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.
Zanette Singh is a Toronto based sculpture and drawing artist. Her work, often humorously, explores the intricate interiors of the psyche, from existential death anxiety to the most absurd and sacred dream worlds and locates this within the queer racialized body. She is a Creative Director at CUE, an award-winning arts initiative dedicated to providing high-access arts funding and support to new generation artists living and working on the margins.
Dainty Smith is a Toronto based Actor, Burlesque Performer, Writer, Producer, and Speaker. Dainty believes that through the art of storytelling and a willingness to be exposed that genuine human connections can be made. Her performances often tell deeply vulnerable stories regarding race, religion, sexuality and challenging social boundaries. Dainty took performing arts at George Brown College and is a powerful self taught storyteller, performer, and orator. She acted in the acclaimed theatre group Les Blues and has starred in two short films: How To Stop A Revolution, and Red Lips (Cages for Black Girls). Her diverse array of stage performances include the Mayworks Festival, Gladstone Hotel, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the Tranzac, Artscape, and Daniels Spectrum Theatre.
Over the past decade Dainty has brought her utterly raw, emotional artistry to her burlesque performances. She co-produced the performance art collective Colour Me Dragg and founded Les Femme Fatales: Women of Colour burlesque troupe, the only burlesque troupe for women of colour in Canada. Her performances have been showcased at Rock. Paper. Sistahz, the Rhubarb Festival, Harbourfront Centre, Killjoy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Haunted House conceived by Allyson Mitchell and countless venues throughout the city of Toronto. Recently, her speaking engagements have included workshops with women and youth on themes of empowerment, glamour, beauty, self love and self care as revolutionary acts. She has taught workshops at Ryerson University, University of Ottawa, and York University on radical body positivity, survival and thriving.Dainty has written for Sway magazine, Lover Magazine, About magazine, Xtra! Newspaper, Sage Blog, Shameless Magazine and The Witness Journal.
Ariel Smith is an urban nēhiyaw iskwew (plains Cree woman), a self-taught filmmaker, video artist, writer and cultural worker currently based on unceded Algonquin territory, Ottawa, Ontario. She has shown at festivals and galleries internationally including: Images Festival (Toronto), Mix Experimental Film Festival (NYC), Urban Shaman (Winnipeg), MAI (Montréal), Gallery Sans Nom (Moncton), Santa Fe Indian Market (Santa Fe, New Mexico), Solid Screens (Cairns, Australia) and Cold Creation Gallery (Barcelona, Spain).
She has written essays and articles on the subjects of Indigenous media arts as self determination and on gendered colonial violence for Concordia University, The Ottawa Art Gallery, The Ottawa International Animation Festival, Bitch Flicks, and the Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Journal. Ariel is a programmer and arts educator for the imagineNATIVE film and media arts festival and is the director of National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition (NIMAC).
Ariel’s lived experiences with difference and marginalization form the basis for much of her work. Interested in the political and social forces that affect the lives of girls and women, she investigates these themes, resulting in anti-essentialist, tongue-in-cheek commentaries which embody the grotesque feminine, while at the same time challenge the negative patriarchal perception of the feminine-as monstrous.
Allyson Mitchell is a maximalist artist working in sculpture, performance, installation and film. Her practice melds feminism and pop culture to investigate contemporary ideas about sexuality, autobiography and the body, largely through the use of reclaimed textile and abandoned craft. These articulations have resulted in a coven of lesbian feminist Sasquatch monsters, a room-sized Vagina Dentata, an army of super genius Holly Hobbies and a woodland utopic library complete with a wishing well of forbidden political knowledge. Her works have exhibited in galleries and festivals across Canada, the US and Europe, including Tate Modern, the Textile Museum of Canada, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, Walker Art Center, The British Film Institute, Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario. She is a Professor in the School of Women’s Studies at York University. She is represented by Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects and she runs F.A.G Feminist Art Gallery with Deirdre Logue.
