Pleasure Dome presents
Immanent Space; New Toronto Works 2012
Programmed by Alexis Mitchell, Sharlene Bamboat & Zoe Heyn-Jones
Saturday, March 31, 8pm @ Tallulah’s Cabaret, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander St. $8/ 5 Members + Students
It is an auspicious time for moving images in our city. 2012 has had an air of the monumental thus far; anniversarial milestones for the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto and the Images Festival, for instance, contribute to a heightened sense that it is a propitious moment for image-making communities here in Toronto.
It is with this sentiment, that we have considered the film and video work generated by our local community. Inherent in these ‘New Toronto Works’ are notions of positionality, temporality and a meditation on the spatial properties of the corporeal and the community. Invoking French philosopher Giles Deleuze, we can accept that durational aesthetics are at play in all film and video work. However, the pieces that we highlight here work together to foreground some particularly fascinating and salient spatial and temporal concerns, forcing us to re-think our engagement with the space around us as we move towards the hype created by apocalyptic uncertainty.
Programme:
La Revue, Coral Aiken & Eve Majzels, 2010, 4:44
Choke, Michelle Latimer & Terril Calder, 2010, 5:31
BA Chamber, Cressida Kocienski, 2010, 6:20
Memory Worked by Mirrors, Stephen Broomer, 2011, 3:00
Jameson Avenue, Mary Porter, 2011, 3:06
Ecoleidoscope, Britt Wray, 2011, 2:14
Manholes (Brian), Wrik Mead, 2011, 3:47
Birth of Alseides, Erin Buelow, 2011, 7:00
Cooling Reactors, soJin Chun & Alexandra Gelis, 2010, 2:00
Left To Eat Cake, Ananya Ohri, 2011, 4:17
to be veiled, Faye Mullen, 2011, 5:00
Plane of Immanence, Jordan Tannahill & Nina Arsenault, 2011, 14:00
Little Fires, Gustavo Cerquera Benjumea, 2011, 1:24
[Untitled], Mark Kasumovic, 2010, 4:00
Lying in Wait, Ambereen Siddiqui, 2011, 3:51
Sponsored by Buddies In Bad Times Theatre, CFMDC & Vtape
www.pdome.org
PLANE OF IMMANENCE TRAILER:
PLANE OF IMMANENCE ARTIST STATEMENT:
Plane of Immanence began as a guerilla intervention at the (re)construction site of Maple Leaf Gardens, which artists Jordan Tannahill and Nina Arsenault found in a gutted, liminal state of transition. In this video, this iconic space rich with national cultural significance – a historic arena of masculinity – is realized into a new potentiality as a metaphysical labyrinth and virtual womb. The queering presence of the body of Arsenault, both naked and constructed, climbing through a jungle of rebar, front-end loaders, and caution tape, reveals to us a multilayered allegory for the trans body, the Deluezian notion of the ‘body without organs’, and permutations of the divine within the Self and the material world.
Nina Arsenault / Jordan Tannahill
14 mins / Canada, 2011
Jordan Tannahill bio:
Jordan Tannahill is a film and theatre director living in Toronto. His works of multimedia performance have been developed and presented on some of Canada’s most prominent stages including Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Canadian Stage, Great Canadian Theatre Company, and the Harbourfront Centre. He is the founder and artistic director of the award-winning theatre company Suburban Beast. Recent honours include the Inside Out Film Festival’s Emerging Canadian Artist Award, the Ken McDougall Award for Emerging Directors, and being named one of Canada’s Top Twenty Under Twenty.
NEW TORONTO WORKS
Curated by Sharlene Bamboat, Zoë Heyn-Jones & Alexis Mitchell
Sponsored by Buddies In Bad Times Theatre, CFMDC & Vtape
Saturday, March 31, 8pm
Tallulah’s Cabaret, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre 12 Alexander St.
Now in its 19th year, this member-curated program features cutting edge experimental film, video and installation produced in Toronto. This year the series is called Immanent Space: New Toronto Works.
