>b.h. YAEL and JOHANNA HOUSEHOLDER: Verbatim
Opening Reception: Friday, November 23rd, 7-9pm
Screening schedule:
Saturday, November 24th, 12-8pm
Sunday, November 25th, 11-6pm
Tuesday, November 26th to Friday, November 30th 11-6pm
Closing Reception & Talk: Friday, November 30th, 7-9pm
APPROXIMATIONS: parts 1 – 3
Three videos by Johanna Householder & b. h. Yael
The Mission, Colour, Video, 4 min 21 sec., 2000
With the exception of one brief sequence, this tape is a shot-for-shot recreation – edited in camera – of the opening scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 landmark film, Apocalypse Now, with Johanna Householder in the role of Captain Benjamin Willard. By replacing Sheen’s body with her own, Householder probes subjectivity and the processes of identification as b.h. Yael duplicates Vittorio Storaro’s Academy Award™ winning cinematography Dogme style.
December 31, 2000, Colour, Video, 7 min. 22 sec., 2001
December 31, 2000 is a shot-for-shot recreation of the pivotal scene in Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey in which Dave dismantles HAL, the renegade computer. But on December 31, 2000, Kubrick's apocalyptic dream has not yet been realized. The domestic scene supplants the space station, and household appliances become the conduit through which we enter the mainframe. In ironic reversal, the failure of the future is exposed.
Next to Last Tango, Colour, Video, 7 min., 2001
Johanna Householder gets in a bag with Francis Bacon, Bernardo Bertolucci, Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, re-reading the infamous “butter scene” from the highly controversial 1972 film which, according to Pauline Kael, "changed the face of an art form." b.h. Yael equally faithfully records the action. Commissioned by Trinity Square Video for the Trans>Sex>Tech Residency.
VERBATIM, Colour, Video, 7 min. 45 sec., 2005
The work recreates the opening scene of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, with shot-for-shot faithfulness. When Gibson released the film in time for the Easter screenings of 2004, it had already received an enormous amount of pre-publicity around Gibson’s vaunted goal of going for verisimilitude, which included the cast speaking in Aramaic and Latin, but didn’t exclude the studio set for the garden of Gesthemene, flooded with smoke and blue light, or the previously unreported presence of the Devil (herself) on the Via Dolorosa.
‘Our strategy is to open up the question about accuracy versus interpretation, a tactic that Gibson used to ensure that the conservative Christian audiences, for whom it was made, would approach The Passion with proper, uncritical reverence. But then Pope John Paul II agreed: “It is as it was,” he was reported as saying in the Wall Street Journal. This version just is.’
Biographies:
Both b.h.Yael, and Johanna Householder are professors of Integrated Media Program in the Faculty of Art at the Ontario College of Art and Design.
Johanna Householder has been making performances and other artwork in Canada since the late 1970s. She was a member of the notorious, satirical feminist performance ensemble, The Clichettes, who performed under variable circumstances, throughout the 1980s. Householder has maintained a unique performance practice, often collaborating with other artists. She is one of the founders of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, and with Tanya Mars, she co-edited Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance by Canadian women, YYZ Books, 2004.
b.h.Yael is a Toronto based filmmaker, video and installation artist. Yael’s work has exhibited nationally and internationally and has shown in various settings, from festivals to galleries to various educational venues. Her works have been purchased by several universities. These include Fresh Blood, A Consideration of Belonging, In the Middle of the Street, and Trisk-aidekaphobia. In 2006, Yael premiered Palestine Trilogy, three videos that focus on activist initiatives, addressing the politics of Palestine and Israel in sites of solidarity. Yael has just completed Trading the Future, a video essay questioning the ways in which secular culture has embraced apocalypse as inevitable.
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