folio magazine issue 14 - fall 2015
folio staff Hortense Chauvin Aaron Dishy Levi Easterbrooks Emily Enhorning Megan Jezewski Josh Marquis Ruby Ross Clarissa Sorenson Kate Whiteway
about Folio is a student-run visual art and design magazine that acts as an ongoing archive of McGill’s artistic community by providing a venue for student artists to showcase their work. It is published biannually.
All contents Š the respective artists.
content
Yufei Wang Flowers II Kara Katon Darastu and diteluk Levi Easterbrooks Metal Scene 2 & 3 Maxine Dannatt No Name Catherine Jeffery Side of the Road Kenneth Koo Grey Matter Folio Notes on a Proposal
Kara Katon diteluk & Darastu
Levi Easterbrooks Metal Scene 2 & 3
Maxine Dannatt No Name
Catherine Jeffery Side of the Road
Kenneth Koo Grey Matter
Notes on a Proposal for a Screening Kenneth Koo (McGill 2015), Looking At You, Looking at Me, 2014 Ann Hirsch, Here For You (Or my Brief Love Affair with Frank Maresca), 2012 Em Rooney, Flesh & Ground, 2015 This screening is meant to act as a sort of introductory dialogue linkingstudent video art practices at McGill within the broader practices of contemporary video art. The critical repurposing of the “stock” options of both chatroulette and reality television programming provide new spaces for artistic embedding in noninstitutional grey areas (uncertainty of art value). (Kenneth & Ann) The medium of video is also interesting as a site of new modes of artcirculation. What happens, for example, when you can engage with something that is considered “art” on tv, on your laptop, in your bed, on your phone, etc.? Video allows new modes of interacting with art. (all of them) Kenneth’s placement of institutionally validated performance works (Abramovic etc.) as foil to the expectations and lecherous gaze of mostly male chatroulette users (dissatisfaction with the disruption of their mechanical desires) (frustrating in its duration → no sexual (read pornlike) immediacy passivity/decontextualization as disruptive to typical sexual flows of the site (joke in art performance vs. performance of digital sexuality) Ann’s “infiltration” of reality tv circuit for art purposes similarly complicates the expectations of the performance of sexuality and/or femininity within these contexts Unlike Kenneth, who appropriates performances that are already validated as art, Ann’s participation in “Frank the Entertainer in a Basement Affair” is classified as art retroactively? (at least it would not be apparent to other participants and viewers of the show) is the work the performance or the edited documentation that forms a new video work? Both? How does this relate to performance as an everyday practice? Em’s work is not as clearly related visually. Dealing with the sexuality of the mechanical in a more literal way. Joke on these same sorts of desire machines? Sexual agency given to objects and their anthropomorphic actions (and fluid byproducts of production) sex as production? Technological discourses of desire Tie in Ryan Trecartin (it’s an intro to contemporary video practice after all) à Reality television and corporate embodiment à again, desire machines (as always) and the corporate cooption of sexuality etc.; intensities of performance circulation of the everyday – his wordplay incorporates absurd takes on everyday sayings, they are remotely familiar to things we can recognize, but still alien. Intensifying ways in which people perform a self mediated through technology; the desiremachines these characters perform cannot accede to recognition, but break down. He intensifies the kinds of relations that we see in Ann’s performance – reality television features people who speak but say nothing. She says things that we can recognize as everyday but mean nothing.
folio contributors
Maxine Dannatt Though originally from New York, she spent high school in Paris before moving to this mad city of Montreal. She occasionally takes pictures in between composing analyses of Sufi pop songs, interviewing anarchist poets and engaging in all night essay writing rituals with friends in McLennan.
Levi Easterbrooks Bruce Willis in: Die Hard (1988), Die Hard 2 (1990), Die Hard: With A Vengeance (1995), The Fifth Element (1997), Armageddon (1998), The Sixth Sense (1999), Sin City (2005), Planet Terror (2007), Surrogates (2009), & Looper (2012) /// Jude Law in: Gattaca (1997), eXistenZ (1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), Lemony Snicket’s A series of Unfortunate Events (2004), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), Repo Men (2010), & Contagion (2011). Also that time I watched Charlize Theron in Æon Flux (2005) on a plane.
Catherine Jeffery I found this lawnmower on the side of the road in my hometown and it struck me as beautiful, despite the rust. I like to photograph abandoned places and items that may seem like trash to most people, using my photography to capture simple objects. I don’t spend a huge amount of time setting up composition or doing anything technical—I simply take pictures of things whose textures I find interesting.
Thanks to the AUS Fine Arts Council and the Students’ Society of McGill University for their generous support.
Kara Katon I spend most of my time exploring flow art with my hoop and wishes to transfer the bodily movement to my visual artwork. Through my submission I present two distinct senses of home; one that is already left behind and the other that is currently occupied. Darastu captures the incessant movement of the ocean that surrounds the native island where I grew up. While diteluk disperses the interior of my living place, unsettling what is already settled.
Kenneth Koo Kenneth creates art as a way for him to raise questions without necessarily answering them. His practice of photography explores the medium’s ability to transcend inherent qualities of photography and tap into the latent possibilities of other media (i.e. painting, sculpture, installation). Yufei Wang While I love science, I also love art because it allows us to explore of the myriad of perspectives of those belonging to the world around us, not often privy to our eyes when society interacts in passing. Art is a really important aspect of my life that often gets lost on the never-ending list of priorities, but I aspire to make time for it because not only is it a therapeutic outlet for the chaos in my mind, but there’s something exceptional in the process of creating something from nothing.