separatist claims to land, governance and self-determination. In a
document that refuses to sensationalize this movement, we join the group as
they methodically pack the camp tents and supplies away for the winter. The
architectures of this temporary utopia are in storage till the next summer.
13. Mikiki
During Mikiki’s research to “find
gender radicalism in the wild, this rock was discovered with a moderately
blown-out, tri-colour weave and wearing a mad decent lipstick”. The artist
performs a short dance with this unexpected queer specimen before its release
back into the wild.
Mikiki is a “non-discipline-based artist”
with emphasis on community-based practices and radical queer performance. Born
and raised in Newfoundland, they have been a drag queen for almost two decades,
exhibited throughout the country and have held positions at TRUCK in Calgary
and Eastern Edge Gallery in St. John’s. Mikiki is currently based in Toronto,
where they work in sexual and reproductive health and wellness, performance and
video. ______________________________________________________________________ Brendan Fernandes, Foe 2008, video installation, photo: courtesy of the artist Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation Through the Lens of Cultural Diversity Editors Jonathan Dewar, Director of Research, Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF), and Ashok Mathur, Canada Research Chair in Cultural and Artistic Inquiry, Thompson Rivers University, will introduce Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation Through the Lens of Cultural Diversity, which examines the way in which immigrants, minorities and artists relate to the issue of reconciliation. This will be followed by a panel discussion featuring some of the book’s contributors, Jonathan Dewar, Ashok Mathur, Jamelie Hassan, Miriam Jordan and Srimoyee Mitra, moderated by Dr. Pauline Wakeham. This is the inaugural event of The Public Humanities @ Western. Cultivating Canada Book launch Reception Join the contributors to Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation Through the Lens of Cultural Diversity for a reception and receive a free copy of the book. Tour Cree artist Kent Monkman’s installation Théâtre de Cristal, part of the Barocco Nova exhibition. Dr. Cody Barteet: Experiencing the Baroque: Architecture and Urbanism in the Hispanic World C. Cody Barteet is assistant professor of art and architectural history at Western's Department of Visual Arts. His research focuses on Renaissance and Baroque architecture and urbanism in Colonial Latin America and Europe. Dr. Laura Petican: Contemporary Italian Art and the Baroque Laura Petican is an art historian specialized in post-war and contemporary Italian art. She is currently SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Western's Department of Visual Arts, where her research focuses on “baroque-centricity” in contemporary Italian art. Patrick Mahon: Barroco Nova: Neo-Baroque Moves in Contemporary Art Co-curator of Barroco Nova, Mahon is an artist, writer/curator and teacher; he is a professor at Western's Department of Visual Arts. Mahon’s artwork has been exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, and his projects as a curator have been seen throughout Canada. Susan Edelstein: Barroco Nova: Neo-Baroque Moves in Contemporary Art Susan Edelstein is co-curator of the exhibition Barroco Nova and director of ArtLab Gallery at Western's Department of Visual Arts. Edelstein has curated over 80 national and international exhibitions workign with such artists as Shirin Neshat, Jin-me Yoon, Ed Pien, Mariko Mori and Takashi Murukami. Recent projects include Breaking and Entering: The House Cut, Spliced and Haunted, organized with art historian Birdget elliott, and including artists Heather Benning, Iris Haussler, David Hoffos and Wyn Geleynse. her research interests include museum and curatorial practices, visual culture, and the diffusion and reception of art within the gallery context. Edelstein will conduct a tour of the component of Barroco Nova on display at McIntosh Gallery, emphasizing the work of Brendan Fernandes. Kent Monkman: Artist Talk Kent
Monkman is an artist of Cree ancestry who works with a variety of media,
including painting, film/video, performance, and installation. He has had solo
exhibitions at many Canadian museums including the Montreal Museum of Fine Art,
the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Winnipeg Art Gallery, and Art
Gallery of Hamilton. He has participated in various international group
exhibitions including: The American West, at Compton Verney,
Warwickshire, UK, Remember Humanity
at Witte de With, Rotterdam, the 2010
Sydney Biennale, and My Winnipeg
at Maison Rouge, Paris. Monkman has created site-specific performances at
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, The Royal Ontario Museum, and at Compton
Verney. He has also made super 8 film versions of these performances which he
calls “Colonial Art Space Interventions.” His award-winning short film and
video works have been screened at various national and international festivals,
including the 2007 and 2008 Berlinale, and the 2007 Toronto International Film
Festival. Monkman’s work is included in the collections of the National Gallery
of Canada, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Museum London, The Glenbow Museum,
Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Mackenzie Art Gallery, Art Gallery of
Ontario, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and Vancouver
Art Gallery. He is represented by Bailey
Art Projects, Toronto, Pierre-François Ouellette, Montreal, and Galerie
Florent Tosin, Berlin.
