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.

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 5-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. 

“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.”
~Pam Patterson


Opening Performance
February 27, 2008 @ 8:00pm

Performance-as-Installation
Open daily from 12:00pm–6:00pm

Final Performance Action
March 2, 2008 @ 6:00pm

Series
IDea

Curatorial Statement by Paul Couillard

Issues of identity are at the centre of IDea, FADO’s multi-year international performance art series. Chris Barker writes that cultural politics are about “the power to name; the power to represent common sense; the power to create ‘official versions’; and the power to represent the legitimate social world.” These powers speak to identity in a territorial, institutionalized framework, but performance practices offer the possibility of turning their presumed weaknesses—contingency, ephemerality and aterritoriality—into strengths, by offering a potentially decolonized, non-institutional forum.

The concept of identity has been at the forefront of art discourse since the 1980s. Performance artists have been particularly concerned with how our various identities are constructed, how they mark us and how they influence self-understanding. At the same time, artists have also used performance tactics to problematize and transform their identities. In recent years, the debate has shifted to examine identity issues in subtler, less didactic ways, using the territory of identity as a ground for complex and often ambivalent readings of subjectivity, hybridity and representation. IDea draws from this growing body of work.

The series considers a broad range of identity labels, including gender, skin colour, ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation, physical appearance, familial role, economic status, political affiliation and profession, to name a few of the more obvious possibilities. In blunt terms, the series will circulate around an underlying set of interrelated questions. How do we accept or resist these multiple identities? Which do we choose to embrace, and why? What identity labels are misleading, unhelpful or irrelevant, and in what ways? How do these labels intersect with one another? How do they determine the nature and quality of our lives? How do they contribute to a sense of belonging or alienation?

While these questions inform the series, they are only a contextualizing lens, not a prescription for how individual projects should or will be structured. IDea is not about representation, or the politics of difference, which is to say that the intention is not to assemble a collection that presents one of each kind. We are not encouraging strident political statements (though there is certainly room for them), but rather, featuring works that reveal something about how the creators understand and situate themselves. Along the way, we also hope to track how artists use performance tactics to circumvent prescribed attitudes and behaviours around identity.

IDea seeks to consider a range of bodily identities—physical, social, political, emotional, and spiritual. To provide further context for the series, commissioned critical that respond to each of the performances. These texts will come from an interdisciplinary variety of thinkers in the realms of philosophy, religion, politics and science.


The IDea series presented 12 performance projects between 2005–2007, and was curated by Paul Couillard.

Series Purple

An ode to FADO's history, Series Purple is composed of a collection of purple fragrance materials dating back to the Roman Empire. Dense, intense, and meandering, this fragrance tells us non-linear stories.

Top Notes

huckleberry, violet

Middle Notes

cassis, lilac, heliotrope

Base Notes

orris root, purple sage, labdanum