TAG TEAM: Gay Premises

Artists and Art Workers respond to Gay Premises: Radical Voices in the Archives, 1973-1983

DESCRIPTION:

Part of the process of broadening and complicating the record of The Body Politic and gay liberation histories across Canada involves reinterpretation and rearticulation via artistic interventions at The ArQuives. Promoting intergenerational dialogue and calling on an emerging generation of queer artists, activists, curators, and historians to engage in processes of ‘activating’ the archive towards its continued preservation, the idea of archives ‘passing the torch’ here might be transformed into a playful, experimental, and collaborative endeavour, conceived along the lines of tag: “tag, you’re it,” tag teams, as well as “tag” and “tagging” as references to digital processes for organizing and archiving information. TAG TEAM: Gay Premises provides an artistic vantage point for thinking about Canada’s gay liberation history and the 40-year history of The ArQuives.

As a collaborative, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary project, artists are tagged in for short residencies throughout the exhibition, working off of the material/ideological/textual traces left by previous artist participants and producing interventions, performances, and objects that contribute to a critical exploration of Canada’s gay liberation history, The ArQuives, and the way that GLBTQ+ histories are promoted and preserved.

TAG TEAM: Gay Premises emphasizes process and performative relationships to the archive, as well as a perception of contemporary queer artist communities working across networks, in collaboration, and through dialogue. The curatorial concept as a whole might be read as an artistic intervention into a reading of the archive as static and relegated to the past, with artists being invited to form the structure of this project that will expand and change as new artists are tagged in. The projects are located in The ArQuives, as well as at other sites in Toronto that are relevant to the history of The Body Politic, Canada’s gay liberation history, and/or The ArQuives.

CONFIRMED PARTICIPANTS:

Over the course of the exhibition, Anthea Black will tag in Sharlene Bamboat. Bamboat will then tag in Eugenio Salas. The artist to be tagged in by Salas will be revealed in late-summer.

For her first project, Anthea Black launches a series of stationary that reinstates the letterhead and logos of the Gay Liberation Movement Archive to suggest that the history of queer liberation is ongoing and always in the process of being written, recorded, and documented. The limited edition stationary will be given away at the archives and used for correspondence relating to the exhibition, and in turn, will both circulate freely and become part of the archive itself. Throughout the run of Gay Premises, Black will also design and install a series of handprinted wallpapers that respond to The ArQuives’s holdings of original architectural drawings, diagrams of protests, actions and police raids, photographs of banners, and design mockups for early queer press publications. Each month of the exhibition, new wallpapers will be revealed, both inside and out of the house. Look for them at the Archive and in several public sites around Toronto.

OCAD Gallery, 52 McCaul Street

Wednesday, June 19, 2013, 7:00-9:00 p.m.

Hosted by Anthea Black, with special guests from the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives

and Gay Premises: Radical Voices in the Archive, 1973-1983

Co-facilitated by Shannon Gerard and Mary Tremonte

PUBLIC ACTION’s Night School series presents an evening conversation and skill-share on queer publishing and archiving hosted by Anthea Black. Join artist and new publications faculty member Anthea Black for a discussion on queer publishing, print activism, and her summer project at the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives. She’s invited special guests from the archives to meet with OCAD students and share their experiences with publishing and archiving in the early days of the queer liberation movement in Canada. In the second hour, we’ll make archivist kits and contribute to the important work of recording our queer histories!

Facilitated by Gabrielle Moser

co-facilitated with Karen Stanworth (Curator) Erin Silver (Co-curator)

Tuesday, July 23, 2013 at 7:30 p.m.

Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (34 Isabella St.)

No Looking After the Internet is a monthly “looking group” that invites participants to look at a photograph (or series of photographs) they are unfamiliar with, and “read” the image out-loud together. Chosen in relation to an exhibition, an artist’s body of work, or an ongoing research project, the looking group will focus on difficult images that present a challenge to practices of looking. If these images ask the viewer to occupy the position of the witness, No Looking offers the space and time to look at these photographs in detail: to return to these difficult scenes in another context where we can look at them slowly and unpack our responses to the image.Premised on the idea that we don’t always trust our interpretive abilities as viewers, the aim of

No Looking is to examine the differences between witnessing and looking. How does a slower  form of looking allow us to be self-reflexive about our role as spectators? How do we look at  these images differently when we interpret them with a community of others? No Looking takes its inspiration and name from No Reading After the Internet, an out-loud reading and discussion group facilitated by cheyanne turions and Alexander Muir that meets regularly in Toronto and Vancouver (http://noreadingaftertheinternet.wordpress.com/). Gay Premises: Radical Voices in the Archives, 1973-1983