Dr. Juan Suarez: Inside the Hispanic Baroque The Hispanic Baroque: Complexity in the first Atlantic Culture is a multidisciplinary, international research project initiated by Dr. Juan Luis Suárez of Western’s Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, it involves 35 researchers Australia, Bolivia, Canada, England, Mexico, Spain, and the United States from an array of disciplines—art, anthropology, architecture, computer science, geography, history, maths, music, literature, sociology—who are studying the origin, evolution and transmission of baroque representation and behaviour in the Hispanic world. Suarez will discuss the emergence of the Hispanic Baroque and its development with emphasis on the cultural technologies, conflicting identities and representations. Brendan Fernandes: Neo-Speak Brendan Fernandes's video installation Foe, 2008, is installed at McIntosh Gallery as part of the Barocco Nova exhibition (see image above). Foe depicts the artist learning the accents of his various cultural backgrounds from an acting coach. He reads from Foe, a 1986 novel by South African author J. M. Coetzee. Woven around the existing plot of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, in Coetzee's book the character Friday has been mutilated: his tongue has been removed and he cannot speak. And it is this passage where Crusoe explains this to another character that Fernandez uses in this video. Born in Kenya of Indian heritage, Brendan Fernandes immigrated to Canada in 1989. He completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007) and earned his MFA (2005) from The University of Western Ontario. His work will be included in Oh Canada a survey of contemporary Canadian art at MASS MoCa in the spring of 2012. Fernandes was the Ontario representative for the Sobey Art Award in 2010. He is represented by Diaz Contemporary, Toronto www.diazcontemporary.caMcIntosh Spring 2012 Programs
No Place: Queer Geographies on
Screen
Deirdre Logue, Path
2011,HD video, duration: 6:10, photo: courtesy of the artist and Vtape7:00 P.M. April 3rd, room 84, University College, Western
University
Free admission
The artists address the complex intersections of culture, orientation and
geography as they are represented in current film and video. They deal with
issues such as migration, displacement, queer assimilation, and spatial
politics. In some instances, the medium and mechanics of film and video itself
becomes the subject of the work. A queerly re-embodied camera may be
understood, for example, as an "orientation device" documenting the
artist's position in relation to physical space.
No Place: Queer Geographies
on Screen includes work by: Sharlene Bamboat, Kajsa Dahlberg, James
Diamond, Vanessa Dion-Fletcher, Ali El-Darsa, Richard Fung, Dara Gellman and
Leslie Peters, Guillermo Gómez, Peña and Gustavo Vazquez, Noam Gonick, Deirdre
Logue, Mikiki, A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, and b.h. Yael.
Artist and cultural worker Anthea Black works collaboratively to insert
intimate gestures into public spaces. Her recent exhibitions include: PopSex! Responses to the History of
Sexual Science (Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary), Gestures of
Resistance (Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland), and QIY: Queer It Yourself –Tools for
Survival (National Queer Arts Festival, San Francisco).
Originally from Alberta, Anthea Black was director of Stride Gallery, Calgary
and exhibitions manager at Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton. She is currently
pursuing an MFA at Western University. For
more information, contact James Patten at: jpatten2@uwo.ca or 519.661.2111 x84602Annotated
Catalogue
1. Deirdre Logue
Path 2011
HD video, 6 minutes, 10 seconds
Deirdre Logue’s
performance-based film, video and installations are self-portraits uniquely
located between comfort and trauma, self-liberation and self-annihilation. Her
work as an artist and curator has been exhibited internationally and she is the
Development Director of Vtape and co-founder of the Feminist Art Gallery, both
in Toronto, Canada.
