Jeanne Randolph, Rapporteur/Blogger

Jeanne Randolph: (in) visible cities’ Rapporteur/Blogger

Date and Time: Saturday, September 6 – Sunday September 14
Location: Various locations in the Exchange District and online at: invisiblecitiesperformance.blogspot.com

Cultural theorist Jeanne Randolph will act as (in) visible cities Rapporteur/Blogger, perambulating amongst the performance events and providing insightful commentary online as the festival unfolds.

Dr. Jeanne Randolph in performance at Banff in 2004. Photo by JoJo LaRue.

(in) visible cities Artists' Biographies

Cheryl L'Hirondelle (aka Waynohtêw, Cheryl Koprek) is an Alberta born halfbreed (Métis/Cree-non status/treaty, French, German, Polish) artist and musician. Her creative practice is an investigation of the junction of a Cree worldview (nêhiyawin) in contemporary time and space. Since the early '80s, L'Hirondelle has created, performed and presented work in a variety of artistic disciplines, including: music, performance art, theatre, performance poetry, storytelling, installation and new media. In the early '90s, she began a parallel career as an arts consultant and programmer, cultural strategist/activist, and director/producer of both independent works and projects within national artist-run networks. L’Hirondelle’s various activities have also found her working in the Canadian independent music industry, as well as various educational institutions, the prison system, First Nations bands, tribal councils and Canadian governmental funding agencies.

L’Hirondelle’s work as an artist and musician has garnered her many awards, and has been written about in numerous journals and anthologies. She was one of the first Aboriginal artists from Canada to be invited to present work at DAK’ART Lab, as part of the 6th Edition of the Dakar Biennale for Contemporary African Art, Dakar, Senegal. In both 2005 and 2006, L’Hirondelle was the recipient of the imagineNATIVE New Media Award for her online net.art projects. She received the 2006 Award for Best Female Traditional Cultural Roots Album and the 2007 Best Group Award from the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, for Fusion of Two Worlds, the first CD from her Aboriginal Women’s ensemble, M’Girl. For more about L’Hirondelle’s work, see: www.ndnnrkey.net, www.myspace.com/cheryllhirondelle, www.myspace.com/mgirlmusic


Jessica Thompson is a new media artist whose practice encompasses sound, performance and mobile technologies. Her projects enable audience members to create user-defined spaces and situations within urban environments. Her projects have been shown in exhibitions and festivals such as New Territories, (ARCO 2005, Madrid) MACO, (Mexico City) dp003, (Dundee, Scotland) ISEA 2006, (San Jose, CA) the 2006 Conflux Festival, (New York), Kunsthallen Brænderigården (Denmark) and InterAccess Artist Run Centre (Toronto). Her project, SOUNDBIKE, was curated into Art Projects at Art Basel Miami Beach by Canadian curator, Natalie Kovacs, in 2005 and recently she was one of five international artists invited to participate in Reinventing the Wheel, a residency held at *.artlabs in Sibiu, Romania. For more about Thompson’s work, see: www.jessicathompson.ca


Formed in 1979 by Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse, FASTWÜRMS 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. FASTWÜRMS has exhibited and created public commissions and installations, performance, video and film projects, across Canada and in the United States, Europe, Korea, and Japan.

Recent exhibitions include ‘Anacowda-happy to feed the world’, for Rococo Tattoo at the Power Plant; ‘Superstition’ at Gallery TPW; ‘Red of Tooth and Kaw‘ at the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon; ‘BLOOD & SWASH 3’ at Parlour Projects, Brooklyn, N.Y., and the 27th Bienal de São Paulo; and ‘Donky@Ninja@Witch’ at the Art Gallery of York University, North York, the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, and Plug In ICA, Winnipeg. They will be performing ‘Krummi Krunkar: Tarot + Tattoo’ in Reykjavik this October as part of the SEQUENCES Festival.

FASTWÜRMS’ cultural politics are complex and strategically subversive, their critical aesthetics relational and inclusive with a bent towards working class, craft collaborations, and queer alliance.


Jeanne Randolph is one of Canada’s foremost cultural theorists, having published the influential Psychoanalysis and Synchronized Swimming (1991), Symbolization and its Discontents (1997), and Why Stoics Box (2003). Her most recent book, Ethics of Luxury (2007) looks at how agencies of imagination can help us to act morally and ethically while participating in cultures of abundance, opulence and consumerism. A practicing psychiatrist, Randolph is also known as a performance artist whose extemporaneous soliloquies (on topics varying from cat curating to boxing to Barbie dolls to Wittgenstein) have been performed in galleries and universities across Canada as well as in England, Australia, and Spain. For Jeanne Randolph’s commentary on (in) visible cities, visit: http://invisiblecitiesperformance.blogspot.com


