Year: 2021

FADO is pleased to present two works by Erika DeFreitas inspired by/with the work of Adrian Piper in the first hour of –AND (2021).

Curated and organized by Christof Migone, -AND (2021) is the second in a series of twelve annual events taking place on December 12, from noon to midnight EST, for 12-hours. This project is realized with the collaboration of multiple artists, venues and partners in Canada, China, Germany, Korea, UK, USA. Each year the event moves through each word of the 12 word phrase, “you and I are water earth fire air of life and death,” and activates the word of the year in myriad ways.

In 2021, the word is ‘and,’ consequently the focus is on repetitions, conjunctions, and duos. Last year it started with ‘you,’ this year we connect you to anything and everything, you are together-with. Or, we get stuck in the very act that ‘and’ opens up, into the enormity that the so-what-next that ‘and’ implies. ‘And’ is all possibilities in a nutshell. A secular litany that follows pi into infinity.

Hour 1: 12:00–1:00pm EST

Seriation #2a: _and (with thoughts of Adrian Piper) (2021)
In this newly commissioned work, DeFreitas creates a score based on Piper’s essay Passing for White, Passing for Black by isolating the word ‘and’ on the pages they appear. DeFreitas then performs this score, reciting the word ‘and’ evenly spaced within the timeframe of 1 minute per page.

Seriation #2: Now (1968)
Soundwork by Adrian Piper; Performed by Erika DeFreitas
DeFreitas was given permission by Piper to perform Seriation #2: Now. The original soundwork consists in 18 minutes of Piper uttering the word “now,” in a measured tone, at shorter and shorter intervals, from one minute to every second. Accompanying the audio are visuals created by DeFreitas to question our presence in the ‘now.’

RE-SOLUTIONS is a collection of 6 performances for video by W. A. Davison, created in the context of FADO Performance Art Centre’s Performance Resolution(s) at-home residency in 2021.

These six informal performance experiments re-interpret the theme “resolutions” as “re-solutions,” meaning, new solutions to problems that have already been solved.

Over the past few years, I’ve been engaged in a number of creative projects that involve exploring, and making use of, material from my archive of past work—finished pieces, documentation, sketches, ideas, etc., accumulated over several decades of artistic activity. The idea of finding new solutions to problems I’ve already solved, i.e. finding new ways to approach, develop, and execute creative problems and premises from my past, is an intriguing concept and ties in nicely with my recent archive-based work.

Working alone in my studio, I conducted a series of performance experiments which were documented on digital video. In these experiments, I examined a selection of finished works from my archive—visual art, writing, film and video, audio, past performances, etc.—determining the basic premise/problem in each one, and then, through an informal, organic, and intuitive process, found new ways in which those problems might be solved. Since the residency is focused on performance practice, these “re-solutions” took the form of performative actions/events/situations. I was particularly interested in what happens when I attempt to translate ideas from other media (drawings, collages, films, audio pieces, etc.) into performance. This was challenging at times but, almost without fail, led to interesting work. The project was process-oriented so I was not necessarily looking to create new performances for an audience. These are, literally, experiments, most geared toward helping me gain insight into my past work, as well as find new and interesting directions for future work. 

Is a work of art ever “finished” or an idea used up? “Re-Solutions” helps answer that question.

THE RE-SOLUTIONS

Dead Horse Dérive (07:10, video slideshow, 2021) is based on a multimedia drawing/painting from 2009 called Wasteland 2. I took one of the main elements of the painting, a dead horse, and traced the contours of it. I then superimposed this simplified contour drawing over a map of downtown Toronto. Finally, on the afternoon of July 10, 2021, I made a dérive (a type of psychogeographic exploration of the urban environment) on bicycle, following as closely as possible the route indicated by the drawing on the altered map. I documented the dérive by photographing streets, intersections, laneways, and whatever caught my eye during the bicycle trip. The final form of the piece is a video slideshow. 

