Curated by Erik Martinson and cheyanne turions, This Story Begins and Ends with Us will feature recent work by Alsharif, including The Story of Milk & Honey (2011), Turkish Delight (2010), We Began By Measuring Distance (2009), and Everywhere was the Same (2007). Alongside this showcase of Alsharif’s work will be Peer Pressure, a curatorial initiative by the artist, featuring a contextualization of her practice through the influence of her peers. What links these works together is the kind of questioning the artists perform in regards to their environments (physical, virtual and/or formal), and the way the artists push the boundaries of the mediums and genres in which they work, thereby creating a kind of positive peer pressure.

The artist talk at A Space, in collaboration with No Reading After the Internet, will feature selections from Helter Skelter (1974), the true crime classic, which will be offered up as a way to examine an author’s or artist’s relationship to historical detail and corresponding ideas of accuracy.

Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, Basma Alsharif spent her early childhood in France, and then immigrated to the US after being denied residency. She received an MFA from UIC in 2007 and relocated to Egypt. Alsharif has since worked between the US, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and the UAE on multi-media and single channel installation works. Alsharif’s work has shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally.

Alsharif will also be leading a workshop at Trinity Square Video entitled The Re-Enactments. The workshop is aimed at artists interested in exploring issues outside of their practice or current projects. Participants will explore the functional uses of re-enactments within various societies, leading to a group exhibition that reflects the activities of the workshop. For more information and registration, please visit www.trinitysquarevideo.com.

Special thanks to the Canada Council for their support of this programming through their Visiting Foreign Artist program and to Circuit Gallery for their generous support in creating the artist’s prints.

We are pleased to present a two-part screening on June 2 featuring a program of Richards’s recent solo and collaborative work followed by Mouth Room, a program of videos by Stuart Marshall, Anne McGuire, Duncan Campbell and others curated by the artist. On June 3, join us at The Power Plant for a discussion between Richards and Chicago-based artist Steve Reinke about their ongoing cross-Atlantic video collaboration, and the confluence of their practices. This dialogue is part of The Power Plant’s 25th anniversary programming.

James Richards has had recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Chisenhale Gallery, London; Trinity Square Video, Toronto; Tate Britain, London; and Tramway, Glasgow. His work was included in the Coming After exhibition at The Power Plant and The Generational: Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum, New York. His work is represented by Rodeo, Istanbul.

Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his single-channel videos, which have been screened and exhibited worldwide. The exhibition of his work as a young artist, The Hundred Videos, took place at The Power Plant in 1997. His single-channel work is distributed by Vtape and he is represented by Birch Libralato, Toronto.

“The short movies of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby have been tearing up the festival/gallery circuit for the past fifteen years, copping awards and retrospectives around the world. In this collection of scripts, creative writings and critical missives, their word smart blend of home spun animation, bedroom pop philosophy songs, and glam personas by the galore get the full treatment. Imagine threesomes, daddy’s porn, fame, and the importance of animals served up on a private TV station. It feels like your fave indie band put all their flash tunes into instantly hummable video vignettes.”

“The book is both smartful and stylish, featuring Electric Animal author Akira Lippit on the couple, Czech film scientist Andrea Slovakova, video legends Tom Sherman and Monique Moumblow, music writer Terence Dick, queer avatar Sholem Kristalka and video dad Steve Reinke. Novelists Claudia Dey and Kyo Maclear lend wit and grace. There are also a pair of fully illustrated video scripts, a hilarious tell-all interview with writer pal Sara Hollenberg, a suite of unpublished writings by Duke (including I Hate Orgasms) and a collection of commissioned artist’s pages. All in colour.” (Mike Hoolboom)

Rain location: CineCycle, 129 Spadina Ave (down the lane)

Submissions under 15 minutes in length can be emailed (maximum of 25 MB) to zipijo@sympatico.ca or sent via website link, Vimeo, YouTube or mailed to Anne O’Callaghan at P.O. Box 162, Station C, Toronto, ON, M6J 3M9. Deadline July 20, selected artists will be notified by July 26.

Johannes Zits is a Toronto-based artist whose practice flows freely among video, photography, collage and painting. He has presented work extensively both nationally and internationally.

Artscape Gibraltar Point is a 20-minute walk east from either Hanlan’s Point or west from the Centre Island ferry docks. For the complete Toronto Ferry Schedule, visit www.toronto.ca/parks/island/ferry-schedule.htm.




Its membership is an organic amalgam of those who joyfully encounter Pleasure Dome and comprise a diverse range of makers, thinkers, curators and academics. Operating in the tradition of the underground screening series, their seasonal programs (winter, summer and fall) cover a lot of ground in exhibiting a diversity of media art practices, which is indexical to the variety of creative types involved in the collective. Keenly aware of available presentation and exhibition contexts, they steadfastly seeks out artists who incorporate the uncommon, alive and spontaneous into their work, challenging the conditions of black box cinema where docile audiences passively watch on. In many ways, Pleasure Dome is a feedback loop. They intently foster prolonged interactions between artists and audiences, developing communities that endure long after the projector is turned off.

