Creamcheese, Chimeras and Cheetah Print
IBS The Musical by Jonah Strub at The Front Room Gallery in Waterloo, ON
October 19, 2019
January 16, 2020 by Rebecca Casalino
Jonah Strub’s IBS The Musical, the artist’s first solo exhibition, was installed at The Front Room Gallery run by performance artist and painter Tess Martens, in her home in Waterloo on the evening of October 19th. The Front Room Gallery is nestled in Martens’ uptown Waterloo neighbourhood, its entrance marked by the bright glow coming from the gallery crowded with people and a sandwich board announcing IBS The Musical: Jonah Strub ft. Athena McQueen.
Melonia Katz, 2019, porcelain. Photo courtesy of Rebecca CasalinoUpon entering the exhibition you are greeted with a towering orange paper maché beehive of hair that extends from floor to ceiling. The exaggerated doo is supported by a heavily contoured face surrounded by a pool of cheetah print fabric and a blue fur collar that appear as if they are melting into the floor under the weight of their hair. The beehive is d
etailed in spirals to match the curls dangling by her ears. This character is Strub’s alter ego and drag persona Loxanne Creamcheese whose features are used in Strub’s paintings and ceramics. Strub spoke about his relationship to his drag persona saying, “Me and Loxanne are one and the same. She is the embodiment of my fruitiness, the quintessence of my flamboyance. As much as it pains my digestive system to say this, Mz. Creamcheese is, and will eternally be, inside me.”
Women Who Made Me Gay, 2019, oil on paper with Emily Reimer and Jonah Strub singing karaoke in front. Photo courtesy of Rebecca Casalino
Moving past the pillar of Loxanne’s hair into the main space, visitors are greeted by nine portraits hung in a tight grid with the title “Women Who Made Me Gay” installed in a bold pink glitter font above. Painted in a gestural, highly textured style, Strub uses contrasting colours to make each portrait pop with a glamorous gritty finish. Strub says he uses, “bright oil colours, fast brush strokes, and high contrast shading” on heavily gessoed canvas so the work feels wet like it’s shaped by choppy waters. He takes inspiration from make-up contour videos, adding titanium white as a highlight, and explores how shadows carve a face. I recognized a few of the “Women Who Made Me Gay” straight away spotting Lea Michelle being ‘slushied’ in Glee, Tracy Turnblad with her huge highlighted hair and double chin singing in Hairspray, Lady Gaga wearing her Kermit the frog dress, and Jonah’s mom lounging on a bench. These autobiographical references give a deeply personal tone to Strub’s exhibition. The choice to include the portrait of his mom became obvious when I recognize her walking around the gallery laughing with visitors and taking pictures of her son with relatives in front of the art. Her supportive presence makes her inclusion in the installation even more personal and lovely.
The Katz Family, 2019, porcelain. Photo courtesy of Rebecca CasalinoThe main space features a set of shelves where the artist has installed five ceramic cats with Strub’s face, complete with his distinct nose and trademark moustache, coated in differing outlandish patterns. More like house cats than sphinxes, Strub’s humour is evident as he glazed a watermelon pattern on the body of one cat with a red face spotted with black seeds, while another cat is covered in small cheetah print interrupted only by an orange caterpillar moustache.
Gay Bugs, 2018, acrylic and glitter on canvas; Straight girls tell me I’m fierce, 2019, ceramics and eyelashes; Mz. Kasha LaPesach. Photo courtesy of Rebecca CasalinoAs viewers round the corner through the kitchen they enter a small backspace where snacks, alcohol and the PWYC (pay what you can) donation bowl are set up. Across from the cheese and crackers is a table with more ceramics featuring a sphinx with a cheetah’s body and the artist’s head dressed up with a little pink scarf, blush and painted red nails. A ceramic reclining man is splayed out on the table, Garfield mug in hand, wearing a shirt and tie which contrast his skimpy black underwear and thigh-high shiny pink zebra print boots. These chimeras spark a dialogue between the masculine and feminine aspects the artist combines within his campy works. Strub states this explicitly in his artist statement writing that he “hopes to create conversations around the true meanings of masculinity, femininity, and outrageous up-dos in a society that has too many gender restrictions and not enough cheetah print.”
Before the karaoke commences Martens reminds visitors to donate to the artists. The Front Room Gallery is an alternative space that compensates artists through PWYC contributions from event attendees. Athena McQueen then warms the crowd rocking a backless metallic top, and a purple and teal sequin skirt with matching iridescent shoes. She kicks off her set by singing “Sweet Transvestite” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a cult classic in the queer community. McQueen also pokes fun at Strub’s passion for musical theatre mentioning his weekly karaoke outings during his time at the University of Guelph. Strub then takes the stage wearing tailored cheetah print pants, zebra print socks, an amber turtleneck and glamourous dangling gold earrings. He performs “Somewhere That’s Green” from Little Shop of Horrors in a ridiculous falsetto that has the gallery giggling. The inclusion of karaoke in the exhibition activates Strub’s work as visitors embrace the spirit of camp singing songs such as “Since U Been Gone” or “Fergalicious”.
Girl Toys, 2019, oil on canvas. Photo courtesy of Jonah Strub.
IBS The Musical was a casual gathering of people with connections to the gallery or Strub. It was a BYOB event, which made it more accessible financially and created a more comfortable house party environment. The creation of alternative spaces, like Front Room Gallery, allows artists to explore avenues of funding outside of the traditional method of government grants. These kinds of art spaces that occupy unorthodox environments; like warehouses, beaches, or artists’ homes are geared towards practices that thrive in less formal surroundings. The PWYC method supports this underground aesthetic of crowdfunded projects that are created as a direct reflection of the needs of the surrounding community. Alternative forms of financial support risk being frowned upon as ‘low-brow’ by some sects of the art world; however, the realities of the scarcity of space and increasing rent prices have made these alternative venues even more valuable in allowing emerging practices to gain momentum.
Sunny Katz, 2019, porcelai. Photo courtesy of Rebecca CasalinoThe installation in Martens’ home presented challenges unique to these types of venues and Strub tackled them expertly as the exhibition moved through a domestic space. The choice to stage the karaoke in front of a wall filled with paintings activated the main space and incorporated the painted works as an element of the performance. I would like to end with Strub’s promotional description of IBS The Musical, “If you like cheetah print, mediocre Cher impressions, and genetic predispositions to digestive issues, this is an event you don’t want to miss!”