Floating Orb (08:09, video performance, 2021) is based on an untitled collage from 2016. The collage features a spherical object floating in front of a desert landscape. For my “re-solution” I came up with a simple action involving a ball being tossed (from off camera) in front of a number of photographs that were taped to the wall of my studio.

Eye Projections (01:34, video performance, 2021) is based on an untitled sculptural assemblage from 2016. For this “re-solution” I took one of the main features of the assemblage, namely the cloth projecting from the doll’s eye sockets, and interpreted that as a performative action for the camera

Red Branches (02:01, video performance, 2021) is based on a series of sound/radio art pieces from 2020 called RE/CYCLING. In the RE/CYCLING series, I constructed a number of textured platters that were placed on a record player and amplified with a contact microphone. My “re-solution” was to make myself the revolving, textured surface, brushing against amplified tree branches.

R.P.M. Redux (01:23, video performance, 2021) is based on a super-8 film called R.P.M. that I made in 1991, in which I put a super-8 camera on a record player, and filmed while it spun around. For this “re-solution” I did exactly the same thing, this time with a video camcorder, the difference being my presence in the film/performance. I sat next to the record player and appear once every revolution.

Object Poems (11:25, video performance, 2021) is not based on a specific work. Instead, I chose to base the work on one of the techniques I use frequently in my poetic writing, namely stream-of-consciousness or surrealist automatism. The technique involves an unedited flow of words, free from rational control. In my “re-solution” I substituted found objects from around my studio for words in a poem, constructing an improvised, visual poem by juxtaposing objects next to each other or otherwise interacting with them.

SPOILER ALERT: Hasting Highland eventually got their bylaw, but you don’t want to miss a (Hybla) minute of the whole story.

In response to FADO’s Performance Resolution(s), at-home residency project call for submissions, Roy Mitchell’s tongue-in-cheek proposal was to go to Algonquin Big Cat Adventures, a roadside zoo about 15 kilometres from where he lives, and “take a tiger away. And then another.”

At the time, Mitchell was preoccupied with so-called ‘big cats’ because of this roadside zoo, that had set up business in his community and Mark Drysdale, the owner of the zoo, was exhibiting lions and tigers without a permit. Soon after learning of Drysdale’s plans to open this zoo in Hastings Highlands, Roy Mitchell started a group—Citizens for a Safe and Humane Hastings Highlands—with the express purpose of lobbying for an exotic animal bylaw in the municipality. 

So began a very long journey for Mitchell and members of his community. Much of it is documented as a part of Mitchell’s art practice—in writing, on podcasts and as content for his journalism-cum-art talk show, the Hybla Minute. The story, and Mitchell’s part in it, even made the CBC news. Is Mark Drysdale Ontario’s own Tiger King? Not if Roy Mitchell has anything to say about it.

This incredible tale covers lions, tigers, and much much more, OH MY!

Read They Fought a Zoo by Joan Webber and then listen to The Doc Project’s audio documentary, Of Towns and Tigers, featuring Roy Mitchell to get the full scoop on this incredible story.

The beginning, the middle and the end. In that order! Roy’s Side of the Story. There will be guests, there will be mud flung on Instagram Live. You can ask questions. It’ll be very interactive!

Instagram Live @roybruno

When: November 2 @ 5pm
Topic: The Beginning
Content: Background and how we found out about the zoo coming to town. 
Guest: Julie Woodyer, Zoocheck

When: November 3 @ 5 pm
Topic: The Middle
Content: Organizing, Drama on Council and the bylaw comes to town
Guest: Nate Smelle, local journalist

When: November 4 @ 5 pm
Topic: The End
Content: The Bylaw, the Drama, Cops and what next and can Politics be Art
Guest: Shannon Cochrane, FADO Performance Art Centre Director

BONUS MEDIA: DOWNLOAD The Lion Ate His Tiger by Grant LaFleche, Toronto Star (2022)

E-bulletin

The pandemic postponed many activities. Earlier this year, I was limited to circulating in my local Ottawa neighbourhood, as well as my backyard, which became the sight of my auto-residence; my investigative space. This led me to (re)evaluate the notion of disorientation. Thus, my shadow became a measuring tool, an extension of self, a sensing body enabling discovery.

