Performance Works
Falbo Theater
Boundaries And Thresholds
Cheryl Pagurek
Year: 2022
Run Time: 5:11
Country: Canada
Dancer Kenneth Emig explores the liminal spaces, thresholds, and boundaries in Cheryl Pagurek’s States of Being interactive video and audio installation, where his inquisitive movements synthesize the videos and compose the soundscape. During a time when relationships are constantly changing between ideas of public and private, individual and collectivity, inside and outside, safety and threat, distance and togetherness, he uniquely expresses our precarious human condition amidst the fluctuating states of being we strive to balance as we navigate new limits.
The States of Being interactive installation reimagines the possibilities for expressive self-representation in the internet age. Instead of the online identities that we perpetually craft and perform via social media platforms, avatars, and video calls, States of Being offers an alternative, experiential and experimental mode to enact virtual creations of ourselves, while straddling both real and digital worlds. The video and music components are mapped spatially to respond to peoples’ movements. Participants synthesize the videos and build up the soundscape through their actions, resulting in immersive video and sound compositions. Video imagery evokes fleeting sensibilities: the built environment and vast natural space, rushing speed and slow contemplation, immediacy and distance, isolation and freedom. Composer Jesse Stewart contributed the musical tracks in the installation.
Bio: Cheryl Pagurek’s artistic practice highlights the constructed nature of lens-based media, while embracing the creative expression offered by computing and technology. Her work in video, photography and digital media has been shown widely in Canada and internationally, including exhibits at MSVU Gallery (Halifax), Patrick Mikhail Montréal, Vu (Québec), Gallery 44 (Toronto), numerous video screenings in Canada, USA, Brazil, France, Columbia, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Currents, a commissioned video work at Ottawa’s Marketplace transit station. Her 2019 exhibit Connect/Connexion at the Ottawa Art Gallery featured an interactive video and audio installation. She received the 2020 Corel Endowment for the Arts Award celebrating the integration of technology and the arts.
The Heart Is An Organ That Pumps BLood
Laura Paolini
Year: 2020
Run Time: 5:00
Country: Canada
The Heart Is An Organ That Pumps Blood is a single-channel video that uses a split screen, which depicts me in different emotional states. Text appears in the lower third of the video, functioning like film subtitles.
The text describes the administrative procedures of patient intake at a dental hygienist school. A student reads my pulse using a stethoscope and their fingers on my wrist. The pause and “transactional intimacy” of this moment is jarring yet becomes almost transcendental when the Madonna song “Like A Prayer” begins playing. The awareness here brought to my body and my state of mind was evoked by a stranger who must touch me for labour and wages, yet also show empathy and care.
Bio: Laura Paolini (she/her) currently lives in Ottawa, unceded and unsurrendered Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation territory. Her artwork is primarily conceptual and manifests through installations, videos, and performances, often unfolding where these forms meet, merge and collapse. Paolini’s work strives to create hybrid spaces, which point to the larger social matrices that are relational and informed by recent political and social history.
The Rehearsal
Kate Walker
Year: 2022
Run Time: 11:58
Country: USA (Idaho)
In this performance-based video, a series of scenes uses group improvisation, re-enactments of real events, various props and other semi-choreographed scenes of play and struggle. These act as metaphors for creativity and conflict, choice and restriction, in current personal and political dialogues today.
Dual wrestling pairs, a ballet sequence, playing and fighting with beach toys as well as a therapy session carried out with megaphones, build a continuous narrative. Lines from the text “The Society of the Spectacle” by Guy Debord are read aloud in the style of news presentation. This text, which explores ‘The Spectacle’ feels prescient in relation to current debates about the meaning of collective responsibility vs individual choice, power and control, and loss of it.
The whole piece is set up like a rehearsal. It is as much about its making and the dynamics of group creativity and production as it is a commentary on current cultural conditions.
The editing reinforces the dynamics of the piece. Multiple images are layered, scaled, collaged together. Images act as screens revealing and concealing other images. Stills are embedded in with video sequences to amplify each scene.
Bio: Kate Walker’s work encompasses painting, performance and video, often working with groups in the community. Recent projects focus on queer bodies, and utopian and dystopian imaginings in popular culture.
Walker received her MFA from the University of Arizona, 2005 and teaches at Boise State University.
Clever At Seeing Without Being Seen
Lee Campbell
Year: 2021
Run Time: 15:00-20:00
Country: United Kingdom
CLEVER AT SEEING WITHOUT BEING SEEN is a 15-20 minute live performance combining performance poetry and visual moving imagery made up of my personal archive as an artist of nearly 25 years. It nails a specific talent queer people need to acquire, the title.
Through colourful, immersive, structured, organic and disorientating collage, this performance narrates the experiences of young queer people through my personal autobiography. The performance starts from the idea that queer existence itself is inherently performative; engaging the various roles that present themselves in a world of diversity. The idea of building a queer identity was so different pre-Internet. The world wide web introduces new possibilities for the construction of queer identity. In the manner of bricolage – building and constructing from what is at hand, piecing together images and visuals available on the Internet and elsewhere to explain one’s identity to oneself. Sharply and poignantly, the performance evokes many of the feelings that are so common to discovering one’s sexuality in adolescence (‘I got very clever/Very clever at seeing/Without being seen’). The work is raw and authentic, with the artist sharing with the audience his own journey to authenticity and emphasising the message ‘just be yourself’
Bio: Dr. Lee Campbell is an artist, performance poet, experimental filmmaker, writer, Senior Lecturer at University of the Arts London, and founder of Homo Humour, a project that explores humour and LGBTQ+ storytelling through film and performance poetry. His experimental performance poetry films have been selected for many international film festivals since 2019. This year, Lee had his first solo exhibition in North America of his poetry films, See Me: Performance Poetry Films at Fountain Street, Boston USA.
A Final Elegant Gesture
Synopsis: An essay narration paired with old B&W found film footage, the narrator describes the horror from his street-level vantage point beneath the Twin Towers on the morning of September 11th. A nearby cluster of big clumsy character balloons suspended from a storefront awning are woven into the plot. Each night as he sleeps, the storyteller stands alone on the ledge of the burning tower and transcends the intention of one final, elegant gesture.
Bio: I am a multi-media visual and performance artist. The themes I work with include minor obsessions, the bizarre landscape, self-realization, and social justice. I often integrate storytelling into my work through text and spoken word. I hold a BFA in Painting and an MFA in Performance Art, both from Arizona State University.
Thomas Pickarski
Year: 2021
Run Time: 9:00
Country: USA (New York)
