Program
Thursday, January 19 // Friday, January 20 // Saturday, January 21
Friday, January 20
- REGINA GYPSY: THE QUEER CITY CAB COMPANY // CINDY BAKER - SASKATOON
Durational & Arranged Performance - Various Times - Day & Nightview details »
Regina Gypsy is a free-spirited taxicab, an indiscriminate chariot of abundant bounty who will pick up anyone who beckons her their way. Yes, she's been around the block a few times, and her undercarriage is sagging, but that just means she really knows her way around and she's willing to take you there. She is drawn to flamboyant revelry and gaiety but has a soft spot for those of modest means, offering sweet comfort and safe passage to lonely travelers, weary wanderers, amorous couples and intoxicated parties alike. Queer friends of Queen City rejoice! Regina Gypsy's underground taxicab caravan is in town, though sadly for a fleeting two nights only.
In this performance, I will hire myself (and my car) out as an underground taxi for the duration of the Queer City festival. Following in the tradition of gay cabs that have operated on and off in large cities such as New York, San Francisco and London for the past 4 decades, I will offer safe, courteous passage to festival patrons needing to get to or from Queer City Cinema events and social gatherings, or to anyone needing my services during the run of the performance. Outfitted with all the trappings of a tasteful gay bar bathroom – condoms, lube, a selection of queer reading material, old cigarette burns – Regina Gypsy: The Queer City Cab Company is a performance art project masquerading as a volunteer designated driving service catering to the queer community.
Please call or text Cindy @ 533 3645 anytime during the festival to arrange pickup by Regina Gypsy: The Queer City Cab Company. Cindy will be available 24 hours a day but won't guarantee to return calls immediately or be ready at a moment's notice, as she does need to sleep, eat, etc. Your call will not incur long-distance charges.
Interdisciplinary and performance artist Cindy Baker is passionate about gender culture, queer theory, and fat activism. Baker considers context her primary medium, working with whatever materials are needed to allow her to concentrate on the theoretical, conceptual and ephemeral aspects of her work. She believes that her art exists in its experience, and not in its objects.
Some of Baker's biggest interests are skewing context and (re)examining societal standards, especially as they relate to language and dissemination of information, and she perceives a need for intervention and collaboration, both within the art world and in the community at large.
With a background of working, volunteering, and sitting on the board for several artist-run centres in Western Canada, Cindy has a particular professional interest in the function of artist-run centres as a breeding ground of deviation. She is based out of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
cindeb@populust.ca
www.lovecindybaker.com
- THE INABILITY TO BE LOOKED AT AND THE HORROR OF NOTHING TO SEE // ZACKARY DRUCKER - LOS ANGELES
Performance Starts at 7:00 PM - Duration: 25 Min.view details »
The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See is a live performance that takes form as a group meditation. Viewers are directed, by a disembodied voice, through a series of breathing exercises, new-age visions, and dark, dysphoric confessions, all the while being instructed to pluck out the hair from an androgynous, stripped body in the center of the gallery.
Zackary Drucker is a Los Angeles-based artist. Drucker holds a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2007), and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (2005). Interested in obliterating language obstacles, pulverizing identity disorders and revealing dark subconscious layers of outsider agency, Drucker disarms audiences using live performance, film, video, and photography. Keeping normative culture on the periphery, Drucker uses her body to illicit desire, judgement, and voyeuristic shame from her viewer. Her work has been featured at Jerome Zodo Contemporary (Milan), Steve Turner Contemporary (LA), Les Recontres Internationales (Paris, Berlin, Madrid), Cercle Blanc (Berlin), Invisible Exports (NYC), Leo Koenig Projekte (NYC), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), and Venice Biennial (Swiss Offsite Pavilion).
- TERESIAS // HEATHER CASSILS - LOS ANGELES/MONTREAL
Performance Starts at 7:45 PM - Approx. 240 Min. (Durational - Audience is Welcome to Come and Go)view details »
The performance Teresias is inspired by the mythological character of the same name. He was the blind prophet of Thebes, famous for being transformed into a woman for seven years. In Teresias, Cassils’ holds her body against a neo classical Greek torso carved out of ice fitted exactly to her body. Throughout the four-hour event, Cassils’ melts this ice torso with her own body heat enacting Teresias’ gender transformation. Cassils’ cast the myth of Teresias as a story of endurance and transformation, in which masculinity both freezes the body and melts it away.
For more information on Teresias please visit - cassils.wordpress.com/projects/teresias/
Heather Cassils is an artist, stunt person and a body builder who uses an exaggerated physique to intervene in various contexts in order to interrogate systems of power, control and gender. Often employing many of the same strategies used by FLUXUS and guerrilla theatre, her method is multidisciplinary and crosses a spectrum of performance, film, drawing, video, photography and event planning. Cassils is a founding member of the Los Angeles based performance group the Toxic Titties.
