“Who’s to say if I’m gonna like [a particular garment] more because it’s ‘Internet’?”

In April 2013, I joined BLOUIN ARTINFO as Lifestyle Editor for BLOUIN ARTINFO Canada. You can read my stories here.

Below is a selection of past and present stories.

BLOUIN ARTINFO:

• Is It Art? Tom Sachs’s Nike Shoe Toes The Line, April 25, 2013
• Oldenburg’s “Floor Burger,” Once Distasteful to Canadians, Now Has Star Status, April 16, 2013 
• “A Dog Shouldn’t Be in Pantyhose”: Artists, Critics on “Dogs in Pantyhose” Meme, April 10, 2013

BLOUIN ARTINFO Canada:

• An Artist Through the Mirror: Five “Selfies” From the Exuberant Alex McLeod, April 26, 2013
• Fashion Illustrator Danielle Meder Forges Aheads with Touch Screen, April 17, 2013
• ROM’s Fashion Crimes Tackles the “Big Issues”, with Caution, April 12, 2013
• The Flamboyant Style and Sexuality of Cameron Carpenter, April 6, 2013
• Canvases on the Catwalk: Art Inspirations from Toronto Fashion Week Fall 2013, April 1, 2013

Re-imagining our archaic remnants.

And the Wind Cries Furry: centuries of domestic torpor – so-called evolution – have calcified what Jung called the “shadow aspect” of our collective unconscious, blinding us to our primal instincts. This video re-imagines our archaic remnants –  those spaces from which our aggressively-follicled ancestors call to us – as we warm our anima by the crackling fires of the all-extensive world-soul.

I did this video and remix in collaboration with my frequent co-conspirator Tony Halmos for Plink Flojd, a super audio/visual collective started by David Quiles Guillo with co-founders Yoshi Sodeoka and Eric Mast AKA E*Rock. It is an ongoing art project disguised as a band that feeds off of Pink Floyd samples.

“And the Wind Cries Furry” is a remix of Pink Floyd’s “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict”. The collage video work draws from personal archives, found YouTube necro-bestial-plush-ophilia videos, Hollywood and art house films, and the fire gods.

The work was a part of Plink Flojd’s winter 2013 programming.

Using the arts as a vehicle for social change.

One World: New Generation is the recorded culmination of an intensive Art Starts music program I project managed that provides opportunities for youth from underserved neighbourhoods to work with experienced professional musicians.

From October 2012 to January 2013, the youth artists experimented with writing, performing, recording and producing original music.

The twenty-four sessions were facilitated by hip-hop artist Jaydahmann, with workshops given by guest artists that included Bandana Singh, Colanthony Humphrey, Krystal Chance, Natty Beats, Lido Pimienta, Maylee Todd, DJ Cozmic Cat and Tony Halmos.

The program geared towards the creation of a community C.D. where participants contribute their own track. It received favourable recognition by Global TV, and closed with a successful CD launch that featured performances by the participants.

The above mini-documentary on the program was shot and edited by Alvaro Giron and Diana Cadavid of Salvaged Productions.

The happy, stylish chaos of a wonder woman anti-aging from 30 to 60 in a month.

The Age Issue was a four stage solo digital art performance I did for the Widget Art Gallery (WAG) from November 30th, 2012 to January 2nd, 2013.

Her 30s (1/4)

Curated by Chiara Passa, the WAG is a mini 3-dimensional, single room gallery that fits into people’s pocket that’s developed for IPhone, IPod Touch and I Pad. Every month, directly on user’s mobile, The WAG hosts a solo digital art exhibition related to the dynamic site-specific content, working both as a sort of kunsthall showing temporary exhibitions and as a permanent collection museum that conserves all the past exhibitions inside an online archive.

Her 40s (2/4)

Her 50s (3/4)

Artist Statement:

The happy, stylish chaos that is a wonder woman anti-aging from 30 to 60 in a month. Every week, I perform crystal vision interventions of my respective life stages in the WAG space. Will she ever feel bien dans sa peau? Let’s discover, together.

Her 60s (4/4)

Special thanks to Tony Halmos, Kevin McVicar & Chiara Passa for their support in this project.