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Rebecca Casalino is a Toronto artist and curator maintaining her practice through deeply personal collaborations in her community and sheer will power. Currently focusing on drawing and multiples, Casalino has also previously worked in video, performance, sculpture, and installation. Casalino completed her BA in Studio Art, with a minor in English, at the University of Guelph in 2017. She co-managed VS Studios from 2017-2018 running numerous social practice projects. Casalino is currently an MFA candidate at the OCAD University.
Above the Belt, Below the Bush in North Bay, ON
September 7-27, 2019
Exhibition Texts, October 29, 2019
Above the Belt, Below the Bush, curated by Minor Hockey Curatorial took place in a partially developed space in North Bay, ON. The exhibition featured work by Adrienne Crossman, Dayna Danger, Tyler Matheson, Dominic PInney, Walter Scott, Jordyn Stewart, and Mary Tremonte and ran from Sept. 7-27, 2019.
Photo courtesy of Alexander Rondeau
The following writing includes three seperate texts that were originally featured in the printed catalogue accompanying the exhibition.
I. About the Exhibition
Robin Alex McDonald, Exhibition Co-Curator
Co-curated by Minor Hockey Curatorial (Robin Alex McDonald and Alexander Rondeau), Above the Belt, Below the Bush revels in the extra/ordinary fusion of queer glamour with the rural aesthetics of Northern Ontario.[1] Collapsing the division between hyper-masculine cultures of hunting and sport and queer/femme textures and materials (including leather, glitter, fluorescents, and sheen), the exhibition meditates on queer negotiations of geographic-specific visual and cultural codes. Some of the artworks in Above the Belt, Below the Bush playfully engage with fantasies of northernness, rurality, and Canadian cultural identity in order to call these homogenizing stereotypes into question; others shed light on actual issues faced by northern communities. Dominic Pinney’s Untitled (for Vaughan), for example, draws a connection to the heightened rate of motor vehicle accidents in the north, while Adrienne Crossman’s No Future -- the title of a prominent queer theory book [2] -- takes on new meaning in light of the damaging dominant attitude that youth must leave northern communities if they are to succeed in their academics and careers.
Dayna Danger. Photo courtesy of Alexander Rondeau
Housed in the former site of Lefebvre’s Source for Adventure (an outdoor equipment store whose collection of fishing, camping, and hunting gear was destroyed by fire in 2012), Above the Belt, Below the Bush opts not for the sterile atmosphere of the white cube gallery but for the grunge and covertness of a building mid-renovation. Similarly, not all of the pieces in Above the Belt, Below the Bush can be immediately read as queer works (or even as works about queerness), and not all of the exhibiting artists self-identify as part of the LGBTQ2S+ community. Instead, the queerness of the works included in this exhibition is largely produced within our readings of them, as curators and queer subjects, as well as from their material and aesthetic connections to queer histories of camp and glamour.
While queer camp is typically understood as loud and outrageous (as in the raunchy films of John Waters or the feather-boas of Elton John), queerness itself often demands an oscillation between hyper-visibility and invisibility (as in underground gay nightclubs or brightly coloured hankies hidden in plain sight.) Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz suggests that “[q]ueerness is often transmitted covertly. This has everything to do with the fact that leaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open for attack.”[3] This may be especially true in the north, where the perception of higher rates of homophobic and transphobic attitudes often activates queer invisibility in the same way that wild animals activate camouflage. Here, the knowledge and conscious manipulation of how one appears or “codes” vis-a-vis other gendered, classed, and racialized codings becomes a crucial survival tactic for marginalized people. The use of actual camouflage prints in works by both Jordyn Stewart and Walter Kaheró:ton Scott gestures toward this critical element of queer covertness while still holding onto cheekiness and parody (whether in the form of a meandering desirous hand, or a pink-camo scrunchie).
Jordyn Stewart. Photo courtesy of Alexander Rondeau
As Estraven Lupino-Smith writes in their meditation on queer urban ecologies, camouflage is a tactic shared by queers and “wild animals” alike.[4] Noting that queers often use the same concealed wooded areas for cruising grounds that coyotes, foxes, and falcons choose as sites to hunt, play, and rear their young, Lupino-Smith suggests that these multi-use areas of “wilderness” “remind us that there are things beyond our control” and “other ways of being in the world.”[5] Such observations also contest the dominant assumption that urban environments are the only places where queer people can thrive, asserting instead that meaningful queer subcultures persist even where they are imagined to be nonexistent or under threat.
This myth of absence – which suggests that queer subjects do not exist in northern or rural communities – has its historical roots in settler colonialism and Canadian nationalism. Since settlement, the misrepresentation of Canadian wilderness as empty, uninhabited lands provided grounds for settlers to violently colonize Indigenous territory and displace Indigenous peoples. In short, the lands now referred to by the colonial name “Canada” were deemed a kind of utopia; a source of endless possibility, ready to be claimed, extracted, and developed. The taming of the exoticized and “unruly” wilderness was achieved primarily through the division of land plots, establishment of public parks, and creation of the forest, mining, and fishing industries, but the imposition of the (cis)gender binary (with itsassociated division of labour), compulsory monogamy, and compulsory heterosexuality also played a significant part.
Certainly, non-Indigenous queers had (and continue to have) an active role in processes of colonization and the naturalization of settlement as well. As Scott Morgensen claims in his book, The Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization, non-Indigenous queers have a long history of “resolv[ing] their exile through land-based relationships to disappeared Native people.”[6] Keeping this in mind, we hope that this exhibition’s curatorial claim – that queers do, and always have, lived in rural areas, northern areas, and all other areas that they/we are believed to be absent from – does not risk suggesting that non-Indigenous queers have any greater legitimacy to these lands than our fellow non-queer settlers. Rather, we hope that the aesthetic fusions explored throughout this exhibition can serve as a reminder that many of the acts, relations, and gestures now understood as “queer” have always existed in this place. Although they have been rendered invisible through settler colonial constructions of “heterosexuality,” they have not been erased. They persist, camouflaged and coded.
