We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
Works by Johanna Householder and Frances Leeming. A Space Gallery, Toronto, ON, November 13–December 12, 2015.
Titled after a misquote commonly attributed to William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, this exhibition is a collaborative installation by Frances Leeming and Johanna Householder. In a large-scale video projection, the artists consider adult representations of children in two twentieth century films: Wee Willie Winkie (1937) and Lord of the Flies (1963). Reworking footage from these allegories for expansionist ideas of “civilization,” the artists put the two iconic protagonists—Winkie (Shirley Temple) and Piggy (Hugh Edwards)—into dialogue, finding uncanny, shot-for-shot similarities between the two films. Leeming and Householder tease out narrative constructions that show the way adults justify their own aspirations by leveraging the perceived innocence of, constructed here in the whiteness of, figures of children.
Johanna Householder and Frances Leeming, We did everything adults would do. What went wrong? 2015
Solo exhibition of works by Meredith Nickie. A Space Gallery, January 8–February 3, 2010.
In Cartographies of Desire, Meredith Nickie brings the pleasures of Chinoiserie, Japonisme and other European ornamentation into tension with the conditions for its appropriation, as a part of her ongoing investigation into issues of race and colonial desire. In this series of installation works, Nickie maps networks of aesthetic and cultural values across seemingly disparate historical and global locations, enlisting Liverpool, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, New Zealand and The New World as sites for the exploration of symbolic and monetary capital flows, a failed narrative of progressive self-rule, and practices of colonial oppression as they are sublimated in discourses of connoisseurship or ornamental pleasures.
Meredith Nickie, Cartography of Desire: So Thorough the Ruin of Flesh and Stone, 2009 [Detail]
Regulating Images: I draw the line at Feet…and Picnics
That 80s Show: Vtape Curatorial Incubator, V.4. Vtape, Toronto, February 10–March 2, 2007.
Not all tapes in this program address censorship directly as do such tapes as Vera Frenkel’s Censored: The Business of Frightened Desires (1987), or Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak’s See Evil (1985), and taken out of context today, issues of censorship may not register in these tapes at all. With the bureaucracy of prior-censorship a constant burden to artists and exhibitors in Ontario for almost a decade, the threat of censorship was imbued in the culture of video-making, and, I argue, influenced production in many ways.
cache: Three Contemporary Videos from Igloolik
Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, March 20, 2005. Co-curated with the cache collective.
The cache collective was a group of then-graduate students who, as a part of a graduate course in the Department of Art at Queen’s University, directed by Dr. Lynda Jessup developed a screening for the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. We screened two tapes by Isuma Igloolik Productions and one tape by Arnait Productions.
Two of the tapes were set in presettlement Igloolik, and one was set in contemporary times. We used the word cache, which refers to a storage of food and supplies that are stashed on the land for later use, to point to the idea that Isuma and Arnait’s videos similarly functioned, in part, as storage projects. They store things like shared memories, intergenerational knowledge, and traditional values, while cultivating new and contemporary experimental film and video innovations and collaborative working practices.
Isuma Igloolik Productions, Qaggiq: Gathering Place, 1989 http://www.isuma.tv/isuma-productions/qaggiq-gathering-place
TARYN SIROVE 