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.
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.
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.
The Toronto Performance Art Collective (TPAC) is a not-for-profit, artist-driven collective that curates and produces English Canada’s oldest ongoing biennial of performance art. In non-festival years collective members engage in a variety of other performance-based projects. 7a*11d was established in 1997 by a group of performance artists, collectives, and organizers, eager to develop a forum for performance art in Toronto. The first 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, in August 1997, presented the work of 60 local, national and international artists. Currently comprised of seven members, we officially incorporated under the name Toronto Performance Art Collective in 2012 after years of just being known as 7a*11d.