[1] Within this exhibition, the coexistence of queer aesthetics and the popular aesthetics of northern rurality is considered to be “extra/ordinary” in that it is both extraordinary (remarkable and striking) and extra ordinary (ubiquitous and quotidian).
[2] See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
[3] José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theorist 8, No. 2 (1996): 6.
[4] Estraven Lupino-Smith, “Morality Cuts: Uncovering Queer Urban Ecologies,” Guts Magazine 9 (2018), http://gutsmagazine.ca/morality-cuts/
[5] Ibid.
[6] Scott Morgensen, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2011), 6.
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Robin Alex McDonald is an arts writer, academic, and independent curator currently living and working on Robertson-Huron Treaty territory and the traditional territories of Nipissing First Nation. Their published work can be found in several magazines and journals, including n.paradoxa, nomorepotlucks, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and Literature and Medicine.
II. Curatorial Statement
Alexander Rondeau, Exhibition Co-Curator
Having grown up in rural small-town Northeastern Ontario, the aesthetic considerations of the artists within Above the Belt, Below the Bush resonate with me in a way that is entirely familiar, eerie, and hopeful. Although the conceptual framework of this exhibition is in many ways deeply rooted in aesthetics, there is also a local buy-in for most Northerners in so far as these aesthetics are largely derived from recreational cultures, including fishing, hunting, and hockey. These cultures and their aesthetics are ubiquitous in Northern locales, but they are also almost entirely exclusionary of queerness; as I have found, these cultures are often paradoxically indoctrinating as they are inherited - or imposed - as a generational transference.
I am acutely aware that curatorial practices in Northern Ontario - especially in smaller, rural locales - are few and far between. Growing up in the North, I was never exposed to critical artworks and did not know that curators even existed until moving to Toronto. After moving back to the North, I realized that my curatorial practice was formed alongside metronormative sensitivities and that exhibition making should be informed by regionalisms that are often too easily overlooked or discredited by urban communities.
Having curated exhibitions in small rural Northern towns, I have learned that there is absolutely room - and need - for contemporary exhibitions, particularly those with works by marginalized and underrepresented artists. It is my hope that Above the Belt, Below the Bush can accomplish a queering of the familiar by prompting an important reconsideration of cultural codes and visual norms that permeate hegemonic social and cultural understandings of identity in small Northern communities. Admittedly, North Bay certainly does not feel small (compared to the community in which I grew up, which had more cows than people), but it also doesn’t feel large enough to escape the omnipresent trend of camo and sporting wear as popular fashion.
Tyler Matheson. Photo courtesy of Alexander Rondeau
While looking over potential works to include in the show with Robin, I was particularly struck by Tyler Matheson’s Hockey Sticks Affixed With Glitter as it is somehow aesthetically both over- and under-stated. But mainly, this work resonated so deeply with me as someone who grew up playing hockey and ultimately quit due to my extreme discomfort as a queer person within hyper masculine hockey culture. Although the works in the exhibition are critical of the aesthetic and cultural folds to which they are responding, I would argue that they also make space for QT2S folks to reconsider themselves in relation to the cultures in question, as I myself had to reconsider my relationship to these fabulous hockey sticks.
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Alexander Rondeau is a queer, Francophone interdisciplinary artist, curator, and writer from New Liskeard, Ontario. He holds a BFA in Image Arts from Ryerson University and is currently an OGS-funded MFA candidate in the Criticism and Curatorial Program at OCAD University. Rondeau’s research-driven artistic practice is largely lens-based hybridizing photography, sculpture, and performative site-specific interventions highlighting the complicated intersections of queerness and Northern rurality. He has done several residencies including MAD in Sigulda, Latvia and has had several group and solo shows across Ontario including a Featured solo exhibition during the 2017 CONTACT Photography Festival. From 2018-2019, Rondeau was the Program Coordinator at the Near North Mobile Media Lab in North Bay, Ontario.
Walter Scott. Photo courtesy of Alexander Rondeau
III. [untitled]
GHY Cheung
It started as a joke. I had bought an iridescent party ornament, one of those things you unfold into a quasi-sphere, clear partitions fanning into honeycombs around a central axel. I saw it in a café and thought of you. How it would unsettle the otherwise no-frills logic of your apartment. Out of place and absurd by way of contrast, sparkly and most certainly gay. Carrying it nascent and tucked neat into my backpack I made my way to yours.
I had sweat through my usual black on black uniform by the time I rounded the corner, as much from the heat as from the idea, now irretractable, that I had somehow miscalculated. The imagined charm of my gesture gave way. What if you hate it but feel pressured by polite convention to pretend otherwise? Your building in view at the end of the street. What if a gag gift is a weird thing to give you when I’ve only met you twice before? Steps away. What if this gives you the impression that I think all queers are magpies, oriented by our genetic makeup towards shiny things?
A 2014 study by scientists at the University of Exeter concluded that magpies are not instinctively attracted to shiny objects. Their reputation then was likely the result of anecdote—Gioachino Rossini’s 1815 opera, European folklore and children’s stories—with an admixture of observer bias. It would be easy to flip my metaphor here into a disavowal of any inherent queer claims to flamboyance or fabulousness (and strictly speaking this would not be inaccurate, though I imagine it would read, with certain inflections, like an assimilationist assertion of queer ordinariness). My instinct instead is to press the myth. To see what happens if we take seriously an insistence on textures and materials that glitter, sheen, fluoresce—that are, more broadly, iridescent—as relevant codes of queerness. To renegotiate how these qualities are thought of in relation to queerness. To say in a tone that suggests at once a statement and a question, there’s something queer about iridescence.
Adrienne Crossman. Photo courtesy of Alexander Rondeau
Iridescence. Noun.
1. The collective glint off every mirrored facet of a disco ball, itself the globe of an alternate, more glamorous planet
Iridescence has an ornamental feeling, twice over. It emanates from objects and coats nearby surfaces. Animated by the aesthetic theories of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Munoz locates in the ornamental a kind of potentiality. In theorizing that both queerness and utopianism are about dreaming the then and there, Munoz aligns the queer desire “to render the world as ornamented” with the utopian desire to image another world beyond the limits of the current one, to reach for new ways of being, forms and quantities of pleasure impermissible in the here and now. [1]
2. The blur of hues that constitutes the world as seen through the teary, anticipatory eyes of a daydreamer
Ornament, like daydreaming, enacts partial fantasies. Iridescence as relics of queer utopian dream-worlds.
