Wildflowers of Manitoba

Noam Gonick and Luis Jacob

A performance installation by Winnipeg filmmaker Noam Gonick and Peruvian-Canadian artist Luis Jacob, Wildflowers of Manitoba features a young man slumbering underneath a geodesic dome. Four different projectors show “idyllic fantasies” of four young men living off the grid in a survivalist camp on the shores of Lake Winnipeg. The videos, projected on the dome, invoke 1970s style communal living and sexual freedom and are set to music by Québécois rock band Harmonium.

Meeting God

Adriana Varella

Meeting God discusses the body's horizontality; how the essential moments of existence--birth, sex, dreaming, death--involve being horizontal. All within an intimate bedroom setting. Projections of multiple flesh on a mattress, arboreal disorientations, the horizon before a sea-journey, eggs nursed and burst, and a violent, celebratory dance of death and birth.

The Key

Marc Arthur

The Key combines action painting, sculpture and performance to challenge spectators to view art in an interactive way. Performers planted in the audience break the boundary between performer and audience as they emerge and create unique scenes and speeches within the audience itself. A large paper is used to script/map/design a structure for the performance. In general, the main concept of the work is: obtaining a key to enter through a door. The innovation of this piece is the various media used to represent and realize the concept.

Fight or Flight

Kadet Kuhne

Be sure to hold your breath for this tempestuous ride through bondage, suspension and the power of the mind. Electrical impulses produce a kinetic expression of reactionary states in this adrenaline-packed spectacle.

Too Rich Tourists

Smith and Lowles

In a toxic haze of red, white and blue gloss paint, an artificial forest opens up, a sanctuary where baroque meets pop, fairytale meets grunge, purity meets sin...where red, white and blue are re-appropriated as nature, at a time when there is a desire for an alternative reality. A Place where everyone’s a tourist.

MY ‘PSYCHO’ BATHROOM

Szu Burgess / Alexis Pace

The most infamous and terrifying shower scene committed to celluloid gets a new soundtrack: a sanctuary interrupted by violence.

Motel Room Porn

Inbred Hybrid Collective

Single-channel video installation incorporating the glitch caused by a damaged rear projection monitor.

Schema Corporeal

Hector Canonge

New-media installation and performance explores the politics and cultural attitudes about gender and identity through the integration of personal text narratives, barcode label technology and the artists’ body as an interactive canvas.

S/HEMALES

Paul Wirhun

Taoism teaches us that all of life is in a balance between Yin and Yang; when one aspect becomes unbalanced it morphs into the other to regain inner balance. One expression of this principle I find at work in the queer communities is when "MEN" go to the gym to gain the perfect (hypermasculinized) body, they become like "WOMEN" in their concerns to be most beautiful as well as the huge chests (breasts) they achieve. Another example is the rise of the TRANNY of all varieties within a society that is so often at war. One issue of H/X years ago showed Dolly Parton and some porn star on the same page - and their tits were the same size....so I thought I'd put Dolly's head on the muscled male body and so began this delightful visual romp. ENJOY!

I Want To Be Left A Loon!

Peter Cramer

A bird, a lake, a landscape. A comic and tragic multi media installation. Taking the Greta Garbo quote, “I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said, ‘I want to be left alone.’ There is all the difference,” Cramer explores the relentless pursuit by the media of cult figures/celebrities that becomes an intrusion both privately and publicly not just for the subject but also the audience intended to be titillated by every detail of someone else’s life. Special thanks to Sur Rodney (Sur) and Materials for the Arts.

Atlantis Unbound

Lori Hiris

Atlantis Unbound tracks the scientific study of hereditary traits dating back to the 19th century with Sir Francis Galton’s attempt to outwit his uncle Charles Darwin, to the discoveries of Thomas H. Morgan in the early 20th century with the Drosophila Melanogaster fruit flies, to James Watson’s modeling of the double-helix and finally to the incorporation of genetic traits in the database and the myriad of possibilities technology presents.

The Pier When It Burnt

Patrick Staff

Through a combination of text-based posters, sculpture and projected video with a performed voiceover, this multidisciplinary video installation explores a deconstructed relationship between monolithic structures--here, the sprawling seaside pier—and the origin of one’s identity. Merged with orbiting fictions and exploring a relationship with queer icons, in particular the writer John Rechy. Using archive materials relating to the pluralized nature of the rituals surrounding such structures, the piece at once unravels, whilst at the same time weaving a web of multiplicitous sources and narratives; reflecting a queer formation identity and a macabre relationship with one’s growing up and relationships with fiction and queer figures in literature.

Live Animation Performance

Bill Hsu

A 10-minute solo improvisation, using Hsu’s new performance system, PSHIVA, that works with audio and animations. His system manipulates visual performance components that evoke the tactile, nuanced, timbrally rich gestures that Hsu enjoys in improvised music, allowing him to set up tensions between abstract and referential elements, and between gestural and textual sections. Visual elements evolve between referential objects and abstract particle clusters. Hsu’s inspirations include Rorschach inkblots (used in psychological evaluations), and the occult practice in scrying, in which images are seen in mirrors, bowls of water, etc.

Living Room Cinema

Stephen Kent Jusick

Home movies, of a sort, presented in an old-fashioned setting, recalling the heyday of amateur filmmaking.