GYMSICK
Hazel Meyer and Lucy Pawlak
Curated by Veronika Ivanova
July 20 — August 2, 2018
Hazel Meyer and Lucy Pawlak
Curated by Veronika Ivanova
July 20 — August 2, 2018
Hazel Meyer is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, performance, drawing and text to investigate the relationships between sport, sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Her work aims to recover the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of sports and recreation. Drawing on archival research, she creates scenarios that bring various troublemakers—lesbians-feminists, gender outlaws, leather-dykes—into the performative spaces of athletics. Recent exhibitions include Tape Condition: degraded with Cait McKinney at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Toronto, a screening of Slumberarty at the Glasgow International Biennale and a commission to produce the installation and performance Where Once Stood a Bandstand for Cruising & Shelter for Nuit Blanche Toronto. She holds degrees from OCAD University (Toronto) and Concordia University (Montréal). Lucy Pawlak's body of work aims to make room for improvisation and play within structure. The various mediums Pawlak uses (performance, writing, drawing, chat, time based media) act as frameworks for considering how and why we adhere to systems and what possibilities breaking with patterns might offer. Pawlak is exploring boxing as a medium to think through experiences of falling in and out of time. She is fascinated by techniques of feinting and slipping. When a boxer slips, a blow slips by. Feints are designed to distract or mislead, feinting means always doing something different then expected or even nothing at all, it means performing, jittering, twitching, dancing in and out of time, playing a different game. Performances and screenings include: The Jumex Museum (Mexico City), Whitstable Biennial (UK), Videonale (Bonn, Germany) The Showroom, Hollybush Gardens, ICA and National Film Theatre (London), Art Metropole (Toronto), Fogo Island Arts (Canada), Karma International (Zurich), The Onassis Cultural Centre (Athens), Kettles Yard (Cambridge), The Palais Kabelwerk (Vienna), Zentrum Paul Klee (Switzerland). Critical Forums: Lux Associate Artists Program 2011 (London), Lux Critical Forum 2010 (London) Screen writing collaborations: Maquinaria Panamericana with Joaquin del Paso. Premier: Berlin Film Festival, awarded Best Script at the Mexican Ariel Academy Awards 2017 and at Raindance Film Festival, London. This exhibition was made possible by the Arts Council England. |
Feint*, Slip, Body Shot Boxing as writing. Writing as felt. Moving words.A Gymsick session of writing reps and sets with writer, artist and shadow boxer, Lucy Pawlak ON: Saturday the Twenty-Eighth of July, FROM: fifteen hundred hours to seventeen hundred hours This workshop is free and for everyone, come as you are, expect to be in the dark, listen to music, watch 2 short videos, do graffiti, form phrases for banners, and play a different game. One, two, three, four, Five, six, seven, eight, And, One, two, three, four, Five, six, seven, eight, “can a poem be choreographed or improvised the way a dance can? Maybe, if it can be inhabited the way a body is, if each word and phoneme indicates a part of a living system moving through space and time with immortal intentions, if the words populate a vision and also dangle that vision over the ledge of the unknown, testing and establishing its boundaries in the same gesture. If the poem is inside of a syntax that loves it, it cannot help but propel with the grace and rigor of a spinning body.” — Harmony Holiday’s Poetry Manifesto: Somebody who loves me * The Golden Rule of feinting is: always do something different then expected. Once you feel their rhythm start slipping Deathnastics Eliza Chandler, Kim Collins, Esther Ignagni, Deirdre Logue, and Allyson Mitchell August 2, 7-9pm Deathnastics is a performative, exquisite corpse-esque death cafe. Different than a traditional death cafe wherein participants are asked questions to provoke personal reflections on death, Deathnastics will take our cue from the Killjoy Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House and ask questions about the death of certain ideas, paradigms, and activisms that are necessary to crip feminist art and activism, as well as intersectional conversations about death and vitality. We position ourselves as one among a series of queer-feminist acts of re-worlding as we enact the necessary ‘death of tropes’ that nullify a crip-feminist coming together. This event is barrier-free and will have ASL interpretation. |