Tag: Extra-Rational

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.

Poland / Canada
www.johnnyforever.ca

Johnny Forever Nawracaj is a non-binary Polish-­born writer, performer and multidisciplinary artist currently based in Montreal. Their work weaves surrealist narrative through soft sculpture, video, gesture and drag-inflected performance to explore love, loss, and labour with a particular investment in these themes as a part of radical queer and trans cultural production. 
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Forever has shown video work at groups shows at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, in San the National Queers Arts Festival in San Francisco, The Coming Societee in Hong Kong, and the Seoul 12th International New Media Festival in the curated series Queers Can’t Wait (2012). In 2016, they held a residency at Struts & Faucet Media Arts Centre in Sackville New Brunswick with collaborator Gambletron. They have performed at 10th Encuentro presented by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in Santiago, Chile; La Real Periferica in Valparaiso, Chile; the Miami Performance International Festival; HTMelles Feminist Festival of Media Arts and Digital Culture in Montréal; the Rhubarb Festival in Toronto; as well as other festivals, galleries, and DIY spaces internationally. They with a Master of Fine Arts degree from USC Roski School of Art and Design as an International Artist Fellow.   

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

Initiated in 2003 by Tanya Mars, FADO’s Emerging Artists series was created to provide a professional platform for emerging artists to develop and present a performance piece, working within a curatorial framework. FADO’s intention with this 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.

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 FADO’s on-going Emerging Artists series which was designed to highlighting the work of Toronto-based emerging performance artists.

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.

The Emerging Artists series was a staple of FADO’s programming year from 2003 to 2014, and was always one of the most popular events in FADO’s performance art calendar.

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

In 2024 and 2025, the Emerging Artist series returns! Stay tuned for details.