Programme:
Michelle Latimer & Terril Calder, Choke, 6:00
Coral Aiken, La Revue 5:00
Stephen Broomer, Memory Worked by Mirror, 3:00
Ambereen Siddiqui, Lying in Wait, 3:00
Britt Wray, Ecoleidoscope, 2:15
Cressida Kocienski, BA Chamber, 6:00
Sojin Chun & Alexandra Gelis, Cooling Reactors, 2:00
Ananya Ohri, Left To Eat Cake, 6:00
Erin Buelow, Birth of Alseides, 7:00
Faye Mullen, to be veiled, 5:00,
Wrik Mead, Manholes – Brian, 3:47
Jordan Tannahill & Nina Arsenault, Plane of Immanence, 15:00
Gustavo Cerquera, Little Fires, 1:00
Mark Kasumovic, Untitled, 4:00
Mary Porter, Jameson Avenue, 3:15
a production photograph from Plane of Immanence, shot in the gutted construction site of Maple Leaf Gardens in 2010.
She Was Barbie: Glamour-Crack 1
(self-portrait as behind-the-scenes footage)
When I made this I was fascinated by celebrity footage I started watching on TMZ and other blog sites- uneditted paparazzi footage of celebrities. There is little narrative to these videos. Famous people, usually at least a bit fucked up, roll in and out of parties, they drive around with cameras following them, they are on red carpets, far away at an event or a bar. Everywhere is glitter, fashion, flashbulbs and the everpresent gaze of the camera. I found the videos utterly compelling for the aura of glamour, a magic spell of importance, they gave to the actresses even while they did the most banal or indecypherable things. Every nuance of the ‘celebrity performances’ I viewed became interesting to me. I laughed when I told this to my friend, Josh, who is a music video and television director, and he called those videos “quick, cheap, disposable hits of glamour-crack.”
The Daily Dish: Glamour-crack 2
(self-portrait as early morning TV appearance)
When I was asked to do this interview I agreed to do it if I could have equal shared rights to all of the raw video footage. I have been interviewed on television programs in the past who would later edit and alter the footage “to make good TV.” This editing often portrayed me in a way I didn’t feel was accurate, but was intended to make me (at the best of times) more palatable to mass audiences, more sympathetic, more understandable, etc. Sometimes, I felt that the people handling the footage revealed their own prejudices about trans issues, beauty and plastic surgery in how they manipulated the video footage (and me.) Sometimes I felt they handled the raw footage to hide their own feelings about my trans body which were apparent to me on set.
This video is my re-edit, andI radically re-editted the footage the station aired. I also added all of the titles.
Thank you to Amira for being such a great sport about it.
Drama Queen Nightclub Projection: Glamour-crack 3
(self-portrait as nightclub projection)
In June, 2009, I went down to Montreal’s to host the legendary Drama Queen party at Tribe Hyperclub. (Past hosts include Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Amanda Lepore.) I showed up a day early to shoot a video that the promoters wanted to project on the club’s giant screen above the dance floor throughout the night and on the monitors around the various bars.
I think the early idea was to get some sexy shots, runway, footage, acting like a Pussy Cat Doll, generally giving a fierce tranny effect. Typical “club tranny” stuff.
At the time I was really obsessed with David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Inland Empire, as well as Cindy Sherman’s Centerfold series. I told them I wanted to use those works as inspiration. I also wanted to do something discordant, a video that wasn’t what it was supposed to be, something that would critique what it was supposed to be.
This is what we came up with.
The video was orginally played on a loop so the director cut it again after the party .
In order to show it online I put this particular dance track to the video.
I love knowing that the first installation showing of this video was above dancefloor.
shoot / spread / stream: Glamour-crack 4
(self-portrait as fashion shoot)
David J. Romero took photos of me all through the video shoot for the Drama Queen night club projection. The idea was to create a fashion spread simultaneously. He produced so many images I liked that I wanted to turn his photography into another project so I put them on an image stream. In doing this what is created is a narrative of “fake” posed moments and “real” candid moments. Romero kept shooting whether I was ready for a close-up or not.
The above video ‘skews’ the reality of experience. Contrived and uncontrived visual moments were captured and now strung together on a timeline, but the actual shoot took about nine hours from hair and make-up to wrap. The telescoped version of time heightens the glamour of the shoot until it becomes abhorrant.
I’ve used every single the photographer took.
To see the series of photographs David Romero selected (and manipulated) for his beautiful series cut and paste the link below:
http://ninaarsenault.com/2009/08/photo-shoot-with-david-j-romero/