Nhan Duc Nguyen was born in Qui Nhon, Vietnam in 1967 and immigrated to Vancouver, Canada in 1976. His paintings have been exhibited across Canada. The big painting, Temple of My Familiar, a 32 metre, irregularly shaped artwork was shown in Belfast, Ireland. In 1997 two thousand paper boats evolved to an installation entitled Joss Paper Boats at the Roundhouse in memory of those who died of HIV/AIDS. Recent projects include core sample from the mountain of fruits and flowers, an installation at Banff Centre during the Intra-nation Residency Program in 2004, and, heyseeds, an altar erected at the Glenbow Museum in 2005 for the Alberta Centennial. Nhan is currently archiving Chicken Bank Images, the work of the late Sally Peanut, aka Warren Knechtel. Other recent projects include “Dream of a Fisher’s Catamite”, a self-published zine based on Japanese wood block prints and Calling for Ba Ba… (Mrs. Ba), a series of altars installed in various pho (beef noodle) restaurants in San Jose as a part of ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose. For more about Nhan’s work, see:
nhanducnguyen.ca, and www.onedge.tv/html/06_baba.html


Experimental, passionate, and irreverent, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan are two of Canada’s best known performance artists. Collaborators since 1989, this Winnipeg-based duo were catapulted into the national spotlight in their 20s with the controversial, now world-renowned performance piece, We’re Talking Vulva. Since then, this acclaimed duo has toured extensively throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan, their film and video works being screened in venues as far-ranging as women's centres in Sri Lanka to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. They have also created installations (Archaeology and You for the Royal Ontario Museum), published books (Lesbian National Parks & Services Field Guide to North America, Pedlar Press), and curated exhibitions (recently as Adjunct Curators at The Winnipeg Art Gallery). They have been acclaimed as “one of the high-points of contemporary Canadian artistic production.” (Border Crossings) For more about the work of Dempsey and Millan, see: http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca

Panel Discussion and Artist Talk

(in) visible cities Panel Discussion
Tuesday, September 9 from 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Little Saigon Restaurant (333 William Avenue at Adelaide Street) 

Join artists Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Nhan Duc Nguyen, Shawna Dempsey, Lorri Millan and FASTWÜRMS for a discussion around issues related to performance practice, identity, community, agency and place. There will be Vietnamese snacks and a cash bar available starting at 6:00 pm, and the panel will begin at 6:30 pm. Arrive early, as there is limited seating. This event also marks the opening of Nhan Duc Nguyen’s installation, Heyseeds, at Little Saigon.

Artist Talk: Jessica Thompson
Date and Time: Friday, September 12 from 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Location: Video Pool Media Arts Centre (300 - 100 Arthur Street)

Jessica Thompson writes, “I am interested in using elements of game-playing and performance to create collaborative situations with the audience where the integrity of the artwork is entirely determined by willing participants.” During this talk, she will discuss her recent work in relation to the politics of broadcast sound, (in particular the ways that we respond to representations of hip hop and boombox culture), the idea of art-as-object versus art-as-experience, how the distribution of new media art is changing the way that art is made, and how shared intellectual property is changing our understanding of artistic authorship.

Performance Schedule and Details

Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan
Lift
Date and Times: Friday, September 12
7:30 am - 9:00 am, 11:00 am -12:30 pm,  3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Location: Kensington Building (275 Portage Avenue at Smith Street)

Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan will present Lift, a series of performance interventions that will be situated in the smallest of spaces: elevators. Dempsey and Millan write, “Elevators are perhaps the last public space uncolonized by consumer culture. With almost no media to distract us, we are very aware (even if briefly) of ourselves, of the wait, of our agency put on hold. We retreat inward, breath-held, until required to re-emerge as the doors open at our floor.” Dempsey and Millan will combine pre-recorded audio with live performance on short (vertical) journeys with captive audiences. As they have done in many previous works, the artists will interact with audience members, whose stories and actions (their journeys) will radically impact and contribute to the performance. This come-and-go performance for a small space will elicit moments of surprise and human contact, to create intimacy within an anonymous space.

Research photo courtesy the artists. Photographer unknown.

Nhan Duc Nguyen
Heyseeds
Dates and Times: Installation at aceartinc. opens at 8:00 pm Friday, September 12 and continues until October 4. Gallery hours are Tuesday - Saturday, 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm. Installation at Little Saigon will be available for viewing from September 9 to October 4 during regular restaurant hours.