3. The feeling of your bedroom once we’ve suspended the ornament under a light, walls liquified into the dreamscape of a Wong Kar-Wai sequence
Sometimes the decorative flies in the face of utility, gets in the way of its substrate-object working. And what if this is a failure that is a refusal that, in Jack Halberstam’s words, “allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior” and reorients us most forcefully towards another time, another place, another life? [2]
4. The play of colours caused by differential refraction of light waves that tends to shift as the angle of view changes
In its flash, iridescence has a particular relationship to visibility. As an expression of difference, it has been used in spectacular, often creative, and always confrontational ways in the world of queer nightlife, drag, performance art, a way for overlooked queers to demand attention. The performed fabulousness of iridescence continues to carve out space in a world that doesn’t comfortably reproduce the contours of queer lives.
From royal flycatchers to tiger beetles, shimmer is mobilized by iridescent animals to a different end as a matter of survival. Flickers and changes of colour variously facilitate camouflage, startle and distract predators, and cause confusion about a prey’s position and location. Iridescence then not only attracts the gaze but tricks and directs it, diverting just as it draws attention, its effect both visibility and a kind of opacity.
Dominic Pinney. Photo courtesy of Alexander Rondeau
All photos courtesy of Alexander Rondeau
5. A lustrous quality or effect
By turns tacky and mesmerizing, iridescence also invokes visual pleasure. But what to make of an association between queerness and visual pleasure when it can look so much like escape, sedation, complacency? If being queer is to uphold queerness’s historical commitment to the broad critique of processes that produce, recognize, and normalize identities, pleasure becomes a corrective necessary alongside the serious work of being queer. It is defiant of burnout. Here then the possibility of pleasure as respite rather than desertion, iridescence as care extended to weary queers.
It started as a joke, but iridescence has taken on real resonance for me within our friendship. This is a queer relationship in many regards, but significantly I think because it tends towards a way of life imbued with the possibility of reaching a relational system through sexual practices. [3] We’ve kept in touch even though I’ve left the city where you continue to live, largely on the strength of the vernacular we’ve developed, the quirks and codes, including ones that have cohered around this ridiculous ornament I gave you. It’s a coincidence that this object that would take on such significance, that continues to index our friendship, happens to be iridescent. Thinking again, it’s also as if the ornament both presaged and precipitated our future social relations. There were perhaps imperceptible (queer) qualities and certainly a weight of queer history that drew me to the ornament, that drove me to bring it to you. Iridescence took on, for me, new queer resonances not by chance or through some alchemy, but because of a kind of insistence, because I was already leaning into the myth that there’s something queer about iridescence.
[1] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 143.
[2] Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 3.
[3] Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” interview by R. de Ceccaty, J. Danet, and J. Le Bitoux, Gai Pied, April 1981.
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GHY Cheung is a writer and artist currently splitting his time between Katarokwi/Kingston and Hong Kong. His work considers the possibilities of using built environment and public spaces against or aprt from their design, queer space and spatial practices, and the imaginary confluence of personal family and queer histories as a reparative measure. In his inquiries, he centres queer kinships as method, archive, and sustenance.
Jenn E Norton: Slipstream at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery
June 26 – September 22, 2019
September 9, 2019 by Danica Evering
Jenn E Norton, Slipstream (video still), 2018. 6-channel video installation, 10:40 min. Courtesy of the artist. © Jenn E Norton.
This text is a response to Jenn E Norton’s exhibition, Slipstream (2018). The exhibition consists of an immersive installation under the same name. A multi-channel video of a dancer wearing a silk robe stretches across six large mirrored video screens, arranged in a ring in the dark gallery space. Bringing together Art Nouveau aesthetics, augmented reality, and 19th-century technologies, Norton considers Loïe Fuller’s (1862 – 1928) often-imitated serpentine dance and mirror room apparatus. A dancer, inventor, chemist, and designer, Fuller is recognized as an innovative figure of both modern dance and projection technology. Jenn E Norton is a Guelph-based artist whose work in interdisciplinary media (video, installation, sound, and kinetic sculpture) often explores technology and design histories, visualizing invisible forces and uncanny imaginaries.
Curated by Linda Jansma and Crystal Mowry, the show is touring through six art spaces in off-centre cities. It is currently at the midpoint, having travelled from exhibitions at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa and Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery in Halifax. It will continue on to the Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery in Sarnia (October 4-January 5, 2020), Kelowna Art Gallery in Kelowna (Spring 2020), and Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina (Fall 2020). This reflection comes out of a conversation with Norton (cross-legged on the floor) within the installation in the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, which runs from June 26 to September 22, 2019.
I. The Circle
Slipstream: a current of air or water driven backwards by a spinning propeller. She has placed six large screens in a ring in a dark room. A dancer in a fluttering silk robe moves around us from screen to screen tossing her arms up and down like great wings. An immense sound circles, a rhythmic chopping. In sprays of white silk underlit by technicolour light, you read shifting forms: flower, cloud, bird, flame, butterfly, wave, snake. Jenn E Norton’s travelling exhibition spirals into the past, returning to dancer, chemist, stage designer, and inventor Loïe Fuller—or perhaps pulling her into the present, or both. Norton explores Fuller’s serpentine dance. Part skirt dance, costume, and early experimental projection surface, it was central to Fuller’s popular stage performance at the Folies Bergère in the late 1800s. I am reminded of Janet Cardiff revisiting Tallis’ 40-part motet. A circle is a container, to be inside it feels holy. The video rises and falls; it has the narrative crescendo of any good performance. Yet the beginning bleeds into the end. Being born is a little like dying. Can a loop have a beginning?
Jenn E Norton, Slipstream (installation detail), 2018. 6-channel video installation, 10:40 min. Courtesy of the artist and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Photo: Tyler Young © Jenn E Norton
II. The Gap
Before I talk about the screens first I need to tell you about the spaces between them. My eyes follow dancer Katie Ewald’s video presence as she crosses the screen, and then there is space, a moment in time when “she” exists in the gap. I can’t see her, she has disappeared from the screen. But she is there, running for a few heartbeats (with the eccentric small-stepped gait Fuller was famous for) through the space between. As we sit cross-legged on the floor, Norton tells me about Zeno’s paradox. Zeno imagined an arrow in flight. In each given instant we look at it, it is occupying a space at rest, motionless. Time is entirely composed of instants. As the arrow flies from the archer’s crooked fingers to thud taught at the target’s trembling heart, it flickers in the air through dozens of instants: points of stillness that we understand to be motion as we draw a line in the gaps between. Video itself is a set of still images that we read as motion in the aggregate. A gap bridged by a cognitive leap.
