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

LEZLI RUBIN-KUNDA, performance documents presented at Fleishman Gallery

> LESLI RUBIN-KUNDA: Outside In

Opening Reception: Friday October 17th 7-9pm

Lezli Rubin-Kunda is a multidisciplinary artist who uses live action, as well as installation, drawing, photography and video to explore her relationship with her surroundings.

The three video pieces presented here, all deal with a place. Through simple spontaneous actions and activities, using the materials of the immediate surroundings in interaction with the artist’s body, they connect to different sites, each with its physical, as well as symbolic, cultural, or metaphysical dimensions. Two of the works are created from documentation from performance festivals. In Down to Earth, the artist digs up earth, carries it through the streets and then descends into an old wine cellar where she acts and plays with the earth and other local produce and debris.

The third and longest work, Housekeeping, is an extended meditation on the reality and concept of home. It is comprised of 11 short video ‘poems’, each one related to different aspects, both material and philosophical, of the artist ‘s relation to her home in all its complexity. Home is the place of living, working , daydreaming, a rich and fertile ground for creating.

It is the hearth, and I am like the goddesss Hestia, guarding the domestic realm; it is the meeting place between sacred and profane space; it is an arena of daily life, from the trivial and banal to the most transcendent: sometimes a trap, sometimes a shelter. Seeing the house as a performance arena blurs the boundaries of art and life, of domestic and artistic pursuits; when I set up my camera every action becomes fraught with layers of significance.

In these works, any assumptions of home as refuge, as order against the chaos, as domestic vs wordly - are reexamined. Rootedness and permanence are brought to question: human constructs cannot keep out the inevitability of flux and dissolution. The built world and the natural world continually fuse, shifting positions.

The artist holds a BA from the University of Toronto in Interdisciplinary Studies, and an MFA from the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She currently lives in Israel, teaching in the Architecture and City Planning area at the Technion, Haifa, Israel. www.lezlirubinkunda.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.