Part of Summer 1999
Who could ever deny our daily acts of drag? Impersonation and cross dressing, essential to our activities in the banal (and the not-so-banal), to our lives as manifested in our relatively autonomous (career, professional, liesure, ethnic, linguistic, etc.) role-playing identities. Dragged out…. surveys the ravishingly rugged terrain of contemporary artists – drag or metadrag, if you will!- in video and in film.
Not only is transvestism addressed from transgendered perspectives as with the forever punning Wrik Mead in his Guise (Toronto) and Atif Siddiqis versified postcolonial Erotic/Exotic (Montreal), but also from the transsexual : Ivan E. Coyote’s radical ‘Family Portrait’ Transmission (Vancouver) and Rita Kung’s delicate La Difference (Lucerne). Bjorn Melhus continues his pointed exploration of androgeny and cloning in No Sunshine and Blue Moon (Berlin). You’ll never forget Minnie St-Laurent’s transgressive, melancholic homage to Tammy Wynette in Stand By Your Man (Toronto/Moncton). The program closes with Richard Fung and Tim Maskello’s very special School Fag (Toronto), documenting an eloquent young queen-to-be……
Other artists represented include Charles Atlas, Pierre-Yves Clouin (Paris), Vaginal Creme Davis (L.A), Tom Kalin (NYC), Christoph Oertli (Zurich), Glennda Orgasm (L.A), et al. Most titles are Toronto or North American premieres. Program notes include original contributions from, among others, John Greyson, Arthur Kroker, Bruce LaBruce, and Tom Waugh. Darling, need I say, a show not to be missed!
