Tag: Extra-Rational

After a 10-year hiatus, FADO’s emerging Artists Series is back in 2025!

A much-loved staple of FADO’s programming year from 2003 to 2014, FADO’s emerging Artists series was created to provide a platform for younger artists to develop and present a performance piece in a professional context, often for the first time. As the series developed, the opportunity it provided extended to nurturing new performance curators. Each new project in the series has interpreted in its own particular way the central term of its mandate reformulating who/what should be considered ‘emerging’ in the context of performance art practice as presented through the FADO frame.

For the 2025 Emerging Artist Series, ‘emerging’ is discarded as a label that reveals age, defines time spent or as a qualification of perceived depth of experience. Instead, from February through May two curators and three series researcher residents develop performance installations, performance events and research projects that bring the notion of ‘emerging’ into relationship with community and forms of practice.

2025: On View | curated by Jordan King
2025: not knowing is the most intimate | curated by Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan
2025: EAS LABists: Christina Anna Trutiak, James Knott, Vanessa Godden
2014: 11:45 P.M. | curated by Kate Barry
2013: .sight specific. | curated by Francisco-Fernando Granados
2011: Extra-Rational | curated by Gale Allen
2009: Misinformed Informants | curated by Lisa Visser
2008: Vivência Poética | curated by Erika DeFreitas
2007: Enter-gration | curated by Nahed Mansour
2005: Open Airway | curated by Elle McLaughlin
2005: Feats, might | curated by Alissa Firth-Eagland
2004: Home Repair by One Night Only
2004: Game City | curated by Craig Leonard
2003: Gestures | curated by Tanya Mars

FADO’s Emerging Artists series was initiated in 2003 by Canada’s own performance art matriarch and educator Tanya Mars, who recognized that the best way to encourage young artists was by offering them a professional presentation opportunity. Her vision was one of mentorship, targeting an interesting mix of new and emerging artists, many of them former students, whom she commissioned to develop new works responding to a thematic context. The first event, curated by Mars, included ambient, conceptual and cabaret-style performance art gestures. This event later developed into the Emerging Artists Series. FADO’s intention with this on-going series was to nurture new work and ideas, provide direction and mentorship, and showcase the work of the city’s newest perspectives in performance art.

As the series developed, it became clear that this was an opportunity to nurture not only emerging performance artists, but also emerging curators, allowing FADO to encourage new curatorial voices in performance art, and introducing FADO to new communities of artists (and new artists to FADO). The series has continued to develop and change, later including the work of artists not just from Toronto, but regionally as well. This way, the series exposes local audiences to the range of performance work happening in the emerging performance scene across Canada.

Hong Kong / Canada
www.AmyLam.me

Amy Lam was born in Hong Kong and lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Lam was half of the high-concept comedy duo Life of a Craphead. Life of a Craphead made entertainment events in theatres, pedestrian crossings, restaurants, and regularly performed in comedy clubs. Lam has completed residencies in the United States and the Netherlands and has presented work at venues such as Gallery TPW, the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, and Double Double Land. In 2011 she was President of the Board of Directors of Art Metropole.

Canada
www.marisahoicka.com

Marisa Hoicka is a bilingual performance and multi-media artist who creates video, installations and paintings. In 2016, she will choreograph a solo as part of Singular Bodies at Toronto Dance Theatre, a collaboration of visual art bringing new ideas to contemporary dance. Hoicka’s This is Not a Test was shown on all Air Canada flights as part of the Images Festival’s Stitches in Time. Her videos have also been shown in Berlin’s Galerie Kurt Im Hirsch, San Francisco’s MoMA, Toronto’s Images Festival, and across Canada from Vancouver to St. John’s, Nfld. She mixed performance, installation and painting in her solos Nature Morte at Toronto’s 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival and Escaping Escapism at the Power Plant’s Quarter-Life Crisis. Her persona “Uncle Wink” took part in The Other Painting Competition at the Art Gallery of Ontario for Nuit Blanche. She was featured in FADO’s 2011 Emerging Artist Series, and has performed at the Feminist Art Gallery and Rhubarb Festival. She has also had a solo show of her paintings at the Department of Canadian Heritage. Hoicka has received awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and led an artist residency at Artscape Gibraltar on Toronto Island. She has a Master of Digital Media from Ryerson University and a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University. Her video work is distributed by Vtape.

© Johnny Forever, 2023. Meet me at the woodshop.

Poland / Canada
www.johnnyforever.ca

Johnny Forever Nawracaj is a nonbinary Polish-born performance and media artist currently based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Drawing on personal experiences of labour and loss, their practice builds metaphors around the precarity of social structures. Combining queer femme tropes with construction materials, their most recent work explores the relationship between the labouring body and the built environment.

Over the last fifteen years, Forever has performed and shown work internationally at festivals,  galleries, museums and community spaces. They often collaborate with their partner, sound artist Gambletron, merging FM radio transmission with digital media to conjure surreal soundscapes, installations and performances. Forever’s work emerges from a dedication to research practice. They hold an MA in art history from Concordia University and an MFA from USC Roski School of Art and Design.    