Locations: aceartinc. (2nd Floor, 290 McDermot Avenue) and Little Saigon Restaurant (333 William Avenue at Adelaide Street)

Nhan Duc Nguyen’s Heyseeds focuses on the aesthetics, histories and politics of Northern Vietnamese animist traditions as they are being practiced in North America. For (in) visible cities he will be creating two distinct but interrelated shrine installations - one installed in a downtown Winnipeg Vietnamese restaurant, Little Saigon, and another in the Flux gallery of aceartinc. The restaurant shrine will include interviews with restaurant workers, as part of the record of the story of Vietnamese-Canadians (which Nhan has conducted and recorded in advance of the festival), played in conjunction with music used to call up the spirits. A second shrine, installed at aceartinc., has an interactive component which will enable viewers to write on sticky notes and other stationery, and include them for display as a part of the shrine.

At the opening reception (Friday, September 12 at 8:00 pm), incense and candles will be lit and foodstuffs will be offered as a necessary part of these shrines. The shrines refer to the story of the widow Ba Ba Bua*, the childhood ditty which mirrors her tale, and the examination of wars and of widows, fused with the rituals and leitmotifs of Northern Vietnamese animist traditions as practiced in a North American context. The installation will remain in the gallery for four weeks after the opening reception, continuing to accumulate notes from gallery visitors.

* Ba Ba Bua (The Widow Ba) is a woman who sold noodle soup at Bai Sau Beach in Qui Nhon, the town in Vietnam where Nguyen was born. Missing and presumed dead during the exodus by sea after the fall of South Vietnam, she has many shrines erected to her by the 1990s and this woman of great misfortune and of extraordinary resolve has became a patron spirit to many restaurant workers in North America.

Nhan Duc Nguyen, "Shrine to Literature: Redux” (2008) from the exhibition Everything is Not Lost curated by Kim Nguyen, Belkin Satellite Gallery, Vancouver. Photo by Randall Lee.

FASTWÜRMS

HOUSE of BANGS and BLOOD + SWASH
Dates and Times: Friday, September 12 from 8:00 pm to 11:00 pm and Saturday, September 13 from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Location: Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art (286 McDermot Avenue)

In conjunction with their exhibition DONKY@NINJA@WITCH at Plug In ICA (September 13 to November 8 - opening reception September 12 @ 8 pm), FASTWÜRMS will present 
two performances for (in) visible cities:

HOUSE of BANGS features guest stylists Andrew Harwood and Sandee Moore. Bring out your head and they will clip, curl, and comb it, tease, toss, and tress it, muss with it, fluff, and frost, pat, part, perk, and preen it, conk and bob, brush, braid, and boff, bother, body, and bun, wave it, weave it, dred and shag, fro and buzz cut, leave it all alone, then hold it down, blow it, and bang it.

BLOOD + SWASH features guest tattooist Katie Bethune-Leamen. Freestyle temporary marker tattoos for skin and denim. This provisional tattoo parlor and multi-disciplinary performance event is free, and open to the public. No appointment or parental consent necessary.

Both HOUSE of BANGS and BLOOD + SWASH will be presented simultaneously in the main space of Plug In ICA.  

FASTWÜRMS, DONKY@NINJA@WITCH, House of Bangs, installation view, Art Gallery of York University, North York, 2007. Photo by Phillip Monk.

Cheryl L’Hirondelle

êkâya-pâhkaci (don’t freeze up)
Date and Times: Saturday, September 13, from 12:00 noon – 5:00 pm (performance installation in process), and live performance from 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Location: Winnipeg Film Group Studio (Artspace Building, 304 - 100 Arthur Street, 3rd Floor)

Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s work, êkâya-pâhkaci [ee-guy-uh-puck-a-chee] (don’t freeze up), operates through an intersection of nomadic site-specificity, visual patterning, language, narrative, movement and rhythm. With êkâya-pâhkaci (don’t freeze up), Cheryl will stage a performance presented under an adaptable traveling tent where she will be relating useful information to passersby using her body, voice and graffiti/tagging. The audience, by proximity and in accepting her invitation to ‘come in from the cold’ becomes part of her ‘camp’. The public is welcome to visit the installation/tent and have tea and bannock during the afternoon, and Cheryl will present a live performance within the tent in the evening, starting at 7:00 pm.

Cheryl L'Hirondelle, êkâya-pâhkaci (don’t freeze up). Photo by Merle Addison.

Jessica Thompson

Freestyle SoundHack
Date and Time: Saturday, September 13 from 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
Location: Video Pool Media Arts Centre (300 - 100 Arthur Street) and other Exchange District sites (tba – check videopool.blogspot.com for updates)

Jessica Thompson will present Freestyle SoundHack, a collaborative performance in the form of a workshop. The performance/workshop involves building Freestyle SoundKits - wearable sound pieces prototyped by the artist - that generate and broadcast electronic beats as users move through the urban environment. During the performance, the artist will give her project to the public by teaching workshop participants how to make their own Freestyle SoundKits, which they can distribute as they wish, using whatever sounds they choose.

