ANNIE ONYI CHEUNG explores language, culture and gender in 'Mi'

>ANNIE ONYI CHEUNG: Mi

Installation and video work presented at Fleishman Gallery

October 16th to November 20th, Opening Reception October 16th 7-9pm

Annie Onyi Cheung’s work in time-based and three-dimensional media explores themes of memory, identity, shame and vulnerability, as well as generational and cultural difference. She is drawn to concepts that can be investigated through experiential environments, unravelling imagery and narratives, and bridging gaps between disparate perspectives. Her art manifests as combinations of performance, video and installation.

This emerging artist is a recent graduate of Art History and Studio Art from the University of Toronto. The Fleishman Gallery is very pleased to present her first solo exhibition.
Please visit: www.onyi-ajar.com

The exhibition, Mi, includes a wall-mounted paper grid which documents calligraphy practice of elementary-level traditional Chinese vocabulary and family vernacular, examining each character’s construction and pronunciation. The video component, Untitled (She Me), features a dream-like narrative that is projected as a continuous loop. The video, presented as a triptych, attempts to reveal the various manifestations of femininity that compete within certain social structures such as family, gender and nationality. The video contains no dialogue, instead opting to communicate through a vernacular of gesture to find relationships between tradition, gender and identity. The subtitle, ‘She-Me’ refers both to the phonetic Chinese pronunciation of ‘wash rice’ as well as the self-reflective quality of the video’s world of interiors.

The installation will also be accompanied by a third element, a performance piece to take place during the opening reception. The live performance featuring both the artist and her mother, will further explore the complicated and conflicting notions of femininity and womanhood that influence and inform the artist’s relationships with her mother and with her cultures.

CHRISTINA BATTLE investigates the changing natural environment

>CHRISTINA BATTLE: as storms take shape in the distance...
Opening: Friday, July 6th, 7-9pm
Exhibition runs to August 4th, 2007

Combining works on paper, film and video, as storms take shape in the distance… investigates the changing natural environment by imagining moments
when major storms strike.

Pulling from footage gathered by storm researchers and chasers, imagery is re-worked to consider the impacts of major weather patterns. The artworks re-create, collect and preserve existing ecological systems while imagining the impacts such events could have on the overall natural balance. Setting aside the effects of specific severe weather events which were an inspiration to the work, such as Hurricane Katrina (USA, 2005) and the South Asian Tsunami (Bandeh Aceh, Indonesia, Sri Lanka & others, 2004), as storms take shape in the distance…instead concentrates on the systems themselves and the precise moments when such storms hit. Reflecting on the global effects of natural disasters, the presented works seek to remind us how forceful the natural environment can be and how easily it can render us powerless.

Biography: With a B.Sc. in Environmental Biology from the University of Alberta and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, Christina currently lives and works in Toronto. Her artworks have been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT), the National Film Board of Canada and the Toronto Arts Council. She has screened her films internationally in festivals and galleries including: The Images Festival (Toronto), The London Film Festival (London, England); The International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands); White Box (New York City); The Foreman Art Gallery at Bishops University (Sherbrooke, QB); The City of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche 2006 and in the 2006 Whitney Biennial: “Day for Night” (New York City).

For more info visit: www.cbattle.com

b.h. YAEL and JOHANNA HOUSEHOLDER present Approximations and Verbatim

>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.

DEANNA BOWEN reframes African American Christian spirituality in 'Hymnals'

>DEANNA BOWEN: Hymnals
Opening: May 11th, 7-9
Exhibition runs to July 1st, 2007

Hymnals is a conceptual photo series that revolves around the artist’s efforts to reframe African American Christian spirituals as nomadic “road songs” within the greater contextual framework of the Black diaspora. Over the passing centuries, the spiritual has determinedly prevailed as both vehicle for subversion and transcendental tool. Accordingly, Hymnals relies upon an understanding that despite Christianity’s problematic history, African-American slaves and freed blacks have found refuge, solace, strength, and at times, education within the black church for generations.



Bowen collected the pictured hymnbooks in the summer of 2006 while shooting her upcoming experimental documentary about her great grandparents’ migration from a cotton plantation in Alabama in 1911. The photos are part of a larger conceptual project Gospel; an interdisciplinary work that illuminates the interconnected spaces of slavery, Christianity, race, gender and sexuality. This project takes criticisms of black Christianity into account while looking to the long-standing intersection between Canadian and American slave histories as an artistic starting point. Once completed, Gospel will premiere at the University of Toronto’s Graduate Student Thesis Exhibition in April 2008. Bio: Deanna Bowen is a Toronto-based media installation artist. She is a graduate candidate in the University of Toronto’s Masters of Visual Studies Program and received her Diploma of Fine Arts from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1992. Her work has been exhibited nationally (Toronto, Chatham, Montreal, Regina, Vancouver) and internationally (Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy) in numerous film festivals and galleries. She has received several grants in support of her artistic practice, most notably from OAC, TAC, Toronto Lesbian and Gay Community Appeal, Telefilm Canada and BC Cultural Services. In addition to artistic production, Deanna has also worked in the cultural sector for over 10 years at organizations such as the Images Festival of Film, Video and New Media, InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT), Point of View Magazine, Women in Focus Arts & Media Centre, and the Inside Out Lesbian & Gay Film and Video Festival.

For more info visit: www.deannabowen.ca