III. The Mirror
No one true. The screens are slick, shiny as a mirror and showing myself back to me as much as they display the video. Surely she has placed six large reflective screens in a ring intending this slippage between my physical standing form and the life-sized dancer. The screens’ placement and surfaces are the second of Fuller’s inventions Norton has drawn into this space: a mirror room patented in 1893. This ring of mirrors (aligned just so) allowed Fuller to dissolve into herself, hundreds of identical women moving in unison. Those who saw her dance in the moment were awe-struck, wondering which was the real person and which the reflection. [1] Flickering between actual and image, suspending disbelief. Unlike Fuller’s mirrors lining up perfectly to create the illusion of an infinitely unfolding mass ornament, [2] these mirrors are slightly oblique. They reflect imprecisely, my reflection ends after three repetitions. There is something humble about this result—a spectacular optical environment (thinking of other mirrored rooms) does not eclipse the experience. These mirrored angles are more oblique, complicating the reading and pulling in those between them.
Jenn E Norton, Slipstream (installation detail), 2018. 6-channel video installation, 10:40 min. Courtesy of the artist and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Photo: Tyler Young © Jenn E Norton
Jenn E Norton, Slipstream (installation detail), 2018. 6-channel video installation, 10:40 min. Courtesy of the artist and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Photo: Tyler Young © Jenn E Norton
IV. The Invisible
I can’t see the air but Norton and Fuller remind me it’s there. Each sweep of the Serpentine Dance’s giant wing shows its force, guttering and stirring up currents. In sprays of white silk I read other invisible forces which share our space: light, heat, electricity, sound, data, radio waves. A slipstream, a current of air propelled by the dancer’s whirling arms underneath backwards in time. I remember that our bodies are not where our selves end. We extend outwards with each movement, each sound we make pushing molecules in the air. Tiny impacts and gaps, impacts and gaps until it reaches a listener. Covert instants strung together in a long trajectory. Fuller’s invention makes visible the invisible, something Norton is similarly interested in. La fée d’electricité, an electric spirit. I can’t perceive the air’s power, until I push against it.
V. The Grasp
My eyes follow the dancer’s sweeping presence as she crosses the screen, and then one sweep turns into a brushstroke. A thick metallic 3D trace lingers, holding the gesture (though nothing can truly linger in video, and so in a few moments it disappears). It feels in the same vein as experiencing something out of the ordinary in public. Did you see that? These are gleaming tendrils, referencing Art Nouveau’s metals and curves of those who would have been Fuller’s architectural contemporaries. Within the video itself they are very sparing, traces that hint at the many loops and curls visible in an earlier augmented reality facet of the installation that the low light of the exhibition space made technically unattainable. The gesture is fleeting and this trace makes it sculptural, gives it weight and a shape. Like Zeno’s arrow, the 3D trace holds the instant against the fluid passing of time. A moment held then fading.
Jenn E Norton, Slipstream (video still), 2018. 6-channel video installation, 10:40 min. Courtesy of the artist. © Jenn E Norton.
Jenn E Norton, Slipstream (video still), 2018. 6-channel video installation, 10:40 min. Courtesy of the artist. © Jenn E Norton.
VI. The Matter
Can a loop have an end? Carefully, admiringly, Norton both pulls Fuller into the present and returns to the other’s past. It is an earnest, tender connection across time. Genes, words, seeds, inventions. There are many ways to reach the future. Each is unstable. Each portal can be temporary, unexpected, inconsequential, significant, dormant. Fuller was an innovator (mirror room patented), the great-great-grandparent of a field, though for a large part she dissolved into herself. Her arrow has appeared in instants, lit up by scholars, writers, artists, and admirers in the century that followed. Norton is conceptual kinfolk with theoretical physicist Karen Barad, who writes about matter(ing) across time. Barad writes, “remembering is not a replay of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual.” [3] Through this multifaceted act of remembering, Slipstream enlivens an active relationship that goes beyond cause and effect. Something more interactive, circular, and relational, it proposes connections across time. A charge. Between solid things—flesh, silk, atoms—and the spaces between them—idea, resistance, imaginative leap. An arrow flickering through time but never reaching a target. An electric spirit, crackling through the gap between cloud and ground.
[1] Rhonda K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 45-46.
[2] Sigfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag 1963; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
[3] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), ix.
Danica Evering was born in Cobourg and lives in Hamilton, ON. Through writing, organizing, sound composition, and curation, she works through difficulty and belonging, reaching out intentionally, and complicating narratives. Her SSHRC-supported MA in Media Studies from Concordia questions power dynamics and insider/outsider relationships in social practice through interviews with artists and creative analysis of her own field work. Evering’s semi-fictional writing has taken the form of audiosculptural biographies, soundwalks, and an experimental play. Her analysis has appeared in No More Potlucks, Lemon Hound, Public, and Kapsula, and other publications. She was a founding member of the editorial collective of Publication Studio Guelph, a sibling studio of an international publishing network that attends to the social lives of books, and participated in the creation and development of the Benčić Youth Council, a radical arts education program for youth in Rijeka.
Cold Waters Symposium & Media Arts Festival
Review, August 15, 2019 by Imogen Clendinning
In mid-June I was graciously invited to North Bay, Ontario to attend this year’s Media Arts Network Ontario (MANO) conference, the Cold Waters Symposium & Media Arts Festival. I was contacted a month earlier and invited to participate in the Remote Studios program, a kind of free form residency, artist camp. This two day experiment allowed emerging and mid-career makers and artists from the Northern Ontario region and beyond to meet, collaborate and share their ideas. As part of the residency, artists were given access to a monastery turned arts institution— affiliated with Nipissing University. At the end of the two days, attendees of the media conference were invited to an Open Studio event where the participating residents had the opportunity to share our practices and conceptual framing.