Her work responds to the industrial production of images. To inhabit Los Angeles is to live on a film set – indeed, to inhabit any city whose culture is defined by mass culture of consumption is to find oneself defined by the images one consumes.
Cassils have exhibited at the White Chapel and Thomas Danes gallery in London, Manifesta, Schnitt Ausstellungsraum, Edith Ruß Site for Media Art in Germany, LGBT film festival in Paris, France, at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwigin Vienna, Austria, at MUCA Roma and International Festival, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City, at Art in General in NYC, most recently at the Yurba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and at LACE and at the USC Center for Feminist Research in Los Angeles as well as at Art Basel Miami Beach in Florida.
www.heathercassils.com
www.sculptthebody.com
- HOT SOAK // HELENA GOLDWATER - LONDON
Performance Starts At 8:00 PM - Duration - 210 Min. (One-To-One Performances @ 7 Min. Intervals); Location To Be Announced. BUY TICKET NOW!view details »
Book some bath time with Helena Goldwater.
Hot Soak is a one-to-one performance which revels in fluids and intimacy, and where you, the audience, become co-creator of the work through material and physical exchange. Without you the work cannot exist.
Each performance lasts approximately 7 minutes.
To book your appointment with Helena, please sign up for one of the twenty-one time slots by visiting queercitycinema.ca
ON-LINE BOOKINGS WILL BE ORGANIZED INTO GROUPS (A, B C & D) ARRIVING AT THE LOCATION ON THE HOUR STARTING AT 8PM. AN ATTENDANT WILL THEN DELIVER EACH PERSON INDIVIDUALLY TO HELENA. IN ANTICIPATION OF NO-SHOWS, A WAIT LIST WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ON-LINE. LOCATION OF PERFORMANCE WILL BE COMMUNICATED AFTER BOOKINGS ARE MADE.
Goldwater has been making performance art since graduating from Goldsmith’s Fine Art in 1989, and paintings since 2003. In both practices she is interested in intimate exchange and a devotion to craft. She often makes performances that last many hours and her paintings can take months to produce – this dedication to process is a way of transforming the everyday into a spiritual act. Characteristically her performances feature her immersed in fluids, for example, water or milk, and focus on the detail of the body, such as the mouth; directly referencing the erotic and the grotesque. She re-places the fluidity of the inside outside.
Goldwater has been nominated twice for the Paul Hamlyn Awards for Visual Artists. Her performance work has been shown extensively, for example, in the UK at Tate Liverpool, Newlyn Art Gallery, Spacex, Art First, and in Canada, for example, at the Western Front, Vancouver. She also teaches at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.
- PERFORMATORIUM LABOUNGE - FREE
7:00 PM to Late - Neutral Groundview details »
A space for exploration, experimentation, and discovery awaits in Performatorium Labounge. The public is invited and encouraged to create and participate in both scheduled and impromptu performances that will accompany and occur before, in-between and after the ‘main stage’ performances at Performatorium.
Set within the festival’s social space (aka - the ‘black carpet room’ at Neutral Ground C.A.F.) these performances/happenings/events/acts can be durational, interactive, participatory, short, long, solo or group, planned or spontaneous, energetic or static, with disinhibiton, willingness, curiosity, and community the key factors in the creation of Performatorium Labounge.
Join us for a drink, a look, and perhaps your own moment at Performatorium Labounge. To propose an idea for Labounge, please contact Gary Varro at queercitycinema@yahoo.ca
- QUEER SURVIVAL CAMPOUT SNOWCAVE // ANTHEA BLACK - ALBERTA/LONDON
PERFORMANCE VIDEO COMPONENT - FREE
Neutral Groundview details »
In honor of winter and community, this video will be screened in the intimate and cozy room adjacent to the main gallery at Neutral Ground.
QUEER SURVIVAL CAMPOUT SNOWCAVE
ANTHEA BLACK, 2010-2011, HD video, 9:05 minutes, looped for exhibition.
Queer Survival Campout Snowcave is a performance video that takes place in a quinzee, which is a DIY structure made from a big pile of snow that is hollowed out to make a cave and sometimes used for winter survival and shelter. Snow occupies an important place in the Prairie, Northern and Canadian imaginations; it can be a benevolent, insulating and feminizing part of the landscape, or it can be a hysterical, cruel and blinding force of nature. Here, snow, and all of its associations set the scene for a video where local queer artists were invited into the cave to campout, celebrate, eat, drink and performatively take shelter from the hostile forces of nature and culture that surround.
With participation by Cait Harben, Jamie Q and Kelly O’Dette.
Anthea Black is a Canadian artist, art writer and cultural worker. Her work in printmaking, textiles, performance and video is preoccupied with setting a stage for queer collaborative practice and inserting intimate gestures into public spaces. Her recent exhibitions include: PopSex! Responses to the History of Sexual Science at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery / ACAD in Calgary, Gestures of Resistance at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR and QIY: Queer It Yourself – Tools for Survival at the National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco.