Part of Fall 2012
“This I Promise You assembles international performance-based video works that herald an alternate future—part utopia, part nightmare—in which dominant structures of gender and sexuality finally collapse beyond the borders of bodies and gestures. While some videos point to the fragile fault lines that are being torn apart as we speak, others propose fantastical visions, realities on the other side, worlds that the artists have decided they will wait for no longer. These videos all seem to make a promise to the viewer: a promise that there is more ahead, a promise that it won’t be long, a promise that we are, in fact, already there.
This I Promise You emerges from the curatorial process that led to Los Angeles-based Zackary Drucker’s simultaneous solo exhibition opening on September 15 at Vtape, and includes Canadian premieres of work by Julika Rudelius, Jacolby Satterwhite, Pascal Lièvre, Mikiki, as well as Drucker & Rhys Ernst. A live performance by Drucker concludes the evening of single-channel video.”—Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
Program:
Lost Lake (Zackary Drucker + Van Barnes, USA, 7’45”)
M3RM41D (Mikiki, Canada, 2012, 2″)
Dressage (Julika Rudelius, Netherlands, 2009, 9″)
Belly Dancer (Pascal Lièvre, France, 2009, 4″)
Reifying Desire, Part 2 (Jacolby Satterwhite, USA, 2011, 8″)
She Gone Rogue (Zackary Drucker + Rhys Ernst, USA, 2012, 22″)
The evening will conclude with a live performance by Zackary Drucker.
Vtape Exhibition September 15 — October 13
Opening: September 15, 1 — 5 PM, @ 401 Richmond St., #452
Curated by Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
Artist and curator in attendance
Vtape programming season will open with an exhibition of Zackary Drucker’s work, curated by Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay and a public lecture that takes in the expanded body of work produced by Drucker.
You Will Never Be a Woman, you must live the rest of your days entirely as a man and will only grow more masculine with every passing year. There is no way out. A video by Zackary Drucker (9:00, 2008) in collaboration with Van Barnes, Mariah Garnett, A.L. Steiner.
The 2012-13 Vtape’s Artists Squared (Artists to the Power of Artists)
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
A public lecture on the work of Zackary Drucker
Saturday, September 15, 2pm @ Vtape in the VMAC Gallery
The lecture will be the second edition of Artists Squared (Artists to the Power of Artists), a new Vtape programme that seeks to expand and deepen public discussion around media arts through an annual lecture presented by an artist and focused on the work of another artist. We envision that this programme will sharpen vocabularies and produce important critical tools for the understanding and appreciation of media arts.
In this lecture, to be followed by a publication, Nemerofsky Ramsay will look at Drucker’s work from a variety of angles, including a social critique of the growing proliferation of consumer-driven pornographic imagery and language in mainstream media, transgender expression outside of the Male-to-Female/Female-to-Male binary, and the aesthetics of performance video art after Ryan Trecartin.
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is a Montréal-born artist and diarist who was based in Toronto and active in the local art and video community throughout the 1990s. Since 2001, he has divided his time between Berlin and Montréal. His work contemplates the history of song, the rendering of love and emotion into language, and the resurrection of voices –sung, spoken or screamed – from the past, taking form through video, sound, print and textiles. His work has been exhibited throughout Canada, Europe and East Asia and is represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.
Recent curatorial projects include the short video program No Ordinary Love for the Vienna International Short Film Festival (2010) and serving on the curatorial committee for Paraphrasing Babel, a series of site-specific video installations in public spaces throughout Maastricht and Heerlen, Netherlands taking place this October. www.nemerofsky.ca
