Artist
Pam Patterson

© Pam Patterson, Cellu(h)er Resistence: The Body Without Organs?, 2008. Photo Shannon Cochrane.

Canada
www.pampatterson.ca

Pam Patterson (Ph.D., OISE, University of Toronto, Curriculum, Teaching and Learning) has, for 25 years, been active in both the art and movement communities. Her research has focused on embodiment in art practice, the “body” in art and feminist art education with publications in journals such as: Studies in Art Education, Resources for Feminist Research, Matriart, FUSE, Parachute, and presentations in conferences such as: the Feminism and Art Conference (Toronto), History of Art Education Symposium (Penn State), and Moving Bodies, Embodying Movement: Exploring the Rhetoric of the Body (State University of New York, Brockport). She has taught in movement and the arts for various institutions in Toronto and is currently on staff at the Toronto School of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario. As a performance and visual artist she has exhibited and performed across Canada and the USA.

Writing
A Response to Cellu(h)er Resistance
Leena Raudvee. Photo Miklos Legrady


Written in chalk on black staircase wall at XPACE:

she was a woman too rooted in the past, in the land, connected to the earth.
she brought the earth from her land from her home and kept it in a box in a
drawer with her most precious things. within reach. next to her bed.
Comfort. Strength. one small box enough to connect her to all the rest, her
history, her past, her home-country, her home-earth, her kodumaa. and she /
She carried it in her bucket, more and more, endless, never enough yet one
small box holding it all. and it covered her body and it fell on her face
and it soothed her breast /
Her breast. and she wouldn’t let go and she /
She kept moving the earth. Breaking new ground but grounded in the past.
over and over holding the earth and letting it go.
she was a warrior too. she /
She would /
could not forget.

Leena Raudvee. Photo Miklos Legrady

Leena Raudvee is a Toronto-based artist and curator. She has collaborated with Pam Patterson in the creation and presentation of performance and installation for over 20 years.

Performance
Cellu(h)er Resistance: The Body with/out Organs? by Pam Patterson

Co-presented with XPACE Cultural Centre
Curated by Paul Couillard

Cellu(h)er Resistance: The Body with/out Organs? is a five-day performance-as-installation process piece by Toronto artist, educator and cancer survivor, Pam Patterson. The work combines sound, drawing, action, video and collaborative writing examining the artist’s body, the body with disease and the body without organs. 

Pam Patterson writes:

After decades of dis-ease and illness, the pain of poverty, dis-ability and being reconfigured by surgery my hands now make another body for my body… there are sounds, images, becomings… it is accomplished the moment I undertake it. It isn’t the case that the body/I like(s) pain per se; rather, the body/I like(s) being a Body without Organs, and the pain is the price the body/I is/am willing to pay for that.

SCHEDULE
Opening Performance: February 27, 2008 @ 8:00pm
Performance-as-Installation: Daily from 12:00pm–6:00pm
Final Performance Action: March 2, 2008 @ 6:00pm

Performance Yellow

This fragrance opens us to the question, has the show started? It's winter, the theatre is colder than the street and the room is filled with people and all their winter smells: wet faux leather, down, too much shampoo, and beer breath. The atmosphere is a trickster. Am I late, am I early?

Top Notes

yellow mandarin, mimosa

Middle Notes

honey, chamomile, salt

Base Notes

narcissus, guaiac wood, piss, beer