The danger is invisible; using my intuition I would like to give it a name. If I can identify it, then I can articulate it, open it up, present it and share it. To reach this point of understanding—to identify the object of my intuitive obsession—this was my starting point: non-defensive conscious-raising, definitely the potential of the imaginary.

Thus, I explored my neighbourhood with the help of my shadow, faithful companion heretofore ignored. To evaluate, maybe (re)establish contact, guided by its potential contours. My perception defining a renewed space. My imagination, in a sensorial quest of the site, found itself nourished by connections, memories, awareness and realities. As a result, I discovered a close connection to nature. 

Tari Ito

1951–September 22, 2021

Tari Ito was a Japanese performance artist, organizer, and activist whose work was featured in events across Asia, Europe and North America. She died earlier this year after a ten-year struggle with ALS—an enormous challenge for an artist whose practice was so intensely focused on body movement. She was greatly loved and respected, and many of us mourn her passing. 

I first met Tari in 1990, when she took part in a nine-city Canadian tour of Japanese performance artists, coordinated by Vancouver’s Western Front. She and fellow artist Haruo Higuma spent a week in Toronto, presenting solo works at A Space and also participating in an open “jam” session with local artists. As I recall, it was Pam Patterson and I, working as members of A Space’s performance art committee, who coordinated Tari’s and Haruo’s Toronto appearances. 

For that project, Tari was performing a work she called Memory of the Epidermis, which involved painting large panels of latex “skin” onto the gallery’s floor in advance of her performance. For the Toronto version, she had to improvise using skin she had already created when she could not find the right kind of rubber latex locally. One of her skin objects was a giant balloon-like rubber sphere, as large as her body, which she ended up pushing, bouncing and rolling around the gallery space before finally corralling it in a corner, all the while speaking to it in Japanese—later she told me her words were something to the effect of “What is this giant blister?” 

The work was visual, aural, and above all kinetic, expressing complex relationships and feelings primarily through movement. The rhythm and texture of the performance was varied, ranging from slow, careful gestures to repetitive, staccato motions, always seemingly in reaction to the elasticity of the latex, which could appear either durable or fragile depending on how it was handled. It did not matter that most of us could not understand what Tari was saying in Japanese as she worked with giant sphere: her tone and intonation, and above all her physical interaction with the wobbly figure, were deeply expressive. This visual and gestural communication was also evident in the performance jam, where several of us worked simultaneously without speaking, sometimes side-by-side, sometimes infiltrating or adding to each other’s actions and visuals, creating a striking series of images that I still remember, some of them as accomplished and polished as a finished performance work. It was a charmed encounter. 

The next time I saw Tari was a year later, when she invited me to Japan to take part in the Tajima Performance Festival, co-organized by Yoshimichi Takei and Kyo Hoshino through the auspices of a private group called Scorpio Project. This was the second (and final) iteration of the festival, which took place at the site of the abandoned Yaso copper mine in Japan’s Fukushima district. Billed as a performance art “camp,” the festival was a unique event that brought together performance artists, noise artists, video artists, and Butoh dancers for a week in the countryside, all of us bunking together on the floors of an old wooden schoolhouse. A group of volunteers prepared three meals a day for the participants, who numbered well over a hundred, and performances were self-scheduled using a large blackboard. Each day, artists who wished to perform would write down the time and place (e.g., the quarry, the dam, the schoolhouse grounds, the school gymnasium) of their project, and all of those not caught up in their own preparations or performances would form an audience. Events began each day right after breakfast and continued late into the evening. 