Photo courtesy of Vanessa Tignanelli
On the first day of Cold Waters I met thirty artists from North Bay, Thunder Bay, Sault St. Marie, Souix Lookout and a number of other locations. We shared our backgrounds with one another, our conceptual interests, and discussed the nuances of creating safe space (this is no small feet). This conversation embodied part of my more general experience at Cold Waters 2019: the conference encouraged difficult and necessary dialogue to develop between artists and administrators from across Canada, yet these conversations were often limited by allotting only an hour or two for discussion. This kind of tight scheduling created a tension of feeling; somewhere between optimism and frustration. The fact that these complex issues were being addressed frankly was motivating. Just as I would find myself enriched by one discussion or thought, the hour would end and everything was reset. This often hindered deeper discussion of complex issues. Through powerful group dynamics and well formed panels MANO was able to bring to the forefront several sociopolitical issues, but there was less time dedicated to brainstorming nuanced solutions or possibilities. This critique is not strictly relative to the Cold Water Symposium, I often feel that the strict timelines imposed by the structure of conferences can potentially inhibit thorough discussion.
Over the next two days, I would fruitlessly scour the old monastery for technology or supplies. The overachiever that I am, I was compelled to use this as an opportunity to make something new, something that could in some way respond to this experience and place. I filmed a short video, messed around with an old episode of Star Trek on tape and attempted to make something clever with an Anne Rice audiobook on cassette. Needless to say, I wasn’t able to marry Anne Rice to Star Trek. My error was in attempting to respond to the Remote Studio as a short-term residency, rather than an opportunity to develop a community of emerging makers through this experience. On the final day, thirty artists gathered over two floors. Some gave short artist talks (notably artists Jeremy Saya and Tyler Levesque), some screened short films (including Cole Forest Stevens, who is currently beginning a project sponsored by ImagiNative). Performance artist Tejhler Leadbeater, video/performance artist Katie Huckson and myself set up in the basement and offered more casual drop-in experiences with our arts practices.
During the Remote Studio program I was fortunate to connect with Taylor Jolin, an Ojibwe artist from Baawaating (Sault St. Marie). Jolin is a multidisciplinary artist whose work often explores themes of non-verbal communication, banality and paranoia. Jolin is currently working with The Indigenous Women’s Anti-Violence Taskforce, an Indigenous-led group dedicated to restoring and protecting the honour and value of Indigenous women, 2SLGBTQQIA+ and gender diverse people in Baawaating. I contacted her after Cold Waters had ended. I wanted to speak with another emerging artist about their experience at the Remote Studio, and learn more about their practice.
Jolin had opted to give an artist talk on the final day of the Remote Studio, telling me that as casual as the short residency was, it was the most publicly she had ever spoken about her work. Certainly, this section of the conference allowed artists of different ages, backgrounds and practices to occupy time and space at the Cold Waters Symposium. This led to a feeling of overarching support at the conference; as a young maker I felt that my art was relevant and my labour was respected. Jolin similarly expressed that she was anticipating that the event could help legitimize her practice. The ability to present her work during the conference led to a fruitful peer critique, and the opportunity to network. Jolin says that forming these connections can be so vital to one’s art practice, especially for those who live in smaller Northern communities.
Photo courtesy of Taylor Jolin
One of the more fruitful aspects of the Remote Studio program was the ability to learn about each other’s art making. I was particularly interested in Jolin’s Remote Viewing series. A collection of still images captured by Jolin of different snapshots taken from online surveillance cameras documenting natural environments; what looked to me like a kind of Big Brother tourism. In speaking about the project Jolin said, “Remote Viewing is so nebulous to me right now, which feels appropriate because that's also how I perceive the nature of the surveillance cameras. New ones pop up and disappear every day, the placement of some seemingly arbitrary, but I can't dedicate enough time to track the behaviour to know for sure.” The mysterious nature of these floating cameras is sometimes interrupted by architectural and industrial landmarks like wind turbines, which embody human presence. She states further that, “As an Indigenous person who wasn't raised with traditional land-based teachings I've struggled with my relationship to land and place. I don’t feel connected to the ‘yours to discover’ camping and nationalism narrative, or the land is medicine spirituality.” Her investigation of disparate places speaks to a disassociation with more familiar natural landscape. To Jolin, it is possible that she feels more connected to disparate places than to home. These different relationships with place are vital. One of the more nuanced elements of the symposium was the recognition that artists in the North do not relate to the land in the same kinds of ways, nor do we have idyllic relationships with it.
Near the end of the conference I attended a screening of short films, all created by artists and filmmakers from the Northern Ontario region. I was particularly struck by the wit and honesty at play in Amanda Lindenbach’s video-work Oui, je suis une pute. I contacted her after the weekend had ended to speak about her experience at the Remote Studio program— and to learn more about her film. Lindenbach is a “queer, fat, Mad, (dis)abled, spooning, francophone, sex worker, porn maker and interdisciplinary artist. She is a student of fine arts, sociology and electronics; committed to pleasure activism, neuro-inclusivity, slut celebration and the expansion of video art” (Lindenbach). Similar to myself and Jolin, Lindenbach emphasized the prevalence of this being a unique opportunity to formally present her work to a group of peers of young artists and curators. She says, “So much of my energy is focused on creating, producing, exporting and I rarely take the time to hold and care for the work.”
Photo courtesy of Amanda Lindenbach
In Oui, je suis une pute, Lindenbach uses her form, dramatic lighting and spoken word (spoken French and English subtitle), to recount her experience as a pornography artist and sex worker. The video was born from Lindenbach’s response to a particular critique that referenced her work as a pornmaker and sex worker, rather than the art being discussed. I wanted to know more about the different advantages of using digital media to tell stories and share lived experience. Lindenbach responded by saying that “digital media for storytelling provides a constellation. I enjoy the effectiveness of telling digital stories with image, audio, text and all of the interconnected narratives - conscious and subconscious - that appear within the mix.” The effectiveness of intermedia practice to communicate cerebral function and human experience was used by several artists at the Cold Waters Symposium, including Lindenbach.
