October 1 – 19, 2024

Curated by: Toronto Performance Art Collective (7a*11d): Golboo Amani, Kiera Boult, Paul Couillard, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Johanna Householder, James Knott, Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan

IN THE BACHIR/YEREX PRESENTATION SPACE
4th floor @401 Richmond St. W., suite 440

Open Tuesday – Friday, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
Saturday 1:00 – 5:00 pm (only during exhibitions)

OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, October 4th, 2024
5:00 – 7:00 pm (artists will be present) 

 

ARTISTS’ TALKS

In the Commons on 4th floor @401 Richmond St. W., suite 440

Tanya Mars in conversation with Shannon Cochrane
Wednesday, October 9th, 2024
Noon – 1:00 pm

Andrew James Paterson in conversation with Bridget Moser
Saturday October 12th, 2024
Noon – 1:00 pm

Vtape and Toronto Performance Art Collective enthusiastically present God Play, an exhibition featuring Tanya Mars and Andrew James Paterson, this year’s Émineces Grises at the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art. Bringing together video and performance works from 1987 to present, the exhibition embraces the melodramatic mayhem of two artists who have consistently explored the tropes of popular culture and their underlying motivations.

The works in this exhibition reflect on the media imperative to (re-)construct truths through familiar images and personas.  Sharing a savvy use of celebrity and theatrics, Mars and Paterson inhabit and re-frame iconic figures from history, film, literature and visual art within critical explorations of power and influence.

In their most recent works, Mars’s and Paterson’s melodramas take a serious turn, reflecting the brutal truths of our shared realities with themes and images of climate crisis, war, and sickness.

Ranging from the partially-pessimistic to the silly-serious, the works in God Play highlight Mars’s and Paterson’s commitment to probing how the personal becomes political in unexpected ways as the secular and sacred, the human and the larger-than-life, intermingle in a play of contamination, transformation, and perpetual reconfiguration.

 

ARTIST BIOS

Tanya Mars is a feminist performance artist who has been actively involved in the Canadian art scene since 1973, doing many different things. She has lived and worked in Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia. Since the ’70s Mars’ work has focused on creating spectacular feminist imagery that places women at the centre of the narrative. Since the mid-’90s her performances have included endurance, durational and site-specific strategies. Her work is political, satirical and humorous. She has worked both independently and collaboratively to create both large-scale as well as intimate performances in Canada and internationally. Ironic to Iconic: The Performance Works of Tanya Mars was published in 2008 by FADO, edited by Paul Couillard. She is the recipient of a 2008 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Recently retired from teaching at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Mars lives off-grid in Nova Scotia. She has one daughter and three grandsons.

Andrew James Paterson is an interdisciplinary artist living in Toronto, Ontario. His work engages in a playful questioning of language, philosophy, community and capitalism in a wide range of disciplines, including video, performance, writing, film, and music. Now a senior artist, Paterson has contributed to artist-run discourse for nearly four decades — serving on the boards of Trinity Square Video, A Space, and YYZ Artists’ Outlet. He has curated media arts and other programs for these organizations, as well as Cinematheque Ontario, Mercer Union, Images Festival, Pleasure Dome, and Available Light in Ottawa. He has edited and co-edited books for YYZ’s publishing program, and contributed to anthologies published by Gallery TPW and to periodicals such as FILE, IMPULSE, FUSE, and Borderlines. Between 2011 and 2017, he worked as coordinator for the8fest Small-Gauge Film Festival. His media-arts works have shown locally, nationally, and internationally over three and a half decades — in Seoul, Bangalore, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Amsterdam, Paris, New York City, and many other centres. Paterson’s artist’s book Collection Correction was published in 2016 by Kunstverein Toronto and Mousse of Milan. His novelette Not Joy Division was published by IMPULSE B in Toronto in 2018. In 2019, Paterson received a Governor General’s Award for his work in Visual and Media Arts.

Stein Henningsen is a performance artist living on the arctic archipelago of Svalbard. Since 2005, he has presented his work at many biennials, festivals, and events in Scandinavia, Europe, North America, and Asia. Henningsen is influenced by photography, thinking of his performances as vivid images. His work addresses political, social, financial, and climate issues in a contemporary context.

 

SPEAKERS BIOS

Bridget Moser is a Toronto-based video and performance artist and friend and fan of Andrew James Paterson. She has presented work at Remai Modern, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Western Front, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Esker Foundation, the Art Gallery of Ontario and Mercer Union. She has been shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award and was the 2023 recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Visual Arts Award.