One of the events that Tari organized during the Tajima event was a discussion featuring Clive Robertson, who was then the National Spokesperson for the now-defunct ANNPAC/RACA (Association of National Non-Profit Artist-run Centres/Regroupement D’artistes des Centres Alternatifs). Tari had been deeply impressed by the Canadian artist-run network she discovered on her Canadian tour, and she was hoping that hearing about Canada’s artist network might inspire her Japanese colleagues to band together to create something similar in Japan. Much to Tari’s disappointment, the reception to this discussion was somewhat tepid. Rather than embracing the Canadian example as a possible model for artist-driven organizing, the response of those attending seemed to be that Japan should develop its own ways of organizing rather than looking elsewhere for inspiration. This did not deter Tari’s vision of a supportive artist network, however. Over the years she contributed to a number of feminist art groups, first as part of a collective called afa (Asian Feminist Art), and later founding WAN, the Women’s Art Network, followed by PA/F Space (Performance/Feminist Space). 

Despite her soft-spoken demeanour, Tari had a strident spirit of generosity. Not only did she introduce me to many local artists and even help me find other performance opportunities during my three-month stay in Japan; she also invited all of the Canadian artists who were at the Tajima festival to visit her home in Tokyo, where she lived with her parents. This kind of intimacy was unusual in Japan, where the usual protocol was to meet foreigners at a restaurant. The day of the dinner, there was a torrential downpour, and I arrived at her house completely soaked. She was insistent on putting me in her father’s pyjamas (the only clothes in the house loose enough to fit me) while she washed and dried my clothes. I was embarrassed, but grateful for her kindness. 

If Tari’s connection to Canada proved inspirational for her, it is also important to acknowledge that her presence also played a catalytic role in the development of Toronto’s performance art infrastructure. Tari returned to Toronto in 1993 when she was invited to participate in the Mayworks Festival of Working People by then-director Pat Jeffries, whom Tari had met on her earlier Canadian tour. After Mayworks, Tari stayed in Toronto to explore a romantic relationship with Pat, and she also developed friendships with a number of local artists. When it became apparent that Tari would be in Toronto for an extended period of time, Sandy McFadden, who knew Tari from her time living and working in Japan, suggested to me that we should organize an event for Tari. Here was an internationally known Japanese artist, living in our midst, and Toronto should have more of a chance to discover her work. 

This became the impetus for starting FADO. Sandy, Pam, Ed Johnson, Bernice Kaye and I met in my bedroom one summer day and formed an ad hoc collective to plan our first event, a presentation of Tari’s work. Through my involvement with A Space, which had set aside funds that it would hand out to groups organizing art events as part of its community outreach efforts, I was able to secure enough money to pay for the production costs and a modest artist fee for Tari. Tari wanted to do her performance in a large warehouse space at 1400 Dupont Street, which she had become familiar with from visiting the studio of visual artist Aiko Suzuki. Aiko facilitated a meeting with the building manager, and we were able to convince him to allow us to use the large, unfinished central hall—a huge space, 20 by 50 metres—for Tari’s performance. 

At the time, we had no idea of the trajectory FADO would take, how it would eventually transform into a funded artist-run centre for performance art, or how another FADO event initiated by Sandy, an international performance art festival at CinceCycle in 1996 co-sponsored by Le Lieu in Quebec, would inspire the development of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art. Still, this first project, taking advantage of Tari’s presence in Toronto, already laid the groundwork for what would become FADO’s signature production strategy: an ambitious, site-specific event, cobbled together on a shoestring as an act of faith and community-building. Had it not been for Tari, there likely never would have been a FADO. I am profoundly grateful for the auspicious beginning she provided. 

For her Dupont Street performance, Tari created a new work in her Memory of the Epidermis series, called FACE. One section of the performance featured a row of latex smocks hanging from the ceiling at intervals across the length of the space. Tari followed this line, stepping up to each one and draping it onto her torso until she was covered in a thick layering of skins. Another section featured a very large hanging sheet of latex, 4 by 10 metres, that she punctured and penetrated with her arms. Part of the genesis of these images, she told me, was an unlikely Toronto sight that had captured her imagination. She was intrigued by the telephone poles she saw on the street, covered with staples from guerrilla postering. She found these textured layerings fascinating and beautiful, and was struck by the way they gave evidence of a history of piercing, covering, and removal. For her, they were evocative of the rubber skins she created in her work, which carried with them the inverse outlines of the surfaces they had been painted onto. A video recording of both the preparatory process of creating the skins and parts of the live performance uploaded to YouTube is linked to Tari’s artist page on the FADO website. 