Declaration of Poetic Disobedience from the New Border 2005
Video, 15
minutes, 15 seconds
Gómez-Peña’s insistent performative chant mediates on
the boundaries between “us” and “them” imposed by nationalist post-9/11
rhetoric. Performed in many public contexts over the course of 2 years, the
declaration forges links between all
enemies of the state, to chart affinities across vast geographies and racial,
sexual, and gender identities as a radical re-mapping of imagined community.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a
“Post-Mexican” performance artist/writer who has lived in San Francisco for
over 20 years, where he is artistic director of La Pocha Nostra. His pioneering
work in performance, video, installation, poetry, journalism, photography,
cultural theory and radical pedagogy, explores cross-cultural issues,
immigration, the politics of language, the politics of the body, “extreme
culture” and new technologies
3. Richard
Fung
Islands 2002
Video, duration: 8 minutes, 45 seconds
Islands remixes the American war film Heaven Knows Mr. Allison, to comment on the Caribbean's obscured
relationship to the cinematic image. The original is set in 1944 in the
Pacific, but is shot in 1956 in Tobago using Trinidadian Chinese extras to
portray Japanese soldiers. The artist's uncle Clive is one such extra, and Fung
adds his story to emphasize the disjunction between the Hollywood narrative,
nationalism, authenticity, and (homo)sexuality.
Richard Fung’s
influential video work takes on subjects ranging from the role of the Asian
male in gay pornography to colonialism, immigration, racism, homophobia, AIDS
and his own family history. Fung is an Associate Professor at Ontario College
of Art and Design, and a public intellectual who has pushed forward the debates
about queer sexuality, Asian identity and the uneasy borderlands of culture and
politics.
4. Sharlene
Bamboat
Mechanized
Labour 2010
Video, 2 minutes, 30 seconds
In 2010, British Petroleum caused the largest oil
spill in history in the Gulf of Mexico. But who cleaned up the mess when the
art-activist group Liberate Tate poured crude oil in the middle of Tate
Britain’s summer fundraising party to protest the gallery’s sponsorship ties
with BP? This work questions institutional critique and the ethics of local and
international art economies by focusing on the methodical labour of migrant
workers in the aftermath of the action.
Sharlene
Bamboat is an artist born in Karachi Pakistan, and currently residing in
Toronto, Canada. She has explored themes of cultural hybridity, stemming from
constant relocation and migration, and queering nationalism within the
diaspora, by inserting her (queer) body into site-specific locations. Her work
has screened in North America, Europe, South Asia and the UK and she is a
programmer for SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre).
5. Vanessa Dion-Fletcher
Writing
Landscape 2010
Video, 4 minutes, 14 seconds
The artist navigates three sites: the Thames River
near the Moraviantown Reserve just west of London, Ontario, Ash Bridges Bay,
Toronto, and Pangnirtung, Nunavut. Her walking “shoes” fashioned from a copper
printing plate, become an index of how places and their histories impress upon
us, and how we press back.
Vanessa Dion-Fletcher is an emerging
artist working in Toronto. She holds a BFA and a Certificate in Indigenous
Studies from York University and has exhibited printmaking, performance and
video works throughout Canada. With no direct access to her ancestral
Aboriginal languages, she considers ideas of communication without words,
fluency, and understanding in the context of her Potawatomi and Lenape
ancestry.
6. A.L. Steiner + robbinschilds
C.L.U.E.
Part I (colour location ultimate
experience AZ-style) 2007
Video, 13 minutes
robbinschilds have
presented choreographed and video works that explore the relationship between
architecture and human movement in venues including The Kitchen, P.S. 122, and
the Marfa Ballroom.
A.L. Steiner is a
Brooklyn-based artist whose photo and video installations, curatorial, and
performance work has been presented internationally. She is a collective member
of Chicks on Speed, co-curator of Ridykeulous, co-founder/organizer of
Working Artists and the Greater Economy and visiting core faculty at the
University of Southern California.