The performance/workshop begins at Video Pool with a Freestyle SoundKits building session, followed by live sonic and movement-based interventions in the public spaces of the Exchange District. Thompson regards her transmission of open-source technological skill as the core component of the performance. She is interested in sharing technological knowledge so that the sonic transformation of public space becomes less of a specialized artistic activity and more of an ordinary occurrence.

The workshop/performance is open to any one 14 years and older. No previous electronics, hacking, coding or performance experience is needed – just a desire to experiment and play. Enrolment is limited to 10 participants and is available on a first-come, first-served basis. The fee for the workshop is $40, which will cover the cost of workshop materials. Participants should bring their own snacks/lunch to the workshop.

This workshop is presented by Video Pool Media Arts Centre. To register or for more information contact Cam Woykin, Education Coordinator: tel: (204) 949-9134 x4 email: vped@videopool.org
blog: videopool.blogspot.com web: videopool.org

Jessica Thompson, Freestyle SoundKit Test Run (Brooklyn, 2006). Body-mounted sensors, sound module, speaker. Circuit design and technical assistance by Ranjit Bhatnagar. Photo by Ranjit Bhatnajar, courtesy of p|m Gallery, Toronto.

Sign up now for (in) visible cities' workshops!

(in) visible cities will present two performance workshops:

Performance and Activism in Everyday Life, led by Cheryl L'Hirondelle, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan is a two-day workshop expanding ideas of performance art practice in relation to collaboration, community, and activism.

Freestyle SoundHack, led by Jessica Thompson, is a one-day workshop/performance involving the creation of wearable sound pieces that generate and broadcast electronic beats as users move through urban environments.

* * see below for details and registration information  * *

Performance and Activism

in Everyday Life

Dates and Times: Saturday, September 6 and Sunday, September 7 from 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
Location: aceartinc. (2nd Floor, 290 McDermot Avenue)

This two-day workshop will expand ideas of performance art practice in relation to collaboration, community, and activism. The workshop will be led by Cheryl l’Hirondelle (Vancouver), Lorri Millan (Winnipeg) and Shawna Dempsey (Winnipeg) -- a dynamic trio of experienced artists and educators who collectively have backgrounds in performance art, interventionist art, street theatre, community activism, lo-fi media tactics, decolonization strategies, net.art, installation art, costume design, writing, critical analysis, vocal technique and movement.

The workshop will focus on the development of performance-based interventionist strategies using voice, movement, space, objects, writing and costume. It will also include an examination, from a range of cultural perspectives, of interactive and collaborative relationships between performers, audiences and communities.

The workshop will include full group exercises and discussions, smaller group activities, movement and voice-based activities, presentations by the artists on related issues in their own work, and a field trip. It is aimed at emerging and experienced performing artists (e.g. performance art, music, theatre, dance). Participants should wear comfortable shoes and clothing, bring lunch, and a yoga mat or towel. The workshop is free, but space is limited to 12 participants: pre-registration is required, and is offered on a first-come, first-served basis.

This workshop is a joint presentation of aceartinc. and Urban Shaman Gallery. To register or for more information contact:

aceartinc. Tel: 204.944.9763 Email: program@aceart.org
Urban Shaman Gallery Tel: 204.942.2674 Email: program@urbanshaman.org


Freestyle SoundHack
Date and Time: Saturday, September 13 from 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
Location: Video Pool Media Arts Centre (300 - 100 Arthur Street) and other Exchange District sites (tba – check videopool.blogspot.com for updates)

Jessica Thompson will present Freestyle SoundHack, a collaborative performance in the form of a workshop. The performance/workshop involves building Freestyle SoundKits - wearable sound pieces prototyped by the artist - that generate and broadcast electronic beats as users move through the urban environment. During the performance, the artist will give her project to the public by teaching workshop participants how to make their own Freestyle SoundKits, which they can distribute as they wish, using whatever sounds they choose.

The performance/workshop begins at Video Pool with a Freestyle SoundKits building session, followed by live sonic and movement-based interventions in the public spaces of the Exchange District. Thompson regards her transmission of open-source technological skill as the core component of the performance. She is interested in sharing technological knowledge so that the sonic transformation of public space becomes less of a specialized artistic activity and more of an ordinary occurrence.

The workshop/performance is open to any one 14 years and older. No previous electronics, hacking, coding or performance experience is needed – just a desire to experiment and play. Enrolment is limited to 10 participants and is available on a first-come, first-served basis. The fee for the workshop is $40, which will cover the cost of workshop materials. Participants should bring their own snacks/lunch to the workshop.

This workshop is presented by Video Pool Media Arts Centre. To register or for more information contact Cam Woykin, Education Coordinator: 

tel: (204) 949-9134 x4 email: vped@videopool.org
blog: videopool.blogspot.com web: videopool.org