Tag: Queer Lines (For Agnes)

© Kate Barry, Legs, Too, 2015. Photo Henry Chan.

Canada
www.katebarry.ca

Kate Barry is currently based on the the unceded, traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) nations in Vancouver, Canada.

Barry is a performance artist whose work investigates queerness, subjectivity and embodied practice through painting, drawing and video. She has contributed over 20-years to working in artist-run spaces committed to the exhibition of artwork outside the mainstream. She has performed and exhibited in galleries and festivals throughout Canada and internationally, including the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Open Space (Victoria), 7a*11d Festival of Performance Art (Toronto), World Pride Toronto, and the Rider Project (NYC). In addition, she has self-produced work at the Musee d’Orsay (Paris, France) and Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto).

From 2011–2014 Kate Barry was a member of the board of directors for FADO Performance Art Centre (Toronto). She was the project manager for More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (edited by Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars) and she worked as the archival and research associate for the book, Wordless: The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore. She was as the project lead for the MPCAS, an urban screen launched by grunt gallery in 2019. Currently, she is a sessional faculty at Emily Carr University of Art & Design and serves on the board of directors of the Mutual Aid and Reciprocity Fund (MARFEC) at ECU. From 2013 until 2016, she wrote a popular Blog called Performance Art13 that focused on the Toronto performance art scene from a visual art perspective.

Barry has curated several shows including: PLACE for the MPCAS, grunt gallery, Vancouver, 2019–2020; Nature Lover: Performance for the Camera (Fabulous Fringe Film Festival, Durham Region, 2017); 11:45PM, FADO Performance Art Centre’s Emerging Artist Series (Xpace Gallery, Toronto, 2014): and White Wedding to the Snow: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephen’s performance art wedding (Ottawa, Canada, 2010). Kate Barry’s video work is represented by Vtape in Toronto, Canada.

Resolution:
a firm decision to do or not to do something.
the quality of being determined or resolute.
the action of solving a problem.
the process of reducing or separately something into its components.
the smallest interval measurable by an optical instrument.
the conversion of something abstract into another form.

ARTISTS
Cindy Baker
David Bateman
Kate Barry
lo bil
Kiera Boult
Alexis Bulman
Ulyssess Castellanos
Chipo Chipaziwa
Keith Cole & Jeanne Randolph
W. A. Davison
Emily DiCarlo
Claudia Edwards
Vanessa Dion Fletcher
Serge Olivier Fokoua
Marie-Claude Gendron
Moynan King
Hélène Lefebvre
Tess Martens & Holly Timpener
Roy Mitchell
Laura Paolini
Diana Lopez Soto
Jordyn Stewart
Clayton Windatt

Curated by Shannon Cochrane

Performance Resolution(s) is FADO’s 2021/2022 at-home residency series. Participating artists were chosen from a Canada-wide open call for submissions inviting artists to propose performance-based research projects that engaged with the theme of ‘resolution.’

It goes without saying that 2020 changed everything. The world is now a very different place than before. (We resolve never to say, “it goes without saying” again.) For artists working in live art and performance, events were cancelled and festivals postponed. What happens to embodied practice when the bodies can’t be together irl? With dizzying speed, we were compelled to bring performance to the tiny back-lit screen as an alternative. Sometimes that worked. Without being able to gather in large groups, sometimes we leaned on old tricks (what performance artist doesn’t know what it’s like to perform in a half-empty theatre?) to shoehorn our work into the current context. More often than not, to keep moving, we stuck with the script—over producing and addicted to presentation.

But thankfully the new year brings with it fresh starts, new directions and an opportunity to reflect. We make promises in the form of new year’s resolutions—a private or public personal commitment to change. Most resolutions dissolve by the end of March, or sooner. If 2020 taught us anything, it taught us that transformation comes slowly. The real breakthroughs are still in the (social) distance, but a seed has been planted.

Our inspirations for Performance Resolution(s) are the hope for a better 2021 for all, and a profound performance exercise designed by Marilyn Arsem that we think about from time to time. Read Marilyn’s exercise below.

Some of the projects in this at-home residency series will have tangible outcomes; many will not. The point was not to find to way to support artists through replicating old ways of doing things by keeping the hamster wheel of production going. Instead, we encourage a slowing down and a deep dive into what it means to have resolve, even if you don’t have the answer. 

Watch this space for updates on various projects and research contributions as they reveal themselves over the 2021–2022 programming year.

In the spring of 2021, I was given the opportunity to make a video performance through an at-home residency from where I reside in Vancouver through FADO Performance Art Centre’s at-home residency series, Performance Resolution(s).

Queer Lines (For Agnes) is a performance for the camera that marks pandemic time through the abstraction of the Pride Flag. I use my body in various unexpected ways to paint acrylic washes on an unstretched canvas on the ground. I have developed an “embodied painting” approach that combines performance art actions with mindfulness strategies to create a work that balances form and content, emotions, and ideas. A soundscape made from this process of embodied painting compliments the video work.

This process of investigation concentrates on the subject-object binary through an embodied practice. I use my own body in my performances to experience and blur the tension between myself as both a subjective and objective body. To do this, I employ paint brushes I make from my own hair, paint, a straw I use to reenact prehistoric cave painting methodologies by blowing paint onto the canvas and toothbrushes as some of the items to work with to paint the canvas.

Primarily, Queer Lines (For Agnes) takes art historical cues from abstract painter Agnes Martin, utilizing an abstraction of the horizontal lines found in her later work. Inspired by her resistance to Patriarchal norms realized in both her painting and her writing, I find her contributions to a definition of queering conventions provocative and see this work as working from her queries, evoking new strategies and questions for the future. The work is about queer survival during a global pandemic by creating a ritual for protection for all members of the LGBTQAI2S+ communities.

Thanks to FADO, Lisa G for editing and Kage for the soundscape and all your support.

Queer Lines (For Agnes)
video, 18:30, 2021
Distributed by Vtape, Canada