A FAG (Feminist Art Gallery) Satellite Project
Participating Artists:
Cecilia Berkovic
Michèle Pearson Clarke
Sharlene Bamboat and Ali El Darsa
Jesi the Elder
FASTWURMS
Deirdre Logue
Hazel Meyer
Allyson Mitchell
Heidi Nagtegaal
Radiodress (Reena Katz)
Abstract Random (Ayo Leilani, Jamilah Malika, Sun Sun)
Dana Bishop Root and Ginger Brooks Takahashi
Chris E. Vargas
Syrus Marcus Ware
Christina Zeidler
Part of the Complex Social Change Series
Scheduled Events:
January 24 – 12 pm
Art Now Speaker Series – Recital Hall W570
January 24 – 2 – 4 pm
Informal Discussion – Room W857
Feminist Art Gallery
We conclude the first phase of the Complex Social Change series with a project from the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG). Their stubborn, playful, inventive focus on contemporary feminist issues and gender identity could not be more necessary than at a time when people continue to say “we don’t need feminism anymore” or claim that “ [insert feminist statistic or analysis] seems blown out of proportion.” Even more insidious are the subtle forms of sexism that continue to thrive. The two people at the core of FAG, Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue, asked that their names not be featured in the promotion and are instead are included in the list of 20 artists participating in the exhibition. They are both successful artists with international careers, as well as significant day jobs, and it is precisely for this reason that they did not want to be featured ahead of or above the diverse, emerging artists who they aim to support by including whenever their reputation earns them an invitation to produce a project. Pointing out sexist language and structures is not sufficient to make change, one has to change the assumptions and practices – alter the discourse and the discursive formation – in order to create a major shift and to make that change lasts.
Perhaps the most radical action that FAG takes is to put into place models based on collective practice in order to undermine the negative, competitive notion of striving for lone success and climbing over others (or pulling the ladder up once you make it to the top). This approach goes to the heart of what the Complex Social Change group at the U of L is hoping to achieve. We want to focus on successful areas of social change, such as the strides that feminism has made in our society, but also create more productive, more inviting ways of conducting the research into these issues and then engaging with others to discuss them. Along with collaborative artistic approaches, we have also been inspired by the Matsutake Worlds Research Group who use an attractive metaphor to describe and shape the way collaborative work is conducted. They move away from the tree-like imagery often used to depict the scholarly process (with its various disciplinary ‘branches’), instead employing a micorrhizal metaphor—symbiotic structures formed between fungi and tree roots that nourish the fungi, and provide essential nitrogen for the tree. The manner in which the fungi entangle themselves with the tree’s roots is a form of collaboration that allows the plant’s roots to diversify into multiple different strands. This tangle of fungus and roots then cooperates with other microbes to dissolve the soil, creating new strata and changing the very nature of the landscape.
The Complex Social Change group views the U of L Art Gallery as the micorrhizal structure that melds with the roots of the university, assembling new landscapes of interest, and allowing creative new forms of scholarly endeavour—the fruiting bodies of the fungus—to bloom. In this way, we answer the call of Matustake Worlds: “Might we use the heady rush of creativity and charisma, but plow it back into the scholarly process rather than toward the fetish of individual brilliance?” I hope that this approach is evident in the diverse voices present in “We Can’t Compete” and that visitors to the gallery are encouraged to join the discussion raised by the art works included in the exhibition.
– Josephine Mills,
Director/Curator, U of L Art Gallery
WE CAN’T COMPETE
WE CAN’T COMPETE is the title of this exhibition and a mantra of the FAG Feminist Art Gallery.
FAG is – a response, a process, a site, a protest, an outcry, an exhibition, a performance, an economy, a conceptual framework, a place and an opportunity. We host we fund we advocate we support we claim. FAG has a geographical footprint located in Toronto, Canada and is run by artists Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue.
WE CAN’T COMPETE is the first articulation of the Feminist Art Collection (FAC) and is comprised of collected art works as well as materials and documentation from social sculptures and happenings at the FAG over the past four years.