I also was interested in the presence of translation in the video. Why include the French language with English subtitles in the film? Lindenbach explained that the video is in French because it is her first language. The process for this piece began with bilingual video journaling in both French and English. “I decided to share the French parts because I first learned sex-negativism and slut-shaming in that language.” Lindenbach’s video piece was one of the only representations of French language at the symposium, and it used language as a marker of identity. Lindenbach’s video used individual history as a mechanism for storytelling, effectively intertwined with stylistic effects, dramatic lighting and the performative.
The Remote Studios program allowed me the opportunity to meet these artists, among many others, learn about their processes and ask questions. The richest aspect of this event was the space and time to meet other young folks who continue to make relatable, challenging and critical work, and to meet arts administrators who are dedicated to collaboration. It’s electric to take a break from a failing art experiment, to then stumble into an invaluable conversation about funding a media arts project, or to enter a discussion investigating the importance of decolonizing the artist-run centre. Every lunch break was a mind warp.
At Cold Waters the respect for diverse opinions, culture and lived experience was palpable. This recognition and openness was part of what allowed for these innovative conversations to take place. The event exposed arts administrators and artists from urban hubs to the mind-bending work that is being produced outside of these sectors. In more rural places in Canada, it is easy to feel as though you might slip into obscurity, or as though you are tragically disconnected. MANO’s Cold Water Symposium seemingly celebrated difference, and sought to build a bridge.
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Imogen Clendinning is a media artist and arts administrator who lives in Windsor ON, and hails from North Bay ON. Clendinning identifies as a cisgender femme maker whose found-footage videos deconstruct tropes and signifiers used in cult cinema. Clendinning acts as the Programming Coordinator at Artcite Inc., an artist-run centre focused on bringing contemporary arts to the Windsor-Essex region.
Taylor Jolin
https://www.taylorjolin.ca
Amanda Lindenbach
https://almond.format.com
In Conversation with the Curator: I Can Boogie but I Need a Certain Song at Artcite Inc.
June 2 - July 13, 2019
Interview, July 13, 2019 by Luke Maddaford
Off centre’s Luke Maddaford sat down with Artcite Inc’s Executive Director Lucas Cabral to talk about the exhibition he curated, I Can Boogie but I Need a Certain Song. The exhibition, featuring video work by Amie Siegel, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Bearbara, Maya Ben David, and John Greyson, explores music as a material and language in artmaking. The exhibition ran from June 2 - July 13, 2019 at Artcite Inc. in Windsor, ON.
Photo courtesy Artcite Inc.
Off Centre: So, the exhibition. Do you want to start by giving a little bit of information about it?
Lucas Cabral: Sure. So, “I Can Boogie but I Need a Certain Song’ looks at how artists use music as a form of language that comes with predetermined understandings and connotations, that ensures an ease of understanding..
OC: Like an entry point for a viewer that maybe isn’t used to art language.
LC: Yeah, there’s a shared experience that is associated with certain songs - or a certain kind of emotional connection. The relatability is there and then you can build off of it, or diverge from it in order to show what you want to show. But at the same time, artists are people reflecting the way that people in general do this. They use music to proclaim or to demonstrate emotion to others about themselves in the world.
OC: Even to show a bit of their identity to somebody right?
LC: Yeah, absolutely
OC: That’s cool. Can you talk about the title for a bit…
LC: Yeah
OC: ...cause I really like it. And I think it’s funny and smart.
LC: So, it kind of runs parallel to the way I make a lot of my own work as an artist, borrowing from song lyrics, metaphors, figures of speech, and playing with them to point out something that is there, but not necessarily the most obvious. And as I’ve been living my warmer weather life and getting into disco and Pride, the song, “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” by Baccara has been coming up over and over again, and within it the singer says, “I can boogie but I need a certain song/I can boogie all night long” So boogie-ing is the engagement or the connection, but the lyrics also acknowledge the personal specificity required to trigger it. It was a nice way to borrow from music to name the exhibition while also pointing to what’s actually happening in a lot of the work itself.
OC: Cool, let’s talk about the work.
LC: The exhibition includes, Amie Siegel who is based out of New York, Bearbara who is a Canadian artist, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsey who is Canadian based now in Scotland, John Greyson, and Maya Ben David from Toronto.
OC: It’s a very wide range of artists, who have very different practices, so it’s really interesting to see them all in one show.
LC: I wanted to show that this is a strategy that’s used to communicate universally, not just specifically about music or the production of music, it’s getting into all kinds of interests. Maya Ben David has two works in the show and both of them are fairly different. One of them is from a series, or an ongoing body of work where she is developing cosplay characters, and that’s Air Canada Gal. In that video she takes the selloffvacations.com jingle and slows it down and when she does it becomes kind of sexy and alluring and sultry. So she is using music to communicate the identity of this character they are creating, but also at the same time pointing at this romanticization or glamourization of travel and world travel and how ooh-ah-ah travel is, right? Also looking to advertising, all the sexy images of people sprawled out on beaches and the sun beating down and all of that. Applying those tropes to this character through music paints the bigger picture of what this character is. Simultaneously reclaiming, or using it in a tongue and cheek way, to reclaim what she faces online as a woman who is involved in this culture which is a lot of sexism, which is a lot of misogyny. That piece does a lot.
OC: Yeah, that piece is one of my favourite pieces in the show. And I’ve shown it to people and talked to other people about it before and they are on either end of it. They either love it and are totally on board with it, or they have no idea what’s going on and think it’s the weirdest thing ever. So, I guess with that kind of work, it’s interesting to see it in a smaller city, and in a smaller space. I think that you are less likely to get people who are going to be on board with it in a city like Windsor. So, I’m kind of interested in how you feel the exhibition operates in a region like Windsor? Why is it important to put together an exhibition like this here?
LC: I think that’s a hard question to answer, because I’ve only been in Windsor for a few months now. I’m not really sure. But what I think is interesting and what I continue to find satisfying with people coming through the exhibition is I can hear them laugh, I can hear them chuckle, I can hear them sing along or hum along as it’s going on. And it’s a different way, it’s not necessarily what people expect when they come into an exhibition.
OC: It’s maybe a little bit less serious than they expect.
LC: it eases you into it and the humour aspect of it allows you to kind of relate to it more.
OC: It offers another entry point, and there is quite a bit of humour in this show. Like, I think almost all the pieces have an element of humour. Which I think is really nice. Bearbara’s video as well is just like, so funny, but it’s a very serious topic. And I think it’s interesting to put those kinds of things in an exhibition, where they’re not necessarily going to be taken seriously at first, but it’s going to offer somebody another way to engage with it, and maybe they will give it a little more time because they are being entertained as well.
