Sarah Todd has written an article on the Cinenova/Power Plant/AGYU/FAG All Hands on the Archive project.

You can read it on The Power Plant website – here.

Hannah and I will be in residence at the Nida Artist Colony in Lithuania for November & December to work on our queer ecology project – The Beaver Mat & The Fagot Shack.

As part of Cinenova: All Hands on the Archive, a collaboration between the Feminist Art Gallery, the AGYU, and the Powerplant, Hannah & I will be presenting Veronica 4 Rose, a 1983 documentary by Melanie Chait.

“Produced for the then newly launched Channel 4, Veronica 4 Rose is one of the key early documentaries that the channel helped to produce. The film’s broadcast in January 1983 was a milestone in the discussion of homosexuality on British TV. The film consists of interviews, conversations and discussions with young lesbians from Newcastle, Liverpool and London who talk about their lives and in particular the challenges of coming out in Britain in the late 1970s and 80s. Communication is the key subject of the film, which involves its participant in discussions about how they are represented and what they feel is important or interesting about their own experiences. Rather than a series of ‘talking heads’ the film presents the women through various forms of address to the camera and in exchanges with each other, from talking in smaller groups or with their lovers, to reading selections of each other’s testimonies and conversations about how best to present themselves (which one participant discusses as she customises her leather jacket).”

- George Clark, Cinenova: Reproductive Labor, Afterall Online

http://www.afterall.org/online/cinenova

This film was selected from the Cinenova film archive. Cinenova is a non-profit womens’ film/video distributor based in London, UK. Cinenova is a source of very specific knowledge, a network and cultural community that engages directly with feminist film and video practice, and with the question of how to make this knowledge more publicly accessible

All Hands on the Archive activates and animates the Cinenova collection here in Toronto.

Veronica 4 Rose screens at 3pm.

come earlier (1pm) and catch a film selected by filmmaker Michèle Pearson Clarke!

We’re back in Toronto, and it feels great!

Currently we’re working with Dr. Stephanie Springgay at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto on Stephanie’s SSHRCC-funded research project entitled The Pedagogical Impulse.

“The Pedagogical Impulse is a platform for research-creation concerned with contemporary art’s paradigmatic re-orientation towards the educational. The project will orient itself around a series of artist residencies that will take place across a number of educational sites (K-12 classrooms, teacher education programs, graduate programs, and community spaces) in order to examine how artists are engaging with educational concepts as spaces for the development of new critical practices, and the potential transformative engagements that occur when such art practices are located in schools…”

We have been meeting with some really exciting schools (& teachers), and are looking forward to the coming months of our residency.

Also, our dear friend Hazel Meyer is working with us on this project. Check out her inspirational aesthetics (& athletics) here.

I’m giving a brief talk this weekend at PDX Contemporary – details below….

Please join us this Saturday at 11 am for The Art of the Regift, a short talk by Helen Reed. This is the third lecture happening in conjunction with Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen’s exhibition The Classroom, which is on view this month at PDX Contemporary Art.

In The Classroom, Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen present a new body of work that deals with the politics and aesthetics of education. Through the exploration of a variety of pedagogical tools and methods they have created a selection of objects and prints. From modular Mondrian building blocks to color analyses of literary classics there is something for every kind of student. With the current inflation of people pursuing higher education, despite its mounting cost, increased privatization and decreased rigor, it seems particularly appropriate to portray the classroom transparently as a place of commerce. Knowledge is valuable, but it is more valuable still to acquire the ability to transmit that knowledge. What we learn is less important than how we learn.

Helen Reed is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. Over the past 5 years Helen’s art practice has involved working with specific invested communities. During this time she has landed the first senior citizen on the moon, contacted Marshall McLuhan by Ouija Board, and coordinated a lesbian-separatist rave in the farmlands of Ontario. Her most recent project is Twin Twin Peaks, a 3rd Season of Twin Peaks, written and acted by the show’s fans. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at The Kitchen in New York City, Power Plant Contemporary Art in Toronto, The Portland Art Museum, The Seattle Art Museum and La Centrale in Montreal. Helen Reed holds a BFA from the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, BC and an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State
University.

This is one of four lectures happening in conjunction with Anna Gray & Ryan Wilson Paulsen’s exhibition The Classroom on view at PDX Contemporary during the month of July. Each Saturday a local educator will use the objects of The Classroom to present on a variety of topics including, but not limited to, fan culture, pedagogy, language and literacy.

Saturday, July 24th: Helen Reed
Saturday, July 31st: Barry Sanders

All lectures will be at 11 am at PDX Contemporary Art.

925 NW Flanders, Portland, OR

We hope to see you there!

I am writing a paper on documentary reenactments right now, and of course, had to include Jill Godmilow’s What Farocki Taught, since it is one of my favorite pieces of reenactment cinema of all time, in it’s dry yet incredibly potent form and it’s oblique challenge to channels of distribution.

Here’s Jill:

Welcome to my new website. Home of my new blog. From my new home on Sumner Street. 

I am back in Portland after a busy nomadic summer. Twin Twin Peaks screened at the Twin Peaks Festival at the Seattle Art Museum. 

Witchrave screened at Inside Out in Toronto and Out on Screen in Vancouver.  Hannah and I attended a summer school session at Mildred’s Lane in Pennsylania, run by the inspirational J. Morgan Puett and Mark Dion.  

And then to the Yukon, for a six day river trip followed by a 2 week self-initiated residency at KIAC SOVA.

As soon as we arrived home it was time for Night at the Museum, at the Portland Art Museum. I did a dress up and face painting project for the younger attendees. More on this later.