WE CAN’T COMPETE/WE WON’T COMPETE
WE CAN’T KEEP UP/WE WON’T KEEP DOWN
These statements are an acknowledgement of the dilemmas of feminist and queer cultural participation and describe the all too familiar push/pull of working across discourses and converging dialogues. This push/pull activates us to take risks. The opportunity offered through Complex Social Change and the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery is one of these risks. They pulled us into this setting and structure (a gallery, a university, an art space, a budget) and they have offered us the chance to test new models within those parameters -to challenge the system and the audience. And now we are pushing to create an exhibition that is inclusive, that recognizes artists at every stage in their careers, offers opportunities for publication, supports their work, and makes them visible within an academic, public and social framework fulfilling FAG’s desire to make artists who are almost always invisible- visible.
The economies of art institutions and the powers that dominate the art world do not champion, or recognize artists working from the margins. It is this truth and injustice that prompted the creation of the Feminist Art Collection. FAC is as much an archive as it is an intervention into the economic hierarchies that fail to value feminist and queer artists (including artist of colour, women artists, Aboriginal artists, trans artists and artists with disability/ies).
The FAC starts at home as a deterritorialized body of feminist art collected through an interactional network of artists and enablers in support of queer and feminist cultural production. Art that enters into the FAC is bought from the artists and exists in the care of an enabler. Institutions (like the University of Lethbridge) that borrow from the FAC enter into a declaration of participation, a social contract that acknowledges the value of the artwork and ensures the artist will be paid for the exhibition of the work. The FAC does not contain, possess, and capitalize on artists.
As this young collection grows we struggle with the language for feminist description. How do we describe an object or image or sound piece as feminist and/or queer? All of the art in this exhibition incorporates text. Words, lyrics, letters, statements. This entry point may be one of the least complicated ways to begin this communication.
The collection is forming and becoming. It exists in the near future. The FAC manifesto is on the tip of our tongues and can be felt inside these gallery walls. Feel it.
– FAG (Feminist Art Gallery)
We Can’t Compete Participating Artists Bios:
Cecilia Berkovic
Cecilia Berkovic is a Toronto-based visual artist and designer who uses strategies of collecting and displaying to explore aspects of feminism, consumer culture, leisure and queer identity. Her work includes poster projects, publishing, photography and installation. She sits on the Board of Directors at Gallery TPW in Toronto and received her MFA from Bard College in New York.
Michèle Pearson Clarke
Michèle Pearson Clarke is a Trinidad-born media artist working predominantly in photography, video and performance. Recent projects include the photo series It’s Good to Be Needed (2013), documentary shorts The Grief Trilogy (2012) and Diplomatic Communication, a commissioned photographic project presented at Axe Grinding Workshop, part of the Civil Partnerships? Queer and Feminist Curating conference at The Tate Modern in May 2012. NOW Magazine’s Cameron Bailey named Michèle one of Toronto’s 10 best Filmmakers of the Year in 2006, and the following year she won the Best Canadian Female Short Award at the Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film and Video Festival for her video, Black Men and Me. Michèle has served on the board of directors for the Inside Out LGBT Film and Video Festival and Trinity Square Video and she was a jury member for the Ontario Association of Art Galleries annual awards in 2010. Currently Michèle is on the boards of the Feminist Art Gallery and Gallery 44, and is pursuing an MFA in Documentary Media Studies at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.
Sharlene Bamboat and Ali El Darsa
Sharlene Bamboat is a Toronto-based artist, working predominantly in film, video and performance. Her work calls into question narratives of diaspora, citizenship and nation building. Through a re-examination of history, Bamboat elicits tongue-in-cheek performative videos and installations to question our contemporary moment marked by colonialism and neoliberalism. Transgressing the rigid boundaries of both identity and the canon of moving image work, Bamboat inserts her queer body into site-specific locations in video and performative installations in order to question narratives that structure how we imagine bodies should belong within spaces. Using humour, subcultural practices, and discourses of art activism, Bamboat’s work also explores themes of cultural hybridity through the conditions of globalization that structure relocation and migration. Bamboat regularly works in collaboration with artists and academics. Her most regular collaborative partner is artist Alexis Mitchell, and together they form Bambitchell. Bamboat’s other collaborative ventures include the 2012 installation, Throwback, with the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) and artist Ali El-Darsa, and recently a collaborative group project curated by Erin Silver called TAG TEAM: Gay Premises exhibited in Toronto, in the summer of 2013.