In dialogue with the exhibition Gay Premises: Radical Voices in the Archives, 1973-1983 (https://arquives.ca/exhibitions/whats-next) at The ArQuives, and its critical counterpart of collaborative interventions, TAG TEAM, this month’s looking group will examine images included in the Photograph Wall: a key component of the exhibition. Incorporating photographs from the thousands of images in The ArQuives that were produced for The Body Politic, a Toronto-based gay newspaper that was a dominant voice in the body politics of the LGBTQ+ communities in Canada in the 1970s, the Photograph Wall mimics a photo editor’s wall and encourages viewers to respond to, label and narrativize the archives’ photographic holdings. While The ArQuives has made significant efforts to identify the individuals, places, and events depicted in these images, the Photograph Wall hopes to further identify elements in the unknown photographs by asking gallery visitors to “write” on the wall or to contribute their own text or images.

Focusing on the images included in the Photo Wall, the July meeting of No Looking aims to interrogate what we—as viewers—want from photographs of the past and to question the kinds of narratives we try to make from them when they withhold easy answers. How does the anonymity of the subjects of these photographs, and their “out-of-placeness” in the archives, trouble our viewing experience? What are the difficulties and pleasures we encounter by “not knowing” about the context in which these photographs were produced? And how might  the space of the gallery exhibition open up new interpretive possibilities for these archival documents?

This edition of No Looking is organized in collaboration with Erin Silver’s project, TAG TEAM: Gay Premises.

Sharlene Bamboat is a mixed media artist, working predominantly in film, video and performance. Through a re-examination of history, Bamboat elicits tongue-in-cheek videos and performances to question our contemporary moment marked by colonialism and neoliberalism. Bamboat works largely in collaboration, most notably as part of Bambitchell with artist Alexis Mitchell. Her work has been exhibited internationally. She is on the programming committee of the Pleasure Dome Film & Video Collective, and works as the Artistic Director for SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) in Toronto.

Anthea Black is a Canadian artist, writer and cultural worker. Her work in print, textiles, performance and video sets a stage for collaborative encounters and inserts intimate gestures into public spaces. She has exhibited throughout Canada and the United States and has circulated collaborative print editions in cities across North America through her ongoing artist-curatorial project, looking for love in all the wrong places. Her most recent curatorial project, No Place: Queer Geographies on Screen, considers the spatial politics of queer film and video. Her  writings have appeared in numerous publications and her collaborative writing with Nicole Burisch is included in The Craft Reader (BERG) and Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Duke University Press).

Gabrielle Moser is a writer and independent curator. She is currently curator in residence as part of Gallery TPW R&D. She regularly contributes to Artforum.com, and her writing has appeared in venues including ARTnews, Canadian Art, Fillip, n paradoxa, and Photography & Culture. She has curated exhibitions for Access Gallery, Gallery TPW, the Leona Drive Project and Vtape. She is a PhD candidate in art history and visual culture at York University, where she also teaches.

Eugenio Salas (Mexico City, 1976) is a Toronto-based artist. His practice seeks to disrupt social roles and dynamics, exploring the symbolic spaces that unfold. He carries out collaborative site-specific and process-based performances, employing intervention, video, film, animation, photography, artist books and installation mediums.

Karen Stanworth (Gay Premises: Radical Voices in the Archive, 1973-1983) is an associate

professor, joint-appointed to the faculties of Fine Arts and Education at York University in Toronto, Canada. She has just completed a manuscript on visual culture in Canada, entitled Visibly Canadian: Imagining Identities in Canada, 1820-1910, which examines the imaging and imagining of social identities through art and popular visual practices in 19 Ontario. Karen has recently returned to curatorial work with her project: Gay Premises: Radical Voices in the Archives, 1973-1983, at the Canadian and Lesbian Gay Archives, June – Sept 2013. This is the second of a three-part curatorial exploration of the archives. Last year, she curated Public Sins/Private Desires: Tracing lesbian lives in the archives, 1950-1980, summer 2012. Next year’s exhibition focuses on queer migration to Canada in the 1980 and 90s, and videos of “home.”

Erin Silver (TAG TEAM: GAY PREMISES) completed a PhD in Art History and Gender & Women’s Studies at McGill University in 2013, focusing on histories of North American feminist and queer art production, as framed by feminist and queer alternative art institutions and spaces from 1970 to 2012. Silver has curated several exhibitions, including Coming through the Fog: les rencontres de Matthieu Brouillard et de Donigan Cumming, at the FOFA Gallery, in 2012, and is currently working on an exhibition of queer immersive and intermedia practices, to open in 2014. Silver has taught Art History at Concordia University, OCAD University, and the University of Guelph. Her writing has been published in C Magazine, Ciel Variable, Fuse Magazine, and No More Potlucks.