Tag: Gestures

© Tanya Mars, CRONE, 2017. Photo by Henry Chan.

USA / Canada
www.tanyamars.com

Tanya Mars is a feminist performance artist who has been involved in the Canadian art scene since 1973. She was a founding member and director of Powerhouse Gallery (La Centrale) in Montreal (the first women’s art gallery in Canada), editor of Parallelogramme magazine for 13 years, and very active in ANNPAC (the Association of National Non-Profit Artist-run Centres) for 15 years. She has also been an active member of other arts organizations since the early 70’s. Her work is often characterized as visually rich layers of spectacular, satirical feminist imagery. She has performed widely across Canada, and internationally: Svalbard, Chile, Mexico City, Sweden, Denmark, France, China, Finland and the US.

She is co-editor with Johanna Householder of Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance art by Canadian women (2004), and More Caught in the Act (2016), both published by YYZ books and partners. She was a member of the 7a*11d (1998-2022) that produces a bi-annual International Festival of Performance Art in Toronto.

In 2004, Mars was named Artist of the Year for the Untitled Arts Awards in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2008 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and was an International Artist in Residence at La Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2008. In addition, a book on her work published by FADO and edited by Paul Couillard, Ironic to Iconic: The Performance Works of Tanya Mars, was launched in 2008.

In the 70s and 80s Mars’ work focused on creating spectacular feminist imagery that placed women at the centre of the narrative.  Since the mid-90s her performances have included endurance, durational and site-specific strategies. Her work is political, satirical and humorous. She has worked both independently and collaboratively to create both large-scale as well as intimate performances. Recent work reflects on our complicity in the world of excess and consumption in the face of economic collapse, as well as the impact of aging on the female body.

She recently retired from teaching at the University of Toronto Scarborough after 25 years and currently lives off-grid in Middle Ohio, N.S. She has one daughter and 3 grandsons. She is looking forward to whatever comes next, post-retirement, post-covid-19.

FADO is proud to present Gestures, an evening of performance works by five emerging artists and recent art school graduates. Curated by Tanya Mars, the evening focuses on concepts of gesture: gesture as movement, gesture as courtesy, gesture as mark. Reflecting a range of strategies and approaches to performance, Gestures introduces a fresh, vibrant, and diverse group of local and regional performance artists to Toronto audiences.

ARTISTS
Adrian Kahgee
Christine Peplinksi
Erika DeFreitas
Julian Fiala
Keith Fernandes

FADO’s on-going Emerging Artists series grew out of this first event, initiated by performance artist and educator Tanya Mars. One event expanded into an on-going series in order to provide a professional platform for emerging artists and curators from Toronto and beyond. Working within a curatorial framework, the series is intended to nurture new work and ideas, as well as provide direction and mentorship. The series is also a vehicle to showcase the work of the community’s newest perspectives in performance art.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Erika DeFreitas’ multidisciplinary practice includes performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, drawing and writing. Placing emphasis on gesture, process, the body, documentation and paranormal phenomena, DeFreitas mines concepts of loss, post-memory, legacy and object-hood. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Keith Fernandes is a fifth year arts management student at the University of Toronto majoring in Drama. His recent credits include an original adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and an original clown performance entitled The Golden Ball, which was awarded Best Production at the University of Toronto Drama Festival.

Julian Fiala is a feminist artist/activist working predominantly in performance and installation. Over the last two years, Julie has worked with marginally housed communities, women, and Queen’s University janitors to explore themes such as sex and class privilege, as well as notions of public/private space Recent credits include speaking at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre’s Active Practices Symposium and co-curating ARTHappens2, an evening of performances, happenings and events at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre. Julie currently resides in Kingston, where she has taken a job as Modern Fuel’s Program Director.

Adrian Kahgee is an Anishnaabekwe originally from Saugeen First Nation. She currently resides and teaches in Toronto. As an emerging video and performance artist, Adrian has worked on a number of collaborative projects with other First Nation artists, including Four Red Women Nude a radio/ performance art production aired on CBC radio. She has also been involved with the emerging video artist collective 640 480. Her most recent collaborative work, a documentary titled The Original Summit, Journey to the Sacred Uprising premiered at the 2002 imagineNATIVE Media Arts Festival in Toronto.

Christine Peplinski is a recent graduate of the Fine Arts program at the University of Toronto. She believes that art is better than the truth.

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.

Canada
www.erikadefreitas.com

Erika DeFreitas’s multidisciplinary practice includes performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, drawing and writing. Placing emphasis on gesture, process, the body, documentation and paranormal phenomena, DeFreitas mines concepts of loss, post-memory, legacy and objecthood. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including: Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery; Gallery TPW, Toronto; Project Row Houses and the Museum of African American Culture, Houston; Fort Worth Contemporary Arts; and Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita. She is a recipient of the 2016 Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Finalist Artist Prize, the 2016 John Hartman Award, and was longlisted for the 2017 Sobey Art Award.