Curatorial Incubator: Life on Venus screening and curator’s talk tonight at Vtape

Tonight is the premiere screening of the last program in the 2009 Curatorial Incubator – The Dark Arts: magic and intuition series at Vtape. Titled “Life on Venus,” the program examines feminism and the uncanny through a series of videos by Canadian and international artists that investigate the discomforts of the everyday.

Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines 8 [still], 2006, Courtesy Broadway 1602

Curated by Matthew Hyland, the interim director and assistant curator at Oakville Galleries, the program includes work by Toronto artist Deirdre Logue, landmark video artist and theorist Martha Rosler, and the amazing Shana Moulton, whose work I only recently discovered and am totally enamoured with. Moulton manages to make work that is the perfect mixture of pop culture appropriation, over-the-top personae, self-reflexive musing and playful experimentation. It’s simultaneously absurdly hilarious and endearingly earnest in a way that reminds me of many people’s childhood experiments with video and audio recording equipment.

Salla Tykkä, Lasso [still], 2001

The catalogue for this season of the Incubator, including programs and texts by Darryl Bank, Erik Martinson, Hyland and Leigh Fisher, is available at the opening and Hyland will be doing a curator’s talk and Q & A session at 7 pm at Vtape at 401 Richmond St., suite 452.

“Life on Venus” program:

Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, 6 min.
Jennet Thomas, SHARONY!, 2000, 11 min.
Gunilla Josephson, CRASHBANGSMASH, 2001, 3 min.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Me/We, Okay, Gray, 1993, 5 min.
Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines 8, 2006, 8 min.
Deirdre Logue, Eclipse, 2005, 5 min.
Salla Tykkä, Lasso, 2001, 4 min.