Soon after the FACE performance, Tari returned to Japan when her relationship with Pat ended. I wondered what it would be like for Tari returning to Japan, where being a lesbian—or even identifying as a feminist—could be an isolating experience. Tari’s response was to become much more overtly political and activist. In 1996, she “came out” publicly in a performance work called Self-portrait, which was eventually presented in 26 different venues, including Toronto, where she was part of the Rencontre festival organized by Sandy McFadden for FADO at CineCyle. For Tari, this work signalled a profound shift in her understanding of her art practice, which she realized could be used to convey powerful personal and social messages. Alongside her performances and visual art projects, Tari also began to actively develop and promote feminist and lesbian events, networks, and spaces that spanned beyond Japan’s borders to other Asian countries including Korea and Thailand. 

The last direct involvement I had with Tari’s work was in 2002, when Rochelle Holt curated an exhibition of her work at A Space. The opening night performance, Where is the Fear?, was co-sponsored by the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art. Where is the Fear? was an openly lesbian performance with elements of audience participation that Tari developed in part as a response to homophobic remarks by then Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro. Tari presented this work in various Japanese venues as well as Toronto, noting in her book Move, “Sexual minorities live in fear of prejudice. Fear lies in the hearts of people who feel frightened of the idea that there are many different kinds of people in the world” (p. 109). 

Tari made several other visits to Canada over the course of her career, including an appearance at Montreal’s Viva! Art Action Festival in 2006 where she presented Rubber Tit. That performance featured a 2.5 metre-tall inflated rubber tit, which I like to think of as the logical progression of Tari’s “blister” from her early A Space performance. One of her final performances—after a four-year break from performing—was at the LIVE Biennale in Vancouver in October 2019, where she presented Before the 37 Trillion Pieces Get to Sleep, a work that Tari developed in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. For this work, curated by Makiko Hara for LIVE, Tari appeared in a wheelchair, and was then laid on large pieces of paper while assistants repeatedly traced the outline of her figure. Tari said of this performance, “The body losing its muscles nonetheless continues to live on. For this reason, I want to stay close to the memories of ‘my body and others’ that were forced into silence or forced to be silent.” A moving description of the performance by Katherine Chan, along with photo documentation by Alisha Weng, can be found on LIVE’s website. 

I had hoped to bring Tari to Toronto as part of the same tour, to present her work in the context of the KinesTHESES series. Tari wanted very much to return to Toronto, but her deteriorating health made including an additional venue impossible. I suggested that we could perhaps find a way for her to develop the performance remotely, using local bodies to stand in for hers, but such an approach did not fit her vision of the project. She understood her own disabled body to be a key element of the work. She told me that if her body had not been so profoundly compromised, working remotely might have offered an interesting challenge, but precisely because, as she wrote in her hesitant but poetic English, “I stare at the body that is stuck,” she felt it was essential for her to work with her own body, doing only what her own skin, bones, and muscles could accomplish in direct relationship with an audience. The closest the project could get to Toronto was when Pam Patterson’s WIA Projects featured a video installation of the work at Gallery 1313’s Window Box Gallery in early 2020, just as the world was beginning to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic. 

I was sad not to have had an opportunity to work with Tari again, but I rejoice in her ongoing legacy—her performances, which moved audiences on several continents; her organizing and networking efforts, which brought together many artists over several decades; her championing of women’s and minority voices; and, of course, her surprising role in Toronto’s performance art development. And so, I would like to share with you Tari’s humble words from Move’s “afterword,” which seem to me very reflective of her spirit: 

“I believe that the joy of performance art comes from wondering what makes a particular artist engage in a certain action with all of their heart and soul. For this reason, it is actually when I am sitting within the audience of a performance art piece—rather than onstage—that I am the happiest” (p. 185). 

