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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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 | I am going to be delivering bedtime fortune stories at the Heliconian Club this Saturday night-Sunday morning as part of a Nuit Blanche event curated by Emily Pohl-Weary. The reading lineup for the Bedtime Tales: Fables and Fantasies program is listed below. Other cool events (especially this and this and this) are taking place all over town. |
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Bedtime Tales: Fables and Fantasies A Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Event On Saturday, Sept. 30, literary fantasia Bedtime Tales: Fables and Fantasies will feature more than twenty local literary stars and provocateurs, assembled in Yorkville's gothic Heliconian Club, located at 35 Hazelton Avenue (one block east of Avenue Rd). The authors will delight, entertain, and heat up the wee hours of the morning in between stops on the Scotiabank Nuit Blanche route. Pause for a cup of hot cocoa and cookies, grab a cushion, stretch out beneath the vaulted ceilings, and enjoy tales of the night ranging from the surreal to the sensual to the scary. Here's the lineup: Lillian Allen 7:01 PM Hadley Dyer 7:30 PM Olive Senior 8:00 PM Jean Yoon 8:30 PM Kerri Sakamoto 9:00 PM Pam Mordecai 9:30 PM Ibi Kaslik 10:00 PM Tamara Faith Berger 10:30 PM Russell Smith 11:00 PM BREAK 11:30 PM Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm 12:00 AM Mariko Tamaki 12:30 AM Kelley Armstrong 1:00 AM Paul Hong 1:30 AM BREAK 2:00 AM Sabrina Jalees 2:30 AM Kristyn Dunnion 3:00 AM Caitlin Sweet 3:30 AM BREAK 4:00 AM R.M. Vaughan 4:30 AM Andrew J. Paterson 5:00 AM BREAK 5:30 AM Gemma Files 6:00 AM Emily Pohl-Weary 6:30 AM Download the program book with readers' bio notes at: http://www.emilypohlweary.com/bedtimetalesprog.pdf | |
Yesterday I went to see The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach (curated by Rhonda Corvese). Artist Iris Häussler invented another artist: a little old man, German, an outsider artist living in a tiny house in downtown Toronto and filling it with dark and scary sculptures. The artwork is the house, and the tour given by people who tell you they are from the municipal archives, investigating the "cultural value" of the work. The story goes that the archives have opened up the house to the public, both to allow the art to be seen in its original setting, and to justify the budget, since cataloguing is taking much longer than anticipated. It's a great fiction, and our tour guide gave an incredible performance, never breaking out of character even a tiny little bit. I absolutely loved it.
The artist and curator only revealed the fiction part way through the exhibition, so quite a few people who saw it early thought it was real. I am not sure how I would have felt if I had seen it before I knew. The show was very emotional and intimate, and I would likely have felt manipulated. However I think it is brilliant. And it poses a question: is it wrong to lie for fiction? Even knowing I was in a constructed installation, I still felt like I was tramping through somebody's life. Which is obviously the intention. The character of this old man was very vivid, working out his personal history, including the holocaust, by making big dark sculptural projects that are reminiscent of Anselm Keiffer and directly influenced by Brancusi. There is also weird creepy obsessive stuff going on with the female form, as befits any male outsider artist worth his salt, and a mysterious relationship with a woman who seems to have lived with him for several years. I feel like Joseph Wagenbach is real.
I would love to hear in the comments from others who went, especially anyone who was not aware of the fiction. Here's part of Häussler's statement:
In parallel - as the project is ultimately revealed as an art installation - it initiates a discussion of questions of authorship and ownership, of public perception and curated intention, such as "What defines a contemporary oeuvre?" "What does it mean to be a product of your times?" "What personal history remains in a body of work?" "What products of work are considered as art and for what reasons?" and "In what sense could it be said Joseph Wagenbach exists, or does not exist".
My only lasting complaint about Jennifer McMackon's necessary and fabulous art blog, Simpleposie, has been that mostly what she does is ask questions, and we don't get to read enough of her own keenly considered writing. But now she's culled her essay/reviews into a collection called Simpleposie Scribbler. Yay! This is good art criticism.
