Art Exhibition & Reception @ FAG Feminist Art Gallery
With Emelie Chhangur, Jennifer Chan, and Jesika Joy
Co-sponsored by the Graduate Program in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies
Tuesday, June 6, 2017
5pm-7pm
25 Seaforth Ave
Please note: the gallery is wheelchair accessible but the washroom is not.
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These three artists challenge assumptions about sexuality and disrupt typical representations of race and power. Through tactics of performance for the camera the works present visual questions about the gaze, decorum and the politics of perversion.
Emelie Chhangur, Quenched, 2003, 6 minutes
Description: We know not what we resist until the limits are exceeded. In a breathless performance work, the artist places redemption squarely on the side of perversion and the line to be crossed. “Laisser mille transgressions fleurir.”
Emelie Chhangur is an artist and award winning curator and writer based in Toronto, where she works as the Assistant Director/Curator of the AGYU. Over the past decade, she has developed an experimental curatorial practice in collaboration with artists. Recent projects include The Awakening a three-year multi-faceted participatory performance with Panamanian artist Humberto Vélez, no.it is opposition., an exhibition and two-year collaboration with Brazilian artist-curator Carla Zaccagnini, Imaginary Homelands, a three-year residency project and exhibition featuring the work of nine young Colombian artists, and the Centre for Incidental Activisms (CIA), a radical proposition of gallery “in-reach,” where participatory, activist, and research-based practices were emphasized over conventional methods of exhibition display. Her recent collaboration with Trinidadian artist Marlon Griffith is a large-scale public street procession programmed in conjunction with the Para Pan Am Games.
Chhangur is interested in how exhibitions and texts perform to create unique interpretative experiences as well as in finding ways to enact activisms from within an institutional framework. As an Assistant Director of a public, university-affiliated, contemporary art gallery, Chhangur believes that the contemporary art gallery must serve a social as well as aesthetic function. In fact, other than, as an artist making single channel videos and installations, which are shown nationally and internationally, questioning the nature and function of a contemporary art gallery is her primary art project at the moment.
Jesika Joy Subject to Subject 2006 4:24 minutes
Description: In Subject to Subject Joy uses her body as both palette and tool; the work is confrontational and manipulative, controlling what the viewer can and can’t see, despite her objectification through their gaze. Joy insists that it is impossible to separate the sexual from the political.
Bio: Jesika Joy is a Toronto based artist working in video and performance. Through exaggerating normalized social practice and incorporating abject imagery, she creates radical feminist interventions cloaked in a postmodern aesthetic.
Jennifer Chan Young Money, 2012, 7 minutes
Description: In her work Chan explores Internet fetish communities. Her focus is on the tension between mediated sexual fantasies and corporeal desires. She contains her findings in creative gestures, through which she strives for a better understanding of complex motivations and power structures. Young Money is about the interconnected nature of various capitals: cultural, social and financial.
With hypercontemporary remix video, this video indulges in the valorization of youth and newness in both art and the internet. Some like it hot, some like it sloshy. Young Money is a remix video that divulges Chan’s critical fantasies of white masculinity in relation to the internet. In these videos Chan draws continuances between micro-world of non-sexual online fetishes and young aspirations for sex(iness) and likeability.
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