Pride Toronto: Video Art is Queer

Launch Party
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
7pm - 9pm
Gladstone Hotel - Melody Bar
1214 Queen Street West

‘Video Art is Queer', curated by Sharon Switzer, showcases compelling new work by ten nationally and internationally recognized artists: Deanna Bowen; Aleesa Cohene with Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay; Tori Foster and Alexis Mitchell; Oliver Husain; Jean-Paul Kelly; Robert Lee; Nina Levitt; Krys McGuire; Allyson Mitchell and Steve Reinke were asked to make a new video that addresses Pride’s ‘Unified!’ theme in some way. Their responses take us on a wild ride from bizarre childhood memories, to years of tabloid gossip, to a shared sense of pathos and mortality.

All the artists in 'Video Art is Queer', whether emerging or established, allow their contemporary art practices to be informed by a unique queer perspective. Their interests are varied and their work ranges in genre from experimental to documentary, but for this project, all of them made the leap across the invisible chasm that divides Queen Street and Church Street, so their art could join the party. This project brings some of the best video artists in Canada to the streets for Pride.

Commissioned works will be screened at the launch party; Pride Weekend on large screens at our festival site (located at Church and Hayden, Church and Carlton and East of Yonge on Wellesley Street); at the Drake Hotel (1150 Queen Street W.) through August; and via web streaming on our site.

Deanna Bowen - "Lean on Me"	Deanna Bowen is a Toronto-based media installation artist. She received her Diploma of Fine Arts from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1992 and is currently completing her Masters Degree in Visual Art at the University of Toronto. Her work has been exhibited nationally (Ontario, British Columbia, Yukon Territories, Manitoba) and internationally (Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy) in numerous film festivals and galleries. She has received several grants in
support of her artistic practice, most notably from the Canada Council, OAC, TAC, Toronto Lesbian and Gay Community Appeal, Telefilm Canada, and BC Cultural Services. In addition to artistic production, Deanna has also worked in the cultural sector for over 13 years at organizations such as the Images Festival of Film, Video and New Media, InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT), Point of View Magazine, Women in Focus Arts & Media Centre, and the Inside Out Lesbian & Gay Film and Video Festival.
Aleesa Cohene & Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay - "The Same Problem"	Toronto-based artist Aleesa Cohene produces videos and video installations that seek to occupy the oppositional zone between ideas and emotion, cultural belief, and personal integrity. Rooted in the re-use of existing sound, image, music, and dialogue, Cohene’s work consciously draws on common resources to expose common anxieties. Short videos like Absolutely (2001), All Right (2003) and Ready to Cope (2006) address themes of political protest, immigration policy, and domestic anxieties. While drawing attention to the
lens’ ability to reflect us as individuals and societies, they simultaneously absolve us from being seen: permitting us to not look or listen to ourselves, asking that we simply be quiet and passively watch the screen. Her work has shown in film and video festivals across Canada as well as in Brazil, Germany, Holland, Russia, Scandinavia, Turkey, and the United States, and has won prizes at Utrecht’s Impakt Festival and Toronto’s Images Festival. She has participated in a residency at the Banff Centre of the Arts and is currently artist-in-residence at Impakt Works in the Netherlands. Aleesa Cohene is currently part of the creative duo The Archenemy, working collaboratively with artist Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay. She was born in 1976 in Vancouver, Canada. For more information please visit: www.aleesacohene.com Since 2000, Montréal-based artist Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay’s video- and performance-based work has brought together song, self-reflexive performance, and lyrics from pop music to examine the untranslatability of emotions into language and the ways in which emotional expression changes shape when mediated by technology and popular culture. His work has screened in festivals and galleries across Canada, Europe, and East Asia and has won prizes at festivals in Germany, Portugal, and Canada as well as First Prize at the Globalica Media Arts Biennale in Wroclaw, Poland. His 2002 video I am a Boyband has been broadcast on German, Swiss, Dutch, French, Canadian and Japanese television. He has participated in artist residencies in Canada, Germany, Austria, Denmark and France. His work is in numerous private collections as well as the the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay currently works in creative partnership with Canadian artist Aleesa Cohene. More information at his website www.nemerofsky.ca
Tori Foster & Alexis Mitchell - "Queerpolis"	Tori Foster is a Toronto-based documentary artist working in film, new media, and photography. Her work is primarily concerned with experience. In film, this is often explored through identity; in new media and photography, her explorations are more data driven, including the use of typology, modularity, and space-time representation. Foster has been featured on the cover of Now, Xtra, and on MTV Canada. Her feature film 533 Statements, a documentary about queer women across Canada, sold out at Toronto’s Inside Out in 2006,
and also won the festival’s Best Canadian Feature. It has gone on to show at festivals and cultural events across Canada, the United States, and Europe. Recent and current projects include Movement portraits, composite photographic studies of movement through slivers of public space, which exhibited this May in Contact at the Gladstone Hotel; Circus Geeks and Sideshow Freaks, a short film documenting the queer performance event Abnormals Anonymous; The Mother City, a new media typology of the forms and resultant human experiences of the metropolises of North America; and Junction, a non-linear database work that navigates the parallel and visual thought process of the dyslexic thinker, for which Foster was awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. Alexis Mitchell is a Toronto-based media maker whose first short video documentary entitled, Rubb My Chubb: Fat Activism and the Fat Femme Mafia has screened all over Canada, the US, and internationally. She has been intimately bound to queer politics for many years and in that time has created experimental, documentary, and hybrid visual works that have dealt with issues of representation of queer relationships, female masculinity, female body/fat politics, and the dissection of gender and heterosexist societal norms. While working on her MFA in Documentary Media Production at Ryerson University she has been experimenting with photography, installation and new media forms and concepts for displaying her work. Continuing in the realm of fat politics, Alexis recently created a fat-positive photo book entitled, It Ain't Over: Fat Photos and Politics of Size. She worked alongside media-artist Tori Foster to create Circus Geeks and Sideshow Freaks, a video documentary following Toronto artists,The Hobo Homos, in the creation of their first queer circus event, Abnormals Anonymous, and is currently working on a media display/performative documentary looking at the intersections of Judaism and queerness within Purim carnival celebrations.
Oliver Husain - "Stimulation"	Ranging from documentary to live-action compositing to Bollywood dance sequences – sometimes all at once — Oliver Husain's short videos have everything except that stifling sense of seriousness that so often seems to come with rigour. Shot in locations the world over (including Germany, India, Indonesia, and China), his works are playful travelogues from some place that has never existed except as the impossible sum of various parts. They
combine a keen, respectful sense of place with a healthily absurd irreverence that puts the "fab" back in "fabulist."
Jean-Pail Kelly - "Self-Unfruitful"	Jean-Paul Kelly is a Toronto-based artist who makes video, photo-based work, and drawings. His work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals in North America, Japan, and Europe, including art-action: rencontres internationales 2006 in Paris, Berlin, and Madrid. In October 2008, Gallery TPW (Toronto) will present And fastened to a dying animal, an exhibition of Kelly's recent work. He is member of the Pleasure Dome experimental film and video programming collective, and curated "Drawn In From Without" as part
of Vtape's Curatorial Incubator project in 2007. Kelly holds a Masters of Visual Studies degree from the University of Toronto (2005). He is currently an instructor in the Visual Studies programme at U of T and in Integrated Media at OCAD University.
Robert Lee - "All filler, no killer"	Robert Lee is interested in architecture.
Nina Levitt - "Headlines"	Nina Levitt is an artist working in photography, video,and interactive technologies. From resurrecting lesbian pulp novel covers in photographs made in the mid-1980s to recent video installations about women in space to her current obsession with women spies, she often relies on the recovery and manipulation of existing images. Her work can be seen at www.ninalevitt.com
NO IMAGE AVAILABLE	Krys McGuire is a white, queer, trans guy interested in exploring trans experiences, embodiments of masculinity, and sites of tension within trans and queer communities/identities through photography and digital video production. As part of his artistic practice, he is working on integrating collaborative
exchanges with other queer and trans folks into his creative process. He continues to engage in political work by making sex positive art and attempting to create spaces in his work for dialogue around intersections of disability and race with trans/queer identities. His prior photo and video works have screened at/been a part of Erotic Blender (Toronto 2006); Inside Out Film Festival (Toronto 2007), Out On Screen Film Festival (Vancouver 2007), and Queer City Cinema (Regina 2008). He has also worked for community organizations producing documentaries of their events and engaging program participants in digital video projects. When he is not immersed in photo or video projects, Krys currently works at CTYS' Pride & Prejudice Program as a Youth Program Leader and YGAP (Youth Gender Action Project) Research Assistant. He has been involved in various capacities in Toronto's trans, queer, and dis/ability activist communities for the past five years and hopes to continue engaging in this work.
Allyson Mitchell - "Dyke Pussy"	Allyson Mitchell is a maximalist artist working predominantly in sculpture, installation, and film. Since 1997, Mitchell has been melding feminism and pop culture to play with contemporary ideas about lesbian sexuality, autobiography, and the body, largely through the use of reclaimed textile and abandoned craft. Her work has exhibited in galleries and festivals across Canada, the US, Europe, and East Asia. She has also performed extensively with Pretty, Porky and Pissed
Off, a fat performance troupe, as well as publishing both writing and music. She is a professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University.
Steve Reinke - "Jesus Sneaker Freak"	Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his work in video. He lives in Toronto and Chicago, where he is Associate Professor of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University. A book of his scripts, Everybody Loves Nothing: Video 1997 - 2005 was recently published by Coach House (Toronto). He has also co-edited a number of anthologies, most recently The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema (with Chris Gehman).