Ali El-Darsa, Lebanese-born Montreal-based, works in video, performance, installation and printmaking. His work examines associated temporal and spatial dimensions within a media context and a cultural landscape, where notions of absence, identity politics, intimacy, and transience have acquired new meanings. His latest performance piece, That tree you claimed your throne employs interactive sound and lighting design to express a view of exile from a meditative stance. It actively calls for an audience to listen to a reading of words as they lose their meaning over time due to repetition. El-Darsa’s collaborative work include Crossover, a performance with Bogota-based artist, Carlos Romero Maria, and Throwback with Toronto-based artist, Sharlene Bamboat. Crossover, highlights a contemporary social discourse of ‘queer’ identity, while Throwback responds to queer archiving, specifically the lack of migrant bodies/stories/histories within queer North American art production. His latest installation, “”Standing Still”” in collaboration with sound artist Solomiya Moroz examines Griffintown’s current social condition and evolving identity in the midst of rapid urban redevelopment by looking at its architecture as a site of collective memory in relationship to the human body. His work has been internationally exhibited.
Jesi the Elder
Jesi The Elder is a self-taught animator born in Toronto in 1985. After a couple of years of making work for Katie Stelmanis, she established her career as a music video artist, making videos for talents such as Owen Palette, Timber Timbre, DDMMYYYY, and Brendan Canning from Broken Social Scene. Besides animating, Jesi is an avid painter, sculpture, comic book artist, and Psychic.
FASTWURMS
Formed in 1979 by Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse, FASTWURMS is the trademark and joint authorship of these Toronto/Creemore- based multidisciplinary artists whose artwork melds high and popular cultures, bent identity politics, social exchange and a Witch positive DIY cinematic sensibility. FASTWURMS has exhibited and created public commissions and installations, performance, video and film projects, across Canada and in the United States, Europe, Korea, and Japan. FASTWURMS’ cultural politics are complex and strategically subversive, their critical aesthetics relational and inclusive with a bent towards working class, craft collaborations, and queer alliance.
Deirdre Logue
For the past 20 years Canadian artist Deirdre Logue has been prolific and steadfast in her engagement with the moving image and has subsequently produced upwards of 60 short films and videos as well as some of this country’s most celebrated video art installations. Diving deep into the unconscious, Logue’s recorded performances are a tangle of fragmentation, perversion, symbiosis and psychic unrest. Uniquely located on the golden mean between excess and deficiency, self-liberation and self-annihilation, her works are at once unruly and uncanny. Logue holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from Kent State University. Recent solo exhibitions of her award winning work have taken place at Open Space in Victoria, Oakville Galleries, the Images Festival in Toronto, the Berlin International Film Festival, Beyond/In Western New York, YYZ and at articule in Montreal. She was a founding member of Media City, the Executive Director of the Images Festival, Executive Director of the CFMDC and is currently the Development Director at Vtape. Logue also directs the F.A.G. Feminist Art Gallery with her partner/collaborator Allyson Mitchell.
Hazel Meyer
Hazel Meyer is an artist and sports enthusiast based in Toronto. She draws pictures, text and comics, makes letterpress prints, screen-printed multiples, felt banners, broadcasts, and constructs physical environments that are used for performance, collaboration, workshops and amateur athletics. From the monumental to the modest her projects range from immersive installations, to small woven tags meant for an audience of one. Much like the tag line of The Litter Game, a collaborative project she started with Lucy Pawlak and Jim Skuldt in 2013, her practice is devoted to a forever shifting ratio of endurance, transgression, and laughs, as ways of being in one’s body and the world. She holds an MFA from OCAD University (Toronto), a BFA from Concordia University (Montréal) and has recently had her work included in Separation Penetrates at Dutch Art Institute (Netherlands), More Than Two (Let It Make Itself), curated by Micah Lexier, PowerPlant, (Toronto), No Theory No Cry at Art Metropole (Toronto), Schlaegermusik with Annesley Black for Zukunftsmusik (Stuttgart), Walls to the Ball at La Centrale (Montréal), All Hands on the Archive: An Audience of Enablers Cannot Fail, with Logan MacDonald at F.A.G. (Toronto), and flex your textile, John Conelley presents (New York).
Allyson Mitchell
Allyson Mitchell is a maximalist artist working in sculpture, performance, installation, and film. Her ongoing aesthetic/political project, “Deep Lez” advocates a strategic return to the histories of lesbian feminism for it’s radical queer world making potential. Her work has exhibited in numerous venues including the Textile Museum of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Warhol Museum, Tate Modern and the British Film Institute. She is based in Toronto, where she is an Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University.
Heidi Nagtegaal
Heidi Nagtegaal lives and works in/from/with Hammock Residency, on unceded Coast Salish Territories.
Hammock Residency lives and breathes, and unfolds in residencies of 2-3 months, takes students at The School Of The Free Hammock for 2-3 years, and is interested in Buying The House with the current roommates and cast of decentralized housemate members in 2014.
Radiodress (Reena Katz)
Reena Katz aka Radiodress uses live and recorded talking, whispering, singing, yelling and listening to consider bodies as sites of knowledge, and communication as a social and political practice. Through audience participation in public spaces, Katz highlights the relationship between collective voice and the empathic act of listening. Her projects have been performed, played and exhibited widely in North America and Europe. Katz’s web-based audio project, embodied arts collective assembly was commissioned by the Vera List Centre for Art and Politics on the occasion of their 20th Anniversary year. Her recent project, love takes the worry out of being close: public assemblies in bed with queers premiered in April at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto as part of the 2013 HATCH Residency. Katz is currently the Acting Director of Galerie SAW Gallery, a multi-lingual artist-run center in Ottawa, Canada.
Abstract Random (Ayo Leilani, Jamilah Malika, Sun Sun)
Abstract Random is a rap electro dub hop mashup infused with feminist politics. Their shows are a multimedia spectacle including visual projections, face paint and costumes. Something different. JAMILAH MALIKA (vocals) , SUN SUN (producer, vocals, visuals) & AYO LEILANI (vocals). Three people, four years, countless shows from galleries & parks to clubs and festivals like; NXNE, Canadian Music Week, Under The Volcano, AfroPunk, Manifesto, Soul Of Brooklyn Festival, Womens’ World Conference, Nuit Blanche, Allied Media Conference, Pride Toronto and more. Abstract Random has been blessed to open for amazing acts like Shabazz Palaces (SubPop Records), THEESatisfaction (SubPop Records), Climbing Poetree (NYC) and LAL (Toronto). Abstract Random have toured Europe twice, playing shows in Berlin, Amsterdam, London and Paris. Check out their seven independently produced music videos featured in film festivals in Toronto, Montreal, Brazil, New Zealand, France and Milan. Ontario Arts Council -‘Popular Music Grant’ recipients. {2011} Toronto Independent Music Awards – Nominee ‘Best Electronic’ {2012} 88 Days of Fortune music and multimedia collective members.
Dana Bishop Root and Ginger Brooks Takahashi
Dana Bishop-Root is a founding member of Transformazium, a collaborative project in North Braddock, PA. Their projects aim to foster multiplicity of amplified voice; redirect money from an arts economy to a local economy; value local knowledge and discourse production; and create spaces in which roles can shift between teacher and learner. Transformazium has an embedded partnership with Braddock Carnegie Library where they operate a Neighborhood Print Shop, a residency program and an Art Lending Collection. Transformazium has presented their work at Temple University, Carnegie Mellon University, ICA Philadelphia, the Queens Museum and the Columbus Art Museum. Transformazium was in the Pittsburgh Biennial in 2012, and the 2013 Carnegie International. They received an MFA from Portland State University in 2013. Prior to Transformazium, Bishop-Root was a program director for Publicolor in NYC. She continues to work as an education consultant for arts and neighborhood based organizations.