Photo courtesy Artcite Inc.
LC: I think it’s kind of a bit of a back and forth in terms of... we are seeing artists using music to communicate aspects of their identity individually, but on a grand scale, it is everyone. So if you look at the Amie Siegel works, My Way 1 and My Way 2, each one pulls videos from YouTube. The one on the left, young kids, mostly girls singing a track from High School Musical, on the right, typically older men doing My Way by Frank Sinatra. And these things that are large emotional gestures, big public things that have been put online for everybody to see, become very very intimate in this viewing. In combining these clips together, personal becomes universal as clips of performances of the song are combined into 12 minutes of the people all singing the same thing. What is perceived as being this unique independent gesture, when they are all brought together like this, is actually not. Your conviction to sing this song and identify yourself by it is something that everybody else is doing. All these people have done the same thing. So what actually becomes more telling in these snippets, in these portraits, are the things in the background: posters, the pictures, what shirt are you wearing?
OC: One of the things that I really like about that piece is, I find that people posting covers that maybe aren’t even that good online is a really vulnerable thing to do and putting them all together creates this shared vulnerability where it’s no longer just you bearing yourself out online, it’s a thing that everybody is doing and it’s not as scary, it’s more of a cultural phenomenon.
LC: It’s in the way the monitors are facing each other, too. We are made aware that it’s something that develops with us. Like it’s not a juvenile gesture done because you don’t have the language or skills to articulate how you feel. You have this older group who are also doing the same thing and with time and money they invest in better audio equipment. You can see it, they have mics on stands. Where in My Way 1 there’s posters of High School Musical or My Little Pony, on the right in My Way 2, there’s Heineken signs, lava lamps, one guy has a gun hanging up in the background. So shared by these very different types of people with different interests is this idea of using music to effectively communicate what you feel, or what you’ve been programmed or told to feel.
Photo courtesy Artcite Inc.
OC: Definitely. Do you want to talk about Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay’s work?
LC: So Benny’s work was really interesting to me durationally. The video was produced in 2002, and it was paired with a letter that was sold to collectors and sealed. The letter was written to Madonna and explains how through making this video and her music, he was able to kind of understand more about himself and this new experience. There’s an interview online where he talks about when he had heard the song when he moved to Berlin from Canada after a heart break and was at this party and was all, “fuck, I hate Madonna, she’s evil incarnate, but this song is telling my story”
He’s talking about how these things are produced to be relatable and be connected to, but also he’s very aware of the opposition. For this show, the framed work replaces what would normally be the sealed letter. So all these years later, his connection with the work and his connection with the song has changed, shown to us through how the work has changed. The letter which was kind of a personal thing between him and Madonna, he has now taken excerpts of it and made it public. And the first couple lines, “Your lyrics became a tool through which to understand my own experiences...”
OC: I think you could apply that to the whole exhibition.
LC: Yeah, and in terms of feeling loneliness and feeling seen, performing this for 16 individual security cameras. Madonna has never seen him, she doesn’t know him but sang this song, produced this song so particularly that it applied so specifically to him that he feels seen. There’s a voyeuristic part to it. But also, within that he is one of many who has also shared that same experience, right? So it’s doing something not so dissimilar from what Amie Siegel is doing. But in a personal way, looking inward, whereas Amy Segal is looking at this outward trend, spotting what people are doing. Does that make sense?
OC: Yeah, I think it does. Should we talk about John Greyson?
LC: Yes. So this piece and the Bearbara one function a little bit different for me in the way I’ve been thinking about the exhibition. I’m interested in how these interventions into song provide space for personal inflection, personal style, right? But also how music is a storytelling tool like what we saw with Benny.
Greyson hasn’t really spun off a song, he’s taking an existing story and applying music to it, he’s reclaiming that story and using music as a way to do so. Similarly with Bearbara who makes music as Bearbara because she feels that her messages of consent are not received when she is not Bearbara. Somehow as this 8-foot tall purple bear, she is taken more seriously and her message is taken more seriously. So at the tail ends of the exhibition this strategy of interrupting the space instead of the song is different. Thinking differently about how the performer can engage a space and audience.
OC: This one, I also feel is much more embedded in a larger social issue, or maybe something more people would have heard about or be aware of than something like Amie Siegel’s work, or especially Maya’s work. I guess it feels like much more of an established commercial work than some of the other ones. And I think that’s very interesting in that it’s another way of engaging with people. When you have this kind of commercial production of something it gives it clout and people are going to take it more seriously.
LC: Absolutely. And getting more into using music and in this sense, this genre of music, comes with it’s own connotations. Right? It’s an opera, you don’t make an opera about your cosplay character.
OC: Maybe you should.
LC: Well yeah, but using storytelling and this specific mode of music storytelling to position this story is seen as this classic and deconstructing all of that classic-ness through opera and through the visual symbols as well.
Photo courtesy Artcite Inc.
Maya Ben David’s take on the John Denver song in Serenading my Apartment reflects our eagerness to connect with music. She takes this John Denver song which is comparing his love for his then-wife to a walk in the rain, a mountain covered in flowers, all these grand metaphors, and as she sits in the mall and makes this very public, grand, gesture of love and affection for her popcorn ceiling in her apartment, she grasps at straws to actually make it apply to her life. So, she’s like “I’ve never been on a mountain of flowers, but I’ve seen the sound of music and it was this and that and whatever da da-da da da-da da”. All of a sudden you are way lost in this dark hole of trying to make this sound really, really, connect with you. At the end, a clip of Denver reflecting on the song after splitting from his wife saying, “I wrote this song for Annie, but this song is for our children, it’s for this, it’s for that, it’s for this person, it’s for this” and it exposes how widely music actually has to be produced in order to make that connection. You think about the ways that music resonates through you and for what reasons.
OC: Do you have anything else to say about the show?
LC: I’m sure I will after you leave.
OC: I think it’s fantastic. It’s really nice to see all these artists in Windsor. I feel that they aren’t necessarily artists that I would expect to see here, or together in one exhibition, but I think it turned out really well, and it’s nice.
LC: Thank-you.