Berlin-based Canadian artist and guest curator Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay brings a video work by L.A. based performance, film and video artist Zackary Drucker to Toronto for its premiere exhibition in Canada. A collaborative piece – as is frequently the case with Druckerʼs work – You Will Never Be a Woman, you must live the rest of your days entirely as a man and will only grow more masculine with every passing year. There is no way out. (Zackary Drucker, Van Barnes, Mariah Garnett, A.L. Steiner), is a nine minute performance-based video from 2008 in which two transgender individuals engage in “…a brilliantly written and staged dialogue – alternately violent, alternately tender – with each other, themselves, and the spectator, weaving a complex, textured and provocative portrait of gender fantasies.” (BNR)
Opening Reception: September 15 1:00 to 5:00pm
The 2012-13 Vtapeʼs Artists Squared (Artists to the Power of Artists)
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay gives a public lecture on the work of Zackary Drucker
2:00pm
We will open the Vtape programming season with an exhibition of Druckerʼs work, curated by Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay and a public lecture that takes in the expanded body of work produced by Drucker. The lecture will be the second edition of Artists Squared (Artists to the Power of Artists), a new Vtape programme that seeks to expand and deepen public discussion around media arts through an annual lecture presented by an artist and focused on the work of another artist. We envision that this programme will sharpen vocabularies and produce important critical tools for the understanding and appreciation of media arts.
In this lecture, to be followed by a publication, Nemerofsky Ramsay will look at Druckerʼs work from a variety of angles, including a social critique of the growing proliferation of consumer-driven pornographic imagery and language in mainstream media,transgender expression outside of the Male-to- Female/Female-to-Male binary, and the aesthetics of performance video art after Ryan Trecartin.
Bios:
Since graduating with an MFA from CalArts in 2007, Zackary Druckerʼs performances, films, photographs and videos have been screened and presented in a variety of locations in Europe and North America including: the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennalle 2011; 5th Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, The Central House of Artists; the up-coming L.A. Biennial: and Les Recontres Internationales, Paris/Berlin/Madrid.
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is a Montréal-born artist and diarist who was based in Toronto and active in the local art and video community throughout the 1990s. Since 2001, he has divided his time between Berlin and Montréal. His work contemplates the history of song, the rendering of love and emotion into language, and the resurrection of voices –sung, spoken or screamed – from the past, taking form through video, sound, print and textiles. His work has been exhibited throughout Canada, Europe and East Asia and is represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.
Recent curatorial projects include the short video program No Ordinary Love for the Vienna International Short Film Festival (2010) and serving on the curatorial committee for Paraphrasing Babel, a series of site-specific video installations in public spaces throughout Maastricht and Heerlen, Netherlands taking place this October.
Still credit: You Will Never Be a Woman, you must live the rest of your days entirely as a man and will only grow more masculine with every passing year. There is no way out. (Zackary Drucker, Van Barnes, Mariah Garnett, A.L. Steiner).