Brenda Goldstein

Artist

Brenda Goldstein

Canada

Brenda Goldstein graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2001 and has received several awards, including the William F. White Prize for excellence in film production, the Charles Street Video Prize, both in 2001, and the Ontario Arts Council Emerging Artist Award for Film and Video in 2005.

Her work has been exhibited in galleries and at festival across Canad and the U.S. including the 2008 World Wide Short Festival (Toronto); Herland Film Festival (Calgary, 2006); Planet in Focus Festival (Toronto, 2005); Images Festival (Toronto, 2005); and at the PDX Film Festival (Portland, Oregon, 2004). In 2006, her work was included in Atchung, Baby, a program of performance videos curated by artists Johanna Householder and Nina Czegledy. The program traveled to venues in Slovakia, Hungary and Romania.

In spring 2006, she curated The Centre Cannot Hold at the Toronto Free Gallery (April – June 2006) and in 2007 she joined the gallery’s Board of Directors. She currently coordinates a locative media research project at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and is a member of the Toronto curatorial collective, Pleasure Dome.

Performance

Pleasure Addicts by Brenda Goldstein

Pleasure Addicts is a performance landscape, an all woman-carnival, a transmission from another media universe, where an evening of channel flipping is compressed into a single space. Pleasure Addicts explores the love-hate, inherently unstable push-pull nature of mass media conceptions of femininity drawn from celebrity culture, reality television, lifestyle programming, and run of the mill prime-time TV.

PERFORMED BY
Aubrey Reeves
Brenda Goldstein
claude wittmann
Cathy Gordon
Yvonne Bambrick
Heather KeungJennifer Norton
Leila Gajusingh
Jesika Joy
lo bil
Maria Legault
Victoria Moufawad

The Pleasure Addicts performance was conceived by Brenda Goldstein after a year-long collaboration with Jesika Joy, Leila Gajusingh, Heather Keung, Jenn Norton, Aubrey Reeves and claude wittmann. Watch for our upcoming video Piece of Me.

Set and props: David Frankovich, Stephanie Chris
Video: Cabot McNenly
Make-up: Shawna Renee
Photos: Henry Chan

Pleasure Addicts is indebted to the support and assistance of FADO, Heather Haynes and the Toronto Free Gallery, and the Ontario Arts Council.

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