Surely, she shared this happiness with others through her own life and career. 

On September 26, 2021, twenty-six Toronto artists (of a certain generation), on the invitation of Keith Cole, assembled at the Windsor Arms Hotel in Toronto for a High Tea. The guest of honour? Dr. Jeanne Randolph. One of Canada’s foremost cultural thinkers, Randolph is a mercurial character. She is a psychoanalyst, curator, critic, writer, musician, and a performance artist. HIGH TEA with Keith Cole and Jeanne Randolph was, what some theorists or academics might call a work of “social engagement.” For Cole, Randolph and the audience / participants assembled, the jury is out still on whether or not it was even a performance. Perhaps it would be more accurate to think of that afternoon as an event of community (rather than a ‘community event’). The people gathered in the room formed a snapshot of the Toronto arts community from a particular moment, a bit out of focus and dispersed, but collectively felt. Being in the room meant acknowledging the performance of time, of memory and of community. Pinkies up!

Image (above) © Keith Cole, High Tea, 2021. Photo Henry Chan.
Image (below) © Keith Cole, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.

In a sense, the idea for my residency formed in the summer of 2019 in Turkey before the pandemic and before I even knew about the possibility of a residency. While I visited my home city of Istanbul after a 13-year hiatus, I unknowingly germinated the urge to move back there for a year.

Of course, the Covid-19 pandemic put a hold on my half-realized plans. My urge, fortified by powerlessness, transformed into a craving, an itch, a determination to explore the hunger I felt for Turkey.

This year, 2021, started with a concept of making a video in my childhood home in Istanbul. The apartment is uninhabited, complete with old furniture from 80s and 90s, covered with dusty white sheets, with shutdown old windows and blinds, dull musty air and perhaps old spirits. A time capsule from the last lived day of 1994 before our Canadian emigration.

What would be like to go back and record a walk-through of this space, like an audience-less performance, like a home movie of a ghost of a home? The camera as all-seeing eye, from my apartment in Toronto to our apartment in Istanbul, through a distance of 8,196.58 kms?

While I am creating this video in my mind (for now,) walking through the space in my memory, I am also creating actual videos for my day job of auditioning for commercials, film, and TV. Countless of takes for a 30-second footage of pretending to eat a salad or some chips while scolding my imaginary children, acting like a senator or a Middle Eastern engineer, suggesting organic rice to my neighbour, gardening with a surprised look on my face, reading a bowl of cereal like a crystal ball, drinking from a river, thanking the public for being vaccinated and waking up happy in bed…

So now I’m thinking about the absurdity of the correlation of these two notions in video. The manufactured actions of commercial acting and the archival footage of home, stacked together like a building.

There is a video somewhere.

Like the end of Covid, it is unhurried, throbbing, reluctant and eager.

Irene Loughlin’s home—where she spent the 2nd Covid-19 lockdown of 2020, and continues to live—is a small one bedroom apartment she shares with one other person. This 20th floor remnant of rent control is a tall building on the Hamilton escarpment, a concrete monument to the 70’s. Loughlin’s apartment contains an enclosed glass balcony that she has converted into her studio. From there, during the first part of her Performance Home residency, Loughlin is working on a series of experimental video performances using her body to reach and sustain contact with the “outside,” extending her arms through windows to establish a personal choreography with the sky and clouds, changing weather and birds; and through various actions such as ‘embracing the building’ in gratitude for shelter.