Collected and processed audio/visual materials while wandering within a dissolving forest.

plantsATnight is the result of a collaborative process. The artists collected and processed audio/visual materials while wandering within a dissolving forest. They found an impenetrable leaf. Momentary samples of overgrown machinery. Systems terminating and flourishing in one.

I scored this video project in collaboration with A. Bill Miller and Rollin Leonard.

For the sound/audio, I composed a sound collage using Ableton software and a TC-Helicon VoiceLive Touch. The piece was largely improvised in real time, with some post-production work in response to the project’s collaborative process. Inspired by the enigmatic and cinematic, samples came from sources as varied as field recordings, concrete sounds, minimal music, Hollywood films, as well as recognizable standards from pop music’s star-making machinery.

Discipline is liberation.

In September 2012, I contributed a lecture on the Jane Fonda Workout to long-running barroom lecture series Trampoline Hall. The particular event I was involved with was curated by Kelly Jenkins.

Below is a super loose, point-form transcript of my lecture. (And, for the record, I have now seen Klute! Discipline is truly liberation.)

• I feel like Jane has become a part of my life that is both mystical yet terrifying. I likely first encountered this spirit animal on the cover of a beta cassette, with her leotard legs stretched high into the air.
• Her hair is loose and tousled, she flashes a wide smile. She looks in harmony with her age. In fact, it is a temple.
• No pain, no gain.
• Feel the burn.
• Discipline is liberation.
• I could go on at length as to why I’m so drawn to Jane Fonda. Not Jane Fonda, the Academy Award winning actress, nor even the daughter who grew up in the shadow of a national monument. (If you are aware of James Lipton’s line of questioning on the Actor’s Studio, this monument is Henry Fonda.)
• Like, honestly, I really can’t talk about her acting career. I haven’t seen Klute, Coming Home, or even On Golden Pond. Close friends ask: “What kind of Jane Fonda fan are you?”
• (I should note that I have at the very least seen Barbarella, and a few months ago, fell asleep watching California Suite on Netflix.)
• But it’s a question for sure, worth asking: what kind of fan am I?
• I’m the kind of fan that really loves her blog. (And I don’t even keep up with blogs — the last time I did that was when I had a LiveJournal.)
• She’s the kind of blogger that loves to remind you about that time she had hip replacement surgery six years ago, and Eve Ensler flew to Atlanta from New York without any sort of head up while in the midst of her road tour so she could rub Jane’s feet as she drifted in and out consciousness.
• Or she’ll totally overshare about going to Barbra Streisand’s 70th with her  “honey”, music producer Richard Perry, and seeing old friends there and being shameless in taking point and shoot photos with JaneFonda.com watermarked.
• In fact, one of my favourite photos on that site is one that has Jane right smack in between Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell. And as Jane relayed on her blog, there was no small talk.
• (Jane is very big about no small talk. If you are to dig deep with Jane, you gotta dig deep like it’s a therapy session or a junket with a thousand journalists.)
• They spoke about ego as the original sin, and compared their black bear encounters (Jane was quick to quip that hers were “much more dramatic” than Joni’s.)
• Should I mention that I’ve read her memoir? And her self-help book? I loved her self-help book. In particular, her chapter on sex.
• (My favourite quote is this: “”Talk about crossed signals: One night I took a sleeping pill just as my partner came in telling me he’d taken a Levitra.”)
• As you can tell, I’m into the journey that is Jane Fonda.
• “Journey” is something I would learn later on that was a big thing w/Jane. (And why yes! I did read her memoir. I was lucky enough to find  her lingering on the bookshelves of a COSTCO.)
• Actress and activist, feminist and wife, workout guru and role model.
• Why do I like living inside this oldness? Why is a woman of my age interested in another’s aging process? What is it about Jane?
• For someone who has lived her entire life in the public eye, I’m drawn to seeing how she has managed natural, everyday continuum life processes in a way that I respect and find appealing.
• How did she move away from her youth and beauty?
• It’s funny, because you know, I think about the Workout.
• By today’s standards, the workout seems terribly banal, like the proto infommercial.
• But when you think about context: how the hell did Hanoi Jane become the Workout Guru?
• It seems like such a dive in the shallow end, but it’s not.