About the Curator: Sharon Switzer was born in Lethbridge, Alberta in 1966. An artist and curator, she has been exhibiting her media art in Canada and the US since the early 1990s. The first curatorial collective that she formed, Clamorous Intentions, was active in Toronto during the early 1990s, producing three large-scale, multi-media public events in two years. Sharon taught new media and visual art in Ontario Universities for eight years, and is actively involved in the Toronto arts community, presently serving as Vice President of Gallery TPW’s Board of Directors. Her videos are currently traveling to museums across Canada as part of 18 Illuminations, and a catalogue of her work was just produced by McMaster Museum of Art. Switzer is a Graduate of the CFC Media Lab at the Canadian Film Centre, and is represented by Corkin Gallery in Toronto. Her video work can be seen at www.corkingallery.com and www.sharonswitzer.com. She is presently teaching in the Integrated Media department at OCAD University, and is Executive Director of the not-for-profit organization Art for Commuters, which produces the Toronto Urban Film Festival, Contacting Toronto and Words Travel Fast on the Onestop TTC Network of platform screens.

Production Support Provided By:

Trinity Square Video, a not-for-profit charitable media arts centre that provides artists and community organizations with video production/post-production support and services at accessible rates. Here since 1971, TSV provides a broad spectrum of services related to video: workshops, screenings, gallery exhibitions, artist residencies festival sponsorships and community partnerships.