Shannon Cochrane is a Canadian performance artist, curator and writer. Her performance work has been presented in museums, galleries, festivals and in all kinds of events across Canada and internationally in 25 countries. Shannon’s performance practice is primarily concerned with illustrating and working through the tensions between process and strategy, context and perception, and authorship and repetition. Recent proclivities include swan songs, covers and call-backs, and performers who have died on stage. Recent performances in 2024 were presented in the context of Rencontre internationale d’art performance (RiAP) in Montréal (co-presented by Clark Gallery) and Québec City; and Écart’s Biennale d’art performatif (Rouyn-Noranda). Over the last 25 years, Shannon has contributed to the development of the Canadian performance art ecology through curating, programming, producing, and supporting performance artists and their work. She is a co-founding member of Toronto’s 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, and from 1996–2022 co-curated and organized 14 international performance festivals with the collective. As the Director of FADO Performance Art since 2007, she has curated and produced the work of hundreds of performance artists from around the world for Toronto audiences.

Image credit (left-right): Mz. Frankenstein, Tanya Mars, 1993;

Immorality, Andrew James Paterson, 1987

 

October 24th, 2024

Doors open at 6:30 pm

Screening: 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Vtape, Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space

401 Richmond Street West, Suite 452 Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8

The four events in the series, screenings accompanied by conversations with the artists, recontextualize feminist film and video work as constitutive of archival futures; a future imperfect: what will be seen to have been. Too often, feminism is narrated and historicized as wholly outdated/transphobic/racist, invisibilizing BIPOC feminists who were leaders in the Canadian feminist movement and its art practice. Feminists themselves may attempt to disavow previous iterations of the movement. And yet, many examples of early feminist video engage, or invent avant-garde strategies, while also engaging in intersectional interrogations.  The delimiting of the history of feminisms implicitly excludes much of the intersectional cultural work that was central to feminist projects. This is especially pertinent as American hegemony – the undoing of abortion rights, the war on trans bodies -continues to inform local and national contexts in Canada. The films and videos in the programs come from the last three decades of the 20^th century when feminist political organizing was inextricable with women’s cultural production. This screening series emerges from the SSHRC-funded project “The Personal is Digital: Remediating and Digitizing Canada’s Intergenerational Feminist & Queer Media Heritage,” co-directed by Drs. Marusya Bociurkiw and Jonathon Petrychyn, with additional curation by Lexie Corbett and administration by Em Barton.

Program #2: Fantasy/Memory/Media

Conversation with Marnie Parrell, Su Rynard, and Elizabeth Chitty following the screening moderated by curator Lexie Corbett

This program features film and video that take media and memory as their subject. It focuses particularly on non-narrative experimental art works that explore how feminism is broken down and reworked relative to photography and the cinematic image – Lexie Corbett

The Ancient Mariner and my Sister Sailboat (dir. Rhonda Abrams, 1984, 12.28mins)

A woman who leads a dull life escapes into an exciting fantasy world with the help of some household objects, Hollywood, and a classical adventure story. She risks forgetting what is real to find what is important. This tape examines the way popular culture is processed by the mind.

Dinner (dir. Marnie Parrell, 1989, 4mins)

Shot over a Thanksgiving weekend, this film reflects the aimless happy warmth of a late fall road trip. The layering of images through multiple exposure reinforces a where-are-we- feeling.

Blood (dir. Buresje Bailey, 1992, 6 mins)

This tape deals with a personal, intense view of self – race and representation. A sense of personally touching the sexual self, of representing one’s sexuality. It is a reaction to the exploitation of Black Women’s sexuality in history and contemporary media imaging.

TV Love (a made for tv love story) (dir. Elizabeth Chitty, 1982, 3.4mins)

This work was created for an artists’ television project, Prime Time Video. It attempts to represent gender mutuality within a structure of references to television. It refers to a conventional narrative device, gives it a hyper-condensed treatment, uses special effects and plays with light.

Untitled: A Tape About Memory (dir. Su Rynard, 1985, 4mins)

“I wanted to make a tape about memory, not just ‘about’ memory. I wanted to re-create the actual sensation of memory through texture, colour, mood and movement. I also wanted to examine time in relation to memory and visual experience. ” -Su Rynard

Domestic Bliss (dir. Wendy Geller, 1987, 3.45mins)

A burst of claustrophobia, xenophobia, terror, anxiety, cunning and violence. Is this tape the re-creation of standard movie shots showing women enclosed within their “own” environment, or one woman’s drama played out in the terms lodged in her sub-conscious?

The Basement Girl (dir. Midi Onodera, 2000, 11.4mins)

Abandoned by her lover, a young woman finds comfort and safety in her basement apartment. The Basement Girl breaks new cinematic territory by employing multiple formats from traditional 16 mm film

to toy cameras, including a modified Nintendo Game Boy digital camera and the Intel Mattel computer microscope.

Image credit: TV Love (a made for tv love story), Elizabeth Chitty (1982)