Canada

Iris Fraser-Gudrunas is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker. As a DJ and party-thrower she haunts art openings and artist run venues such as Double Double Land as well as events like AGO first thursdays and Electric Eclectics. She’s also known to take a simple gig and transform it into performance by employing a group of improvising male back-up dancers, outfits commissioned by artists along with a slew of installations and environs to create the right mood. That mood is sensual and optimistic and very committed to dancing.

Lisa Visser, 2009. Photo Henry Chan.

Canada

August 31, 1983 – August 11, 2013

www.lisavisser.ca

Lisa Visser was a visual artist and curator based in Toronto, Canada. Visser’s work focused on sculpture, performance, textiles and printmaking. She held a Master’s of Art, Media and Design from OCAD University, and a BFA from Queens University.

Canada
www.amyjenine.com

Amy Jenine Ling Wong is a video and performance artist based in Toronto, Canada. Wong’s work investigates how intimacy is translated through internet meme and online youth culture. Wong has performed and exhibited at venues such as Whippersnapper Gallery, JMB Gallery, White House, XPACE and Red Head Gallery. She is currently completing her BA in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto.

Extra-Rational is a series of performances by emerging Canadian artists that embrace the aesthetics of popular culture and seek to recuperate/utilize these “low brow” processes of production and cognition. The artists in Extra-Rational intentionally make use of aesthetic choices and methods of production that directly challenge the rubric of high-brow vs low-brow culture. These artists use the position of the trivialized, the unmentionable, the frivolous, the carnal and the other as a means to challenge the rationalization of high culture. 

ARTISTS
Amy Jenine Ling Wong
Amy Lam
Johnny Forever
Iris Fraser-Gudrunas
Lisa Visser
Marisa Hoicka

Trust My Gut: A Drag Opera Surgery, performed by Mini Maul and Uncle Wink (two characters selected from the drag oeuvre of Johnny Forever and Marisa Hoicka) dramatizes the recent merging of home and stage on social networking sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and facebook. This eight-hour durational installation references Orlan’s televised performance art surgeries of the early ’90s. Framed by a crochet replica of a YouTube window, Mini Maul performs surgery on Uncle Wink with a pair of tailor’s scissors, crochet hooks and a sewing needle. While splayed open Uncle Wink remains gloriously conscious as Mini Maul crafts his innards, a mass of yarn and fabric, into outrageous sculptural forms that rise from his belly and spill onto the floor. From time to time patient and doctor break into lip-synced duets chosen by audience members from a nearby laptop.

Insight mixes with consumerism and pop culture to create intuitive knowledge in Iris Fraser-Gudrunas’ performance Pop Tarot. Fraser-Gudrunas divines the future and answers the viewers’ life questions using a collection of strange and unfamiliar pop bottles. Viewers are invited to blindly select 4 beverage bottles/cans from a large inventory, stored in a nondescript cardboard box. The bottles represent the past, present, future and soul of the participant. Carefully analyzing the qualities of the consumer packaging, the clarity of the labels, the visual nature of the liquid and the list of ingredients, Fraser-Gudrunas provides the viewers with insight and guidance. 

NANA by Amy Jenine Ling Wong is a four-hour durational performance that references narcissism in youth culture and questions the rise of the self-made Internet celebrity. Occupying the gallery’s street level window, Wong confronts viewers caught off guard with the image of her slowly licking a honey-encrusted monitor. Under the honey, the monitor flickers with a mirror image of herself performing various actions. NANA is an extension of Wong’s online Vimeo library, in which she plays a wide variety of characters including: a young girl offering advice on the application of Avatar make-up, a sullen woman smoking a cigarette while explaining her attempts to replicate the “real community” of the ‘60s on facebook and a teenager aimlessly video blogging about piercing her nose.

Droozle Help Me, a performance that references the comedy sketch genre, makes use of humour and high concept comedy. In this performative lecture Amy Lam plays a character named Droozle who is looking for a new roommate. She uses inappropriate props and costumes in her attempt to be persuasive. As the performance unfolds Lam creates deliberate incongruence between herself as performer, the goals of her character and the audience’s reactions. Lam’s work continues the dialogue started by female comics of the ’50s who used intelligence, wit and a fair amount of acting out to comment on contemporary culture.

We Don’t Love Each Other is a reflexive performance that investigates the female abject body. Composed of a series of simple actions and objects, Lisa Visser drinks a copious amount of hard alcohol while attaching her left arm to her right with the use of a sewing needle and thread. The performance combines contrasting images of harm and repair: what appears to be harmful (sewing) is conceptually approached as repair – or reclamation – of not just a body but everything that is given and compromised in a relationship. And the repair – drinking and drowning one’s feelings in alcohol – is actually harmful. The piece is implicitly humorous; the artist is drunk, awkward and bloody, while the audience is compelled to watch seriously and earnestly while the hour-long performance unfolds.

PROGRAM
March 8 @ 1:00pm–5:00pm
Trust My Gut: A Drag Opera Surgery by Johnny Forever & Marisa Hoicka

March 12 @ 1:00pm–5:00pm
Pop Tarot by Iris Fraser-Gudrunas

March 12 @ 7:00pm
Trust My Gut: A Drag Opera Surgery by Johnny Forever & Marisa Hoicka
NANA by Amy Jenine Ling Wong
Droozle Help Me by Amy Lam
Pop Tarot by Iris Fraser-Gudrunas
We Don’t Love Each Other by Lisa Visser