Part of Summer 2000
In her first solo exhibition, videomaker Monique Moumblow will enchant Toronto with a selection of tapes spanning from 1993 to her most recent work produced out of her hometown of Montreal. The evening will serve as an introduction into Monique’s multiplicity – her varying “personae-duets”– pairs of faces that are certainly not always friendly, nor clear regarding their intentions. These include the underhanded strategies and shamefully entertaining stunts of Monique’s egomaniacal “friend” Anne Russell in Liabilities (1993). The question is posed: how to sweeten the deal that will make us fall in love with her? And indeed, who are we to be in love with, Monique or Anne? This notion of the distressed duet continues throughout the remaining works revealing itself through characters lodged inside video cameras in Joan and Stephen (1996); poltergeists engaged in domestic disputes in Three Waltzes (1998); and foreign subtitles which bare questionable relevance to the pictorial counterpart in Sleeping Car (2000). There will also be a collaborative “surprise performance” between Monique Moumblow and Yudi Sewraj!
Programme:
Liabilities – The First Ten Minutes (10:00 min., 1993, betacam, colour)
Before she was born, her parents had an argument about what to name her. Her mother wanted to name her “Anne” after an aunt, but her father wanted to call her “Monique” after a character that appeared in a late-night television movie.
Liabilities – Part Two (12:30 min., 1993/2000, betacam, colour)
An accident…
Joan and Stephen (12:00 min., 1996, betacam, b/w)
Joan watches her parents from an upstairs bedroom. Stephen is a lover who lives inside my video camera. “I’m a voyeur, but I’ve always wanted to be an exhibitionist.”
Plug (4:00 min., 1997, Hi-8, colour)
A conversation with an electrical outlet.
Three Waltzes (7:00 min., 1998, betacam, colour & b/w)
Three Waltzes: #1 Levitation, #2 Poltergeist, #3 untitled
Sleeping Car (5:30 min., 2000, super 8, b/w)
A narrative constructed on a train, resembling an old foreign film – sub-titles, black and white images, a woman speaking Swedish…The story repeats three times. The images are hypnotic. Eventually the voice and sub-titles begin to drift apart.
Two Short Performances by Monique Moumblow and Yudi Sewraj.
Monique Moumblow lives in Montreal. She was born in Hamilton in 1971 and received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design 1992. She works in both performance and video. Since 1991, she has been assuming the identity of “Anne Russell,” who as an alter ego, has become a co-director of some of her tapes. Her most recent work Sleeping Car won a Jury Prize at the 1999 Rendezvous du Cinéma Québecois Festival.