Alongside this corporeal research practice, Loughlin is mining her performance documentation archive. Observations written during her entry level job in the film industry in the midst of the pandemic are included. Her writing and drawings contain references to the first lockdown when she lived alone, and the film industry shut down. She spent most of the first three months of lockdown on CERB (as did many privileged persons living in Canada), deriving mental and spiritual sustenance from walking in the forest. By walking outside—breaching government recommendations in the first weeks and months of the pandemic—she sought to preserve her ‘sanity’ as a neuroatypical person living through the first pandemic announcements. These walks were generally devoid of human presence, and she took solace in the company of emerging deer, hawks, and other animals, as well as plants, trees and waterfalls. The first lockdown in the forest mirrored her experiences as a child confused in the company of others and seeking relief in the natural world. Sources are translated into pen and ink drawings, juxtaposed with writing that comments on her experiences as a performance and visual artist. The work comes together in a newly self-designed literary hybrid—a performance art graphic novel—that combines past objectives with the emotive and ecological crisis of our current moment specifically from Loughlin’s neuroatypical perspective.

Over several months in 2021, I created performances for people I know, using their yards and/or the spaces outside their windows as my stage and source of inspiration, creating small intimate experimental performances with no preconceived themes or ideas. 

For this residency supported by FADO, I resolved to begin to claw back the things I’ve lost over the past year, in small and incremental gestures.

I resolved:
to perform for live audiences rather than virtual ones.
to see other artists and close friends (if only through a window).
to spend more time outside to work with the weather rather than against it or in spite of it.
to have intimate encounters.
to go to friends’ homes.
to make new performances, to experiment, to learn, to move, to think, to feel.

My practice has tended to focus on issues of identity and corporeality as they relate to gender, queerness, fatness, and disability. The work has always come from personal experience but focuses on universal themes. As my work has evolved, my practice has focused more and more on the deeply personal. It’s less concrete, literal, and intellectual than it once was and has shifted gradually to work which is more poetic. The process is still relatively new territory to me, but I’m navigating it through experimentation, into a place that includes concepts and ideas that are more ephemeral, and less visible or less concerned with public access/interpretation of the “meaning” than before.

As an artist that has generally been most comfortable with a working method that privileges research, planning, writing, making, and gathering, performance is usually the culmination of months or years of labour. Recently I’ve started to shift to a more intuitive style of performance as a way of creating new knowledge; as a way to exercise and increase my flexibility and responsivity. For this residency, I forefronted intuition, putting planning not just on the back burner, but leaving it out of the recipe altogether (as much as that’s possible.) 

This project demonstrates a commitment to a deeper exploration of process than I’ve engaged in the past, using myself as subject, object, and, in many ways, the primary audience. Elaborating on a larger exploration of memory, bodies, and trauma via intensely intimate experiences, I’m pursuing the goal of deep affective experience. I want to be changed by my work, and to examine that change so I can better understand myself and become a better artist.

In the spring of 2021, I was given the opportunity to make a video performance through an at-home residency from where I reside in Vancouver through FADO Performance Art Centre’s at-home residency series, Performance Resolution(s).

Queer Lines (For Agnes) is a performance for the camera that marks pandemic time through the abstraction of the Pride Flag. I use my body in various unexpected ways to paint acrylic washes on an unstretched canvas on the ground. I have developed an “embodied painting” approach that combines performance art actions with mindfulness strategies to create a work that balances form and content, emotions, and ideas. A soundscape made from this process of embodied painting compliments the video work.

This process of investigation concentrates on the subject-object binary through an embodied practice. I use my own body in my performances to experience and blur the tension between myself as both a subjective and objective body. To do this, I employ paint brushes I make from my own hair, paint, a straw I use to reenact prehistoric cave painting methodologies by blowing paint onto the canvas and toothbrushes as some of the items to work with to paint the canvas.

Primarily, Queer Lines (For Agnes) takes art historical cues from abstract painter Agnes Martin, utilizing an abstraction of the horizontal lines found in her later work. Inspired by her resistance to Patriarchal norms realized in both her painting and her writing, I find her contributions to a definition of queering conventions provocative and see this work as working from her queries, evoking new strategies and questions for the future. The work is about queer survival during a global pandemic by creating a ritual for protection for all members of the LGBTQAI2S+ communities.

Thanks to FADO, Lisa G for editing and Kage for the soundscape and all your support.

Queer Lines (For Agnes)
video, 18:30, 2021
Distributed by Vtape, Canada