• In the My Life So Far chapter “The Workout”, Fonda is astute enough in the narrative of her personas, transitioning the Hanoi Jane to the Workout Guru in terms of explaining how the Workout business came about.
• Her and second husband Tom Hayden started a statewide nonprofit CED — The Campaign for Economic Democracy.
• Despite starring in successful vehicles like Fun with Dick and Jane, The China Syndrome — films with premieres that would benefit CED — they were still needing $ to fund CED.
• After discovering that an pro-nuclear power plant lobbyist funded his campaigns through his personal businesses, they had that in their head.
• When they explored business options, the best piece of advice they got was “never go into a business you don’t understand”.
• OK WAIT BACK STORY!
• Jane had to fit into a bikini for California Suite (a film that I watched in bed with my boyfriend on Netflix and promptly fell asleep to, even though I love Alan Alda)
• She fractured her ankle during the making of China Syndrome, and instead of the usual ballet classes (which she couldn’t take anyways), decided to take a class at the Gilda Marx studio in Century City w/Leni Cazden.
• Gilda Marx — interesting woman. She has an iMDB account that lists her as “The Exercise Teacher” in Barbra Streisand’s 1979 vehicle, The Main Event.
• If you do a Google image search on her, you’ll discover a fairly consistant image pop-up: that of an either hot pink or fire engine red 1980s “flexatard” (a cat-suit).
• The classes were revelatory, and you could see how the politico was transitioning. Jane marvelled at the high-volume, repetitive beats she was grooving to: Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Wonder, Kenny Loggins, Marvin Gaye.
• She used to listen to NPR on the car radio, but suddenly these new sounds got her moving to a different rhythm and she was BECOMING one of those ppl you’d see through their car windows singing and grooving to music only they can hear.
• “I never did go back to ballet,” she said in her memoirs about her shift to aerobics.
• On the set of her film, The Electric Horseman, Jane taught the workout at night to women of all ages (and a few men) in the basement of a small spa.
• The benefits of exercise was mind-blowing to her. A woman told her how she stopped needing sleeping pills. Ppl said they felt less stressed. Most profound was the # of women saying how empowered they felt.
• She started her own studios, published a book about the workout, and a woman who was the wife of a home video producer told him he had to make it a video.
• Letters came in from women who were “doing Jane”. They wrote Jane touching handwritten letters that she kept, and the women poured their hearts about the weight they lost, the self-esteem they gained, how they were finally able to stand up to a buss or recover from a mastectomy
• “I couldn’t begin to put in a letter how my life has changed,” wrote one thirty-eight year old woman who lost eighty pounds. “I’ve started a cleaning business, set my own hours, asked for a raise, and got it. This may not sound like much to someone as strong as you, but I used to be so ashmade of myself I never even wanted to go outside. Now I like myself. I’m stong, I’m confident. I feel so wonderful I can’t describe it!”
• Now, I recognize that the workout was like, the most 1980s Reagan/Thatcher thing — the second video is great to see because her hair is moussed up — very Dynasty. Her body is leaner and harder. There is actually a singing # by one of her back-up aerobic shakers.
• But you know what? That whole thing about every morning working out to a video cassette. The repetition of seeing a particular image — woman stretching their bodies, pelvic thrusts — very sexual — and hearing particular phrases.
• The whole workout came from a woman who was a pin-up, had body issues, and was working out those body issues via her image with the fans.
• I think that was pretty affirming for the woman who was the super woman — the 9 to 5er, the young mom, esp the young mom trying to get back her body — not narcisstic but just getting feeling your way to your self and sweating. Sweating!
• Feel the burn.
• Discipline is liberation.

“Picture giant illuminating screens hung from trees and floating shapes that come alive with light.”

The above digital animation was commissioned by the Dublin-based BLOCK T for the AUTOMATA group GIF show curated by its visual arts coordinator Grace McEvoy for Electric Picnic 2012.

Below is documentation of the geometrical themed visuals and installations for the Algorhythm stage set-up:

Herstory done right.

Sheroes is committed to doing herstory right — reinterpreting and remixing the mythic woman-power that pervades digital and actual cultures, realizing new works from ephemeral and archival artifacts.

Above: A TL;DR version of the Sheroes series.

