Johnson Ngo is a Toronto-based artist who works in performance and sculpture. Ngo’s research explores connections and disjunctions between his gaysian identity and Western queer culture. Recent exhibitions include Art Gallery of Windsor, Nuit Blanche, Spark Contemporary Art Space, Toronto Free Gallery/7a*11d, Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Art Centre, Mississauga Living Arts Centre, and Hart House. Ngo completed a two year curatorial residency at the Blackwood Gallery. Currently, Ngo works in the Public Programming & Learning department at the Art Gallery of Ontario and is a board member of C Magazine.
MONOMYTHS is conceived and curated by Shannon Cochrane and Jess Dobkin. The series is presented by FADO in the context of Progress.
MONOMYTHS invites a diverse collection of artists, scholars, and activists to revise Joseph Campbell’s conception of the hero’s journey through performance art, lectures, workshops, and other offerings. This new assemblage of non-linear un-narratives proposes a cultural, political and social feminist re-visioning of the world. The MONOMYTHS perception of the universal journey dispels the notion of the lone patriarchal figure on a conquest to vanquish his demons—both inner and outer—in consideration of community, collectivity, and collaboration.
MONOMYTHS Stage 3: Meeting of the Mentor The Exquisite Course
Performances by Dainty Smith, Tamyka Bullen, Eliza Chandler, Zanette Singh, Ariel Smith, Johnson Ngo
The Exquisite Course, presented by the Feminist Art Gallery (F.A.G.), is an evening of short lectures by feminist and/or queer artists and creative folks from a variety of disciplines, interests, and positions. A mixture of fiction and non-fiction, The Exquisite Course collages real-life stories and performance mythologies around the microphone campfire to stitch together tales of meeting real-life mentors.
The Feminist Art Gallery is a response, a process, a site, a protest, an outcry, an exhibition, a performance, an economy, a conceptual framework, a place, and an opportunity. We host we fund we advocate we support we claim. The Feminist Art Gallery (F.A.G) is our geographical footprint located in Toronto and is run by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue.
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?