Deirdre Logue holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from Kent State University. Recent exhibitions of her award winning work have taken place at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Open Space in Victoria, Oakville Galleries, the Images Festival in Toronto, the Berlin International Film Festival, Beyond/In Western New York, YYZ and at articule in Montreal. Logue has contributed over 25 years to working with artist-run organizations dedicated to media arts exhibition and distribution.
She was a founding member of Media City, the Executive Director of the Images Festival, Executive Director of the CFMDC and is currently the Development Director at Vtape. Logue has been dedicated to working at the Independent Imaging Retreat (the Film Farm) in Mount Forest Ontario since 1997 and directs the F.A.G Feminist Art Gallery with her partner/collaborator Allyson Mitchell.
Earning her PhD from the Social Justice and Education department at the University of Toronto in 2014, Eliza Chandler was dually appointed as the Artistic Director at Tangled Art + Disability, an organization in Toronto dedicated to the cultivation of disability arts, and the postdoctoral research fellow in Ryerson University’s School of Disability Studies from 2014-2016. During this time she was the also the founding Artistic Director of Tangled Art Gallery, Canada’s first art gallery dedicated to showcasing disability art and advancing accessible curatorial practice. Chandler is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Disability Studies at Ryerson University. She is the co-director of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded partnership project, Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life. This seven-year, multi-partnered research project considers the close relationship between art, accessibility, and social change as it contributes to the development of activist art, aesthetics, curriculum, and accessible curatorial practices across Canada. Chandler sits on the Board of Directors for the Ontario Arts Council and is a practicing disability artist and curator. She recently co-curated the group exhibitionBodies in Translation: Age and Creativity at the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery and recent publications include Disability Arts and Re-Worlding Possibilities, a/b: Auto-Biographic Studies (2018). Chandler regularly give lectures, interviews, and consultations related to disability arts, accessible curatorial practices, and disability politics in Canada.
Tamyka Bullen is a POC Deaf feminist based in Toronto who is a social conscious artist and a social activist. She was involved in different organizations to educate about women issues/Deaf issues/Deaf LGBT issues for many years. In 2015 she launching a body care business that sell soaps, lip balms, body creams and other items to honour the Mother Earth.
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.
Conceived and curated by Jess Dobkin and Shannon Cochrane
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.
Joseph Campbell’s influential book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) prescribes a common pattern to all of the world’s mythic narratives. According to this fundamental structure, the archetypal hero is challenged to embark on a monumental quest. Over the course of the hero’s journey, trials and obstacles must be overcome until a victory is won and the hero returns home with new knowledge about himself and the world. Campbell’s concept of the monomyth (‘one myth’) is a recognizable motif in both ancient mythology and contemporary culture, including film, music, literature, sports, and advertising. A current trend in popular visual culture replaces the male character with a female one, in spite of the fact that our heroine–from the get-go–would make different choices if the conditions, and conditioning, allowed. While each MONOMYTHS stage stands alone, the work of each presenting artist is interdependent and connected. These independent visions, when stitched together through the audience’s collective presence, form an exquisite corpse of a larger experimental narrative.
The year-long MONOMYTHS project is presented in three sections starting in February 2016 and concluding in February 2017.
Part 1 (February 3–7, 2016) Stage 1: The Ordinary World/Call to Adventure Stage 2: Refusal of the Call Stage 3: Meeting of the Mentor Stage 4: Crossing the Threshold Stage 5: Belly of the Whale
Part 2 (May 2016–January 2017) Stage 6: Tests, Allies, Enemies Stage 7: Ordeals Stage 8: Atonement with the Father/State Stage 9: Apotheosis/Journey to the Inmost Cave
Part 3 (February 15–19, 2017) Stage 10: The Road Back Stage 11: Refusal of the Return Stage 12: Mistress of Two Worlds Stage 13: Freedom to Live Stage 14: The Return Home
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.