I founded the Toronto-based art project in the summer of 2011. The series began in July 2011 at NACO Gallery (RIP). It moved to the Beaver in January 2012, and ended in July 2012.

 Selective documentation of my cosplay performances from the series, in collaboration with Joanna Dell’Osso, Roxanne DeNobrega, Porcelaine Desire, Kevin McVicar, John Taccone & Janet Vu. Photos taken by Tony Halmos. You can see the full documentation here.

The project presented immersive and participatory multimedia events that engaged audiences & communities in an exploration of the iconography and cultures of fandom surrounding the “League of Legendary Ladies”, an evolving group of female artists and performers, who, throughout their careers, have pushed boundaries and persevered with goddess-like strength.

Selective event GIF documentation from the series, featuring the Smack of the Hand nail art bar, a Lorna Mills animated GIF work,  a House of Monroe dancer & Bahia Watson. Event GIFs by Lorna Mills. For more, click here.

In its first year, the series commissioned on a monthly basis an inaugural programme of on and offline performances, sounds, installations and visuals that focused on such musical icons as Yoko Ono, Madonna, Erykah Badu, Dolly Parton and Grace Jones. It included a cross-section of diverse and eclectic performers, such as the Juno Award-winning dub poet Lillian Allen, Colombian performing artist Lido Pimienta (KU DE TA Records), electronic artist U.S. Girls (Fat Cat Records) and vogueing crew House of Monroe.

Sheroes was a hub for a myriad of Canadian and international contemporary artists featuring frenetic assemblages of performance art, sounds, GIF and GIF-based video art, installations, DIY projects and various activities. Our site-specific, two-channel video projections of stunning digital animations involved a sizable coterie of established and emerging new media artists.

Selective documentation from Virtual Season, featuring public art installations by Kristen McCrea & En Masse, performances from Ada Dahli, Lemon Bucket Orkestra & Kids On TV, and commissioned GIF works by Blinking Girls & Gaby Cepeda. Photos by Tony Halmos. Event GIF by Lorna Mills. For more documentation, click here.

Our inaugural series closed in July 2012 with Virtual Season, an all-day and night arts & music festival co-presented with Artist-Run Centre Whippersnapper Gallery. A culminating presentation of new and past works, the closing event featuring a stellar line-up of local bands and performers as well as international artists at two venues in Toronto’s Kensington Market during a Pedestrian Sunday.

All events were brainstormed and archived online, uniting digital communities with real-time audiences in an ongoing examination into fan culture and collaborative content creation.

The Sheroes Collective

• Rea McNamara, Salonnière
• Tony Halmos, Supervisor of IRL
• Lorna Mills, Group GIF show curator
• Alvaro Giron, Resident DJ

Exhibitions (So Far)

2012

• Sheroes: Virtual Season, a day and night art and music festival co-presented with Whippersnapper Gallery, Cecil Street Community Centre and backlot of El Gordo Foods, for P.S. Kensington, Toronto, ON.
• Sheroes #12: Nina Simone, site-specific multimedia installations and collaborative performances event, The Beaver, Toronto, ON.
• Sheroes #11: Dusty Springfield, site-specific multimedia installations and collaborative performances event, The Beaver, Toronto, ON.
• Sheroes #10: Grace Jones, site-specific multimedia installations and collaborative performances event, The Beaver, Toronto, ON.
• Sheroes #9: Dolly Parton, site-specific multimedia installations and collaborative performances event, The Beaver, Toronto, ON.
• Sheroes #8: Marianne Faithfull, site-specific multimedia installations and collaborative performances event, The Beaver, Toronto, ON.
• Sheroes #7: Etta James, site-specific multimedia installations and collaborative performances event, The Beaver, Toronto, ON.
• Sheroes #6: Erykah Badu, site-specific multimedia installations and collaborative performances event, The Beaver, Toronto, ON.

2011

• Sheroes #5: Yoko Ono, site-specific multimedia installations and collaborative performances event, NACO Gallery, Toronto, ON.
• Sheroes #4: Madonna, site-specific multimedia installations and collaborative performances event, NACO Gallery, Toronto, ON.
• Sheroes #3: Tina Turner, site-specific multimedia installation and collaborative performances event, NACO Gallery, Toronto, ON.
• Sheroes #2: Chaka Khan, collaborative performances event, NACO Gallery, Toronto, ON.
• Sheroes #1: Joni Mitchell, collaborative performances event, NACO Gallery, Toronto, ON.

