Zeesy Powers’ “Projected Realities”

by | Nov 14, 2010 | Exhibition Essays, Writing | 0 comments

On Friday night, I had the pleasure of seeing a set of new works by Toronto artist Zeesy Powers at Gallery TPW as part of the gallery’s ongoing series “You Had To Be There,” which investigates the relationship between liveness and images. I’ve known Powers’ work for a long time now (in fact, I’ve curated it into a few of my shows), so it was exciting to see her new performance-projections, including TOTAL PANIC, a new piece that uses professional dancers as performers rather than the artist herself.

I also had the pleasure of writing the critical text to accompany the performances, and of interviewing Zeesy about her approach to her new practice. I’ve been thinking about the relationship between repetition and live performance in her practice for a while, so it was nice to be able to focus in on it for this particular series (curated by Kim Simon). You can read the text online here, or download the PDF. Big thanks to Zeesy, for letting me have sneak previews of her work whenever she creates it, and for being willing to do an informal interview after a long day of work, and to Kim Simon for inviting me to write for TPW (still one of my favourite galleries in the city, even if it’s a bit nepotistic at this point).