Curated by Lisa Steele
Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space
4th floor @401 Richmond St. W.
March 29 – April 23, 2022, Tuesday – Saturday, noon – 5:00 p.m.
Vtape returns to in-person presentations with a solo exhibition featuring new video and film works by Lauren Gabrielle Fournier!
These works use para-fiction and humour to render an autotheory of “auto” theory – one where white settler culture is analyzed through the symbols of cars and trucks. The resulting site-responsive works are eerily prescient, including the anchoring piece The Truck Guys, shot back in 2020, in which Lauren performs as a conspiracy theorist who sits in her car in suburban parking lots, convinced that a secret cabal of pick-up truck drivers is behind all of the world’s ills. And like sitting in a car waiting, there is the pervasive feeling of idling – tying into the affects of these past two and a half years, as well as earlier, land-based, Indigenous-led movements like Idle No More. Read Lauren’s essay on this work here.
Lauren Gabrielle Fournier (she/her, b.1989, Regina, Saskatchewan, Treaty 4 lands) is a writer, curator, and interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of art, science, and the humanities. A first-generation student and scholar, her work coheres around concept-driven, multi-genre and hybrid genre writings in both fiction and creative nonfiction, including autofiction, autotheory, bio-fiction, ficto-criticism, and nonfiction novels. Her debut, scholarly monograph Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (The MIT Press, 2021) is the first book-length study of “autotheory,” which historicizes the literary term in light of longer, intersectional feminist art histories.
As a curator and programmer, she has organized major exhibitions and screenings of contemporary art and film at such venues as the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the Medical Museion in Copenhagen, and The Horse Hospital in London. She has led major symposia and speakers’ series for institutions and publications, including C Magazine and the Jackman Humanities Institute in Toronto. Recently, she collaborated with Dr. Alex Brostoff (UC Berkeley) on a special issue of ASAP/Journal on “Autotheory ASAP: Academia, Decoloniality, and I,” which includes her interview with 2-Spirit, Cree and Métis filmmaker Thirza Cuthand.
As an author, she writes short and long-form fiction and creative nonfiction for the page and the screen. She has collaborated with other novelists, actors, artists, screenwriters, and directors. Her novella The Barista Boys is forthcoming through Fiction Advocate (San Francisco, 2022), and brings together autofiction and literary criticism to imagine Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997) in the context of 2000s East Vancouver.
During 2019-21 Lauren was the University of Toronto’s inaugural SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Studies.
“Auto” Theory exhibition walkthrough with the artist Lauren Gabrielle Fournier and curator Lisa Steele
Image credit: Whipping a Shitty: Or, Idling (Donuts 1), by Lauren Gabrielle Fournier (2022)