Ken Tov Beseder 2010
Video, 4
minutes, 36 seconds
A Palestinian man in his
private garden is interrupted and called out through Jerusalem streets. As he
walks by construction sites, the Damascus gate, and the wall that divides
Palestinian settlements and Israel, he negotiates his way using three Hebrew
words, “ken, tov, beseder,” (yes, good, all right.) A series of historical maps
are superimposed along his path to illustrate the increasing division of
Jerusalem and gradual loss of Palestinian land since 1948.
b.h. Yael is a Toronto-based
filmmaker, video and installation artist. She is best known for Palestine Trilogy, three videos that
focus on activist initiatives that address the politics of Palestine and
Israel, and Trading the Future, which,
along with many other of her works, has been exhibited nationally and internationally.
She is professor of Integrated Media at the Ontario College of Art and Design
in Toronto.
8. James Diamond
The Man
from Venus 1999
Super-8 film, 3
minutes, 46 seconds
James Diamond is a
Vancouver-based director, producer, writer and mentor in the fields of
communications and multi-media. Self-described as
being of Indigenous (Cree/Métis) and Jewish descent, a transgendered person and
a self-expressionist, Diamond does not single out any one way to be identified. He has directed numerous award-winning films, including Mars-Womb-Man, which won best experimental
work at imagineNATIVE in 2006.
Impossible Landscapes 2006
Video, 12
minutes, 30 seconds
Where walking-based
practices propose an embodied and often peaceful, meandering engagement with
site, Impossible Landscapes lays bare
the ways in which cinema manipulates our movement through landscape to heighten
sensations of awe, fear and mystery. Appropriated footage is subjected to fast,
repeating edits that create tension between enchanted disembodiment and
panicked disorientation.
Dara Gellman and Leslie
Peters have worked together for over ten years and have exhibited their
collaborative and individual video and installation work nationally and
internationally. Working almost exclusively with found footage, Gellman and
Peters plunder television and film images to create works that explore feminist
geographies, ecstatic landscapes, and the spaces between images where hidden
narratives exist.
Time of
Breadth 2009
Video, 8 minutes, 43 seconds
Born in Beirut, Ali El-Darsa
is a Montreal-based artist who works in video, performance and installation. He
uses personal history, language and performative gestures that emphasize
duality and latency, to examine the intercultural divide, socio-politically
charged environments, and the psycho-spatial realm of the self. His work has
been exhibited internationally at festivals and galleries.
Island of
Hermaphrodites 2010
Super-8 transferred to video, duration: 3 minutes, 38
seconds
Noam Gonick is a filmmaker,
artist, writer and curator who explores iconoclastic issues and positions, from
utopian hippie cults and queer sexuality to Aboriginal street gangs and
historic labour uprisings. He has screened at the Venice, Toronto and Sundance
film festivals, and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Morris
and Helen Belkin Gallery at University of British Columbia, and the National
Gallery of Canada.
FemØ
Women’s Camp 2008: Film and Agreement 2008/2010
HD video, 14 minutes, and agreement*,
*copies of the agreement will be distributed in
advance of the screening
Kajsa Dahlberg is a Swedish
artist who divides her time between Berlin and Malmö. She received her MFA from
Malmö Art Academy and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New
York from 2007 to 2008. Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe and North
America. In 2011 she organized the international performance festival Feminists in Space.
M3RM41D 2011
Video, one minute, 37 seconds
McIntosh Fall 2011 Programs
Monday October 3, 5:30 to 7:00 P.M. Book launch and panel discussion, Conron Hall, University College
Monday October 3, 7:00 to 8:30 P.M., McIntosh Gallery
Sunday, October 23, 2:00 P.M., John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, room 100
Wednesday October 26, 4:00 P.M. Film Studies, University College, Room 84
Thursday November 3, 12:30 P.M. McIntosh Gallery
Wednesday November 9, 12:30 P.M. McIntosh Gallery
Wednesday, November
16, 8:00 P.M. Film
Studies, University College, Room 84
Sunday November 20, 2:00 P.M., Von Kuster Hall, Music Building
Thursday November 24, 8:00 P.M. John Labatt Visual Arts Centre, room 100
Gallery information
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