Catalogue

2012

• Whippersnapper Gallery “Is She a Snob?” essay by David Balzer published online on Triangulation Blog.
• Whippersnapper Gallery Virtual Season curatorial statement by Rea McNamara.

Bibliography

2012

• (forthcoming) Interviews with Sheroes: Virtual Season artists Adam Harms, Gaby Cepeda, Rollin Leonard, Sarah Weis and Emilie Gervais for Triangulation Blog.
• “Sheroes art series dazzles Toronto one last time” Sheroes: Virtual Seasonreview by Aubrey Jax for BlogTO.
• “Multicultural — for real this time” Sheroes: Virtual Season review by Kelli Korducki for THE GRID.
• Dialogue between Rea McNamara, Lorna Mills and Andrew Benson for Triangulation Blog.
• “Sheroes” interview with Rea McNamara by Kevin Ritchie for NOW Magazine(online).
• “Grace Jones, Yoko Ono, and Madonna Walk Into a Bar…” feature by Anna Fitzpatrick for The Toronto Standard.
• “My Sheroes” essay by Andrew Benson for pixlbrains.tumblr.com.
• “Sheroes” interview with Rea McNamara by Aubrey Jax for Offerings Magazine.
• “The Night Shift: We could be Sheroes” feature by Paul Aguirre-Livingstone for THE GRID.

Linked and Referenced

• Rhizome
• Bruce Sterling
• Rosario Dawson

A hashtag-free safe space.

Linkbait is an invitation-only hashtag-free safe space I host at the Toronto-based open source social enterprise Academy of the Impossible.

The series came about via my involvement with the Academy: I satt on its faculty and was a research associate with the internet think tank that’s based there, Metaviews.

Linkbait began in Spring 2012 with a trilogy of salon events exploring the current state of online curation, crowdsourcing & content farming. Attendees included bloggers, journalists, writers, as well as editors from publications such as The Grid, Now Magazine, the National Post & The Globe & Mail.

The series is on hiatus, but will return. In light of how it developed within the hashtag-free safe space environment, its focus will broaden to explore digital cultures, internet trends & virtual communities.

Below is an overview of the events so far.

Linkbait Salon 1 (March 2012)

Tags/phrases explored: “Tim Horton’s Journalism“, “commenter culture“, “vanity media”, “confessional media”, “mega mainstream meme“, “aggregator wars“, “curator’s code“.

(Click here to read the event’s recap.)

Linkbait Salon 2: CONFESSIONS! (April 2012)

Tags/phrases explored: “Heather Armstrong is our sister friend“, “overshare”, “Tumblette”, “trollgazing“, “trolling“, “Samantha Brick“, “White Girl Problems”, “Leah McLaren”, “Rebecca Eckler”.

(Click here to read the event’s recap.)

Linkbait Salon 3: PERSONAS! (May 2012)

Tags/phrases explored: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”,  ”executive realness“, “vanity media spirit animal”, “SUPER-BRANDING“, “media darling futurism”, “executive realness dystopian crystal visions“, “millenial exec realness con job“.

(Click here to read the event’s recap.)

For news & updates related to Linkbait, please follow the micro-blog: heckyeslinkbait.tumblr.com.

File under: “experimental ambien”.

T∆NG∆ was an “experimental ambien” band/project that I was involved with that performed live, free-form electronic music, often accompanied by projected video art created by members of the band.

T∆NG∆ members were Travis Gledhill, Alvaro Girón, Kev Mayo, Lorena Salomé  & myself.

“NIGHT WALKER” (2012).

Documentation of our October 2009 performance at Sound Control.

“Gypsy Cake Mix” (2011).

Excerpt from “Whiskey Sour” (2010) for a video work by Travis Gledhill.

“Always a believer”, a music video made from live performance footage from our NACO Gallery monthly T∆NG∆ Party.

If you’re interested, you can listen to more of our music on our Soundcloud. You can also watch more video works utilizing our music by Lorena Salomé & Travis Gledhill.

(And if you really like us, why not “like” button us on Facebook?)