Ginger Brooks Takahashi’s collaborative project-based practice is an extension of feminist spaces and queer inquiry, actively building community and nurturing alternative forms of information distribution. She is co-founder of LTTR, a queer and feminist art journal, and projet MOBILIVRE BOOKMOBILE project, a traveling exhibit of artist books and zines. She received her BA from Oberlin College, attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, and was a founding member of the touring musical act MEN. She has presented work at the Serpentine Gallery, London, 2008; documenta 12, Kassel, 2007; Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto, 2009; the New Museum, New York, 2009; The Brooklyn Museum, 2013, and The Miller Gallery, 2013.
Chris E. Vargas
Chris E. Vargas is a film and video maker whose thematic interests include queer radicalism, transgender hirstory, and imperfect role models. He earned his MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011. From 2008 to Summer 2013, he made, in collaboration with film scholar Greg Youmans, the web-based sitcom Falling In Love…with Chris and Greg. With Eric Stanley, he co-directed the movie Homotopia (2006), as well as its feature-length sequel Criminal Queers (2013). Chris is the founder and the Executive Director of MOTHA–Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art. www.chrisevargas.com | www.sfmotha.org
Syrus Marcus Ware
Syrus Marcus Ware is a visual artist, community activist, researcher, youth-advocate and educator. He is the Program Coordinator of the AGO Youth Program, Art Gallery of Ontario. As a visual artist, Syrus works within the mediums of painting, installation and performance to challenge systemic oppression. Syrus’ work explores the spaces between and around identities; acting as provocations to our understandings of gender, sexuality and race. His work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), The Gladstone Hotel, ASpace Gallery, Harbourfront Centre, SPIN Gallery and other galleries across the city. His work has been reproduced in FUSE Magazine, The Globe and Mail, THIS Magazine, Blackness and Sexualities amongst others. His work has also been included in several academic journals including Small Axe and Women and Environment International. Syrus’ recent curatorial projects include The Church Street Mural Project (2013), 12 large-scale, community-inspired public murals in the LGBTQ village in Toronto and the forthcoming That’s So Gay: On the Edge (2014) at the Gladstone Hotel. In 2005, Syrus was voted “Best Queer Activist” by Now Magazine, and in 2012 he was awarded the Steinert and Ferreiro Award for LGBT community leadership and activism. For the past 10 years, Syrus has worked with Blackness Yes! to produce Blockorama (the black queer and trans stage at Pride), and other related events throughout the year. Syrus is also a founding member of the Prison Justice Action Committee of Toronto. Syrus is a program committee member for Mayworks Festival, and is a past board member of the FUSE magazine. For the past 15 years, Syrus has hosted the weekly radio segment, “Resistance on the Sound Dial” heard each Saturday on CIUT 89.5FM. He is a founding member of the Transparent-cy Working Group at The 519 Community Centre. He helped to initiate the Trans-Fathers 2B course- the first course for trans men considering parenting in North America. Syrus is also a member of the Gay/Bi Trans Men’s HIV Prevention Working Group for the Ontario AIDS Bureau and one of the creators of “Primed: A Back Pocket Guide for Trans Guys and the Guys Who Dig ‘Em”. Syrus holds degrees in Art History, Visual Studies and a Masters in Sociology and Equity Studies, University of Toronto.
Christina Zeidler
Christina Zeidler is a Toronto based film and video artist with over thirty short film and video titles in distribution, which have shown internationally at festivals and appeared on television and the web. She is currently finishing her first feature film “Portrait of a Serial Monogamist” a lesbian romantic comedy. Christina was named one of Toronto’s 10 best Filmmakers by Cameron Bailey and won the Best Canadian Media Award at the 2004 Images Film Festival. She is also President and Developer of The Gladstone Hotel in Toronto with 37 artist designed hotel rooms, and took a community-based approach to the redevelopment of the building and business.
FAG (Feminist Art Gallery) Bio:
Based on successful models presented at several venues including the Tate Modern, Toronto artists and activists Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue will present their own work as well as invite guest artists. Will include panel discussions and structure for audience feedback.
FAG Feminist Art Gallery (Toronto) is an art and political pot-luck, free-schooling, backyard screening, axe grinding, directed reading, protest sign making, craft den, incantation, herbal tea and gluten-free muffin top artist talks series insisted upon by artists/lovers Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell. Logue is currently the Development Director at Vtape and Mitchell is an Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. Both have prolific international art practices.
