FADO continues its 12-month duration performance art series, TIME TIME TIME, with Toronto’s own Tanya Mars in a new performance entitled HOT.

Tanya Mars is well-known for performance works in which she creates spectacular images that function as living pictures. HOT is a sensitive look at middle age and the persistent desire for intimacy. In an elegant, slowly evolving tableau, Mars considers the search for unconditional love.

As always, humour, absurdity, and a dense overlay of visual metaphors are the essential building blocks of Mars’ complex vision. Forsaking the ‘hot’ sexuality of youth for the ‘hot’ flashes of menopause, Mars offers us the image of a bearded lady, setting thousands of household mousetraps with red cinnamon candy hearts as a video projection of a woman cuddling with a dog suggests where true companionship and uncomplicated bonding might be found. Irony, poignancy and even pragmatism play a role in this meditation on the lessons time has to offer aging baby boomers at the end of the millennium.

Mars notes: “It is ironic that just when a woman reaches intellectual maturity and is in her prime, her level of desirability as a mate plummets. HOT is not about sexuality, but about comfort, companionship and loyalty.”

© Tanya Mars, HOT, TIME TIME TIME series, 2009. Photo Paul Couillard.