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Title: Cellu(h)er Resistance: The Body with/out Organs?, by Pam Patterson
Description: Cellu(h)er Resistance: The Body with/out Organs? is a performance/installation that acknowledges the use of theoretical and artistic practices for re-viewing the body-as-matrix. In this work, I reconfigure the (my) female body, marked by the effects of aging, medical interventions and cancer, in public space exploring the challenges and rewards of negotiating the body-as-terrain as a person with a disability and cancer. A feminist investigation and reconstruction of my "matrix" has involved years of excavating my whiteness, my privilege, my ability. As I re-entered the field for this work, following years of disease and illness, the pain of poverty, dis-ability and with a reconfigured surgical body, I shifted my understandings. As multi-disciplinary performance/installation artist, I incorporate, in my practice, performance, drawing, text/theory and photo-derived imagery in various configurations. The detritus I use here as content - the amputated breast, the crippled legs, the swollen, distorted hands, the bags, the sags, the corpulent middle - marks the impact that life has had on my body and art. As a person living with a disability, and in a body altered by breast cancer surgery, I engage with issues around in/visibility, with the body-grotesque as site/sight - and with pain. I energize this content and these issues through a performative/visual praxis. My intention is to conceive of what “life in the face of death” means, and apprehend my own identity, in anxious and immediate (un)certainty in time and space. Repeatedly, I experience my efforts to capture my experiences as/in art as but moment-by-moment wrestling matches with the angel of death. My focus has been not to normalize this struggle, but rather to engage with it as a complex visually and performatively rich intra- and inter-cultural autobiographical site and to see if such engagement might bring me and others closer to understanding life in/and culture(s). Inspired by my daughter and her rediscovery of her Irish heritage and language, I speak in this work, as well, through the figure of 16th century female Irish sea captain Granuaille. Using these and other elements - red “blood”, dirt, paper - to propel my passion, I ritually reconfigure another body for my body. As it is performative, it is (un)accomplished the moment I undertake it. There are sounds, images, becomings. The images - clouded sunsets, my daughter and her horse poised to leap, drawings of a breast, a bowl, a black and white projected film of my younger intact torso, and scattered wall text - remain as traces playing over the gallery walls, as if mis/displaced. As a completed work, Cellu(h)er Resistance: The Body with/out Organs? ironically gains reality as it moves closer to be-coming dis/embodied. Pam Patterson (PhD) focuses her research, art, and teaching, on the body and/in culture. She is Director of WIAprojects which, as a research-for-action program, presents exhibitions, screenings, performances and interdisciplinary arts-informed workshops at the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education, OISE, University of Toronto and with other revues. Patterson also teaches at York University and in the Art Gallery of Ontario studio program. As a performance and visual artist, she exhibits and performs internationally. Her work can be viewed at the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art (http://ccca.ca)
Type: Moving image
Date: Fall 2009
Identifier: intensions3-pampatterson
Identifier (PID): yul:1155995

Title: D'Arcy Island, an installation by Don Gill
Description: "British Columbia has a leper colony. Its existence is not widely known, for those who compose it are of a race whose affairs never reach the public ear.” (The Dominion Medical Monthly: Ontario Medical Journal, No. 6, Vol. XI, Toronto, December, 1898.) In the nineteenth century D’Arcy Island, a small island off the east coast of Vancouver Island was used by the city of Victoria to quarantine residents diagnosed with leprosy after the discovery of the disease in a few people in 1891. The exhibition D’Arcy Island is part of a larger project, Carceral Landscape, which is concerned with the use of landscape as a device for human incarceration. The idea of Carceral Landscape was germinated by photographer Ansel Adams’s belief that the sublime beauty of the natural environment surrounding the internment camp at Manzanar, California inspired and helped Japanese American internees transcend their detention during WWII. D’Arcy Island critically considers the use of an island as a site of detention or banishment. “While the floor of the Owens Valley is desolate, very hot in summer and very cold in winter, the surrounding mountains are spectacular, especially the Sierra Nevada on the west, culminating in Mount Whitney rising fourteen thousand five hundred feet above the valley floor. The Inyo Range to the east is more of desert character and of lower elevation but is very beautiful in its own way. I have been accused of sentimental conjecture when I suggest that the beauty of the natural scene stimulated the people in the camp. No other relocation centre could match Manzanar in this respect, and many of the people spoke to me of these qualities and their thankfulness for them.” (Ansel Adams: an Autobiography. Little Brown, 1998. Pg 220) D’Arcy Island was exhibited at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge Alberta in Fall 2006.
Type: Moving image
Date: Spring 2008
Identifier: intensions1-dongill
Identifier (PID): yul:1155990

Title: Private View, performance by A2
Description: Private View, an installation performance by A2 Company / London, was performed in 2004 by 17 people, (including a 90yr old woman & 3yr old child) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. The installation-performance attempted to explore cause and effect: how the least insignificant action can have an effect on the human body’s sensory system and in our lives, & how the consequences of our actions are rarely considered. Staged in inter-joining gallery rooms, Private View created a space of enactment, of memory, of witnessing, of interconnectedness for performer & audience alike. In one room under the title you’ve cheated again, in front of a microphone, a man on a chair randomly ‘pops’ bubble wrap in his hands. The audio is amplified resulting in the sound of gunfire. His actions are filmed. People lie on the floor & jolt impulsively to the ‘popping’ sound. Audience members are encouraged to lie down & follow. Under the title when I die I would like to take the telephone with me just in case there is one more thing I would like to say, a woman lies under a mound of earth with only one arm revealed holding a mobile phone, which rings intermittently. In another room under the title and I remember that I hadn’t stopped moving on, I had actually been moving non-stop and quite fast, without really paying attention to the fact that soon I was going to be very old, an old lady sits in an armchair, her look fixed on a television screen, broadcasting bubble wrap ‘popped’ between finger & thumb. Desensitized through repeated exposure she falls asleep. A bowl of nuts sit untouched by her side. A2, Anton Mirto & Alit Kreiz, create experimental performance projects exploring new personal, social & emotional language forms. A defining feature of their practice is to represent & engage people from different ages, cultures & backgrounds. Future show: the future of death at WUK in Vienna- April 08 For further information or to contact the company visit www.A2company.org
Type: Moving image
Date: Spring 2008
Identifier: intensions1-a2
Identifier (PID): yul:1155991