In its origins, Pleasure Dome was one of the few ongoing exhibitors of independent, artist driven, experimental media work. Perhaps as a measure of its success, this kind of work is now part and parcel of Toronto’s film communities (even the Toronto International Film Festival, an industry machine, now features an extensive program of art film under its Wavelengths moniker), and so Pleasure Dome continues to chase the horizon of what else film and video can be. At the forefront of their thinking is an interest in supporting artists who transform boundaries into worksites and question ruling orthodoxies about art-making. In this way the collective is an evolution in tandem with the artists it supports.

Pleasure Dome’s seasonal schedules allow for programming that is particularly contemporary, responding to social and political urgencies of the day. In its 20+ years of programming, the collective has disproportionately focused on issues around identity and representation, featuring the works of artists who are, or were once, marginalized because of gender, sexual orientation or race. In this way, their programming slates are expressly anti-hegemonic and derive from an activist motivation to create a venue for whispered histories. They showcase media art that might otherwise fall between the cracks, inviting work that is ambiguous, ethically evocative and difficult.

The collective also acknowledges the mutability and resonance of work through time, mounting retrospectives of important if under-acknowledged filmmakers to new audiences. This fall, for instance, they will be presenting the moving images of Donigan Cumming, an artist famous and infamous for his representations of the radically other. In the 16 years since he started making films, what of his subject matter still has the power to perplex or revolt an audience? And why?

Also as part of their fall schedule, Pleasure Dome’s upcoming presentation of Robinson in Ruins (2010), the final film in Patrick Keiller’s Robinson Trilogy, follows the eponymous title character as he crosses the English countryside expounding upon myriad millennial anxieties and premonitions of late capitalist collapse. It is a timely presentation of the work, coming as it does following widespread rioting across the UK and amidst paradigm-shifting unrest and uncertainty in the face of global austerity and economic crisis.

By pointing backward and forward in time, Pleasure Dome asks its audience to consider what else we might become. And then, audaciously, they take a chance to make it happen through their support of our hypotheses, however wild, implausible or utopic.

Pleasure Dome is a future-tense mode of existence.

Pleasure Dome can be found online at www.pdome.org

Published in Color magazine 9.5 > http://www.colormagazine.ca/magazine/issue/9.5

Pleasure Dome is pleased to present the Toronto premiere of Steve Sanguedolce’s fifth feature film, Blinding (2011, 72 min.)

Vision, in all of its manifestations, permeates the disclosures of the three characters that journey us through Blinding: Jackie, a lesbian police officer grappling with the corroding forces of perception both within and outside her profession; Jamie, for whom the horrors of the Rwandan genocide are tempered by the distance offered by technologies of the military industrial complex; and Ryan, who has progressively lost his sight, retaining just one per cent of vision in one eye. In attending to vision and its primacy in Western society, Sanguedolce materializes the traumas it inflicts, whether through the imperceptibility of truth and its subjective red herrings, obfuscations and blind-spots, or the moment where recognition changes you forever—often for the worse. Blinding couples the confessional intimacy of a documentary with a hypnotic panoply of hand dyed images, luring its audience into a compromise between visual skepticism and optical sumptuousness.

Winner Special Mention Award for Feature Length Documentary at plus Camerimage International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography in Bydgoszcz, Poland.

On Blinding:

A hypnotic, mesmerizing journey which will both challenge and haunt the viewer”. Baibre Holmes, Raindance Film Festival.

“Sanguedolce is a true poet of images” SoleLuna Festival, Italy.

“If you get to see one film this festival… it’s modern day alchemy … a ravishing feast of textures and tones”. Don O’Mahony, Corona Cork International Film Festival.

“The desire to push the boundaries of image in this genre may be the key to Sanguedolce’s approach to filmmaking”. Emmet O’Brien, FILM IRELAND.

“Adventuresome documentary — with expressionistic visuals beautifully hand-colored on 16mm. Always interesting”. Dennis Harvey, VARIETY.

“A complex and compelling narrative of unusual beauty and power. Seattle Gay Scene, Weekly.

“A bold mix, expertly put together, that will lead you to see the world in a whole new way. Andy Spletzer, Seattle International Film Festival.

BIO:
Canadian filmmaker Steve Sanguedolce has always been interested in home movies. Only during his tenure at Sheridan College (1978-81) was he given the tools to grant this interest expression. Trained in the personal documentary ethos of the Escarpment School, Sanguedolce started creating a body of work that peers relentlessly into the darkest and most private moments of the self. Blinding is his fifth feature. Sanguedolce has been an active member of Toronto’s independent film community for over thirty five years winning numerous international awards. His work has screened at several prestigious international film festivals including Rotterdam, Toronto, Mannhiem-Heidelberg, Oberhausen, Montreal’s World Film Festival as well as several others. Over the past 15 years he has been hand developing and hand colouring motion picture film to great acclaim. Much of his time has been spent teaching at local universities, community colleges or conducting independent filmmaking workshops around the world.