RetroFlex Queer Film Series
Screening Itinerary:
Casualties of Modernity – Kent Monkman (2015)
Thursday July 18th 2019
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Doors open at 6:30 pm
Drag Race X – Mikiki (2007) 4 min 35 sec
Performance at 24 Hour Art Marathon – Ana Felaxos/Michael Connors Jackman and Rachel Jean Harding (2009) 15 min 1 sec
Death Race – Mikiki (2011) 6 min 52 sec
Artist as Present – Irma Gerd 2 min 42 sec
Rib Bone – Lucas Morneau (2018) 23 sec
[intermission]
Wake Up! – Jessie Short (2015) 5 min 58 sec
Seance – Kent Monkman (2010) 3 min 46 sec
Casualties of Modernity – Kent Monkman (2015) 14 min 20 sec
Mikiki Rose Beef sermon – TBD
Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts from an Unrepentant Whore – Mirha-Soleil Ross and Mark Karbusicky
Friday July 19th 2019
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Doors open at 6:30 pm
Year of GIF – Paul Wong (2013) 5 min 44 sec
Quicktime Interruptus – Stephen Andrews (2004) 1 min 30 sec
Pussy / cat – Kai Bryan (2017) 29 sec
Disoriental – Paul Wong (2014) 1 min 15 sec
Plastic Bag – Irma Gerd (2017) 23 sec
[no intermission – brief pause]
Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts from an Unrepentant Whore – Mirha-Soleil Ross and Mark Karbusicky 1 hour 14 min
Stone Mouth – Kai Bryan (2014)
Saturday July 20th 2019
1:00 pm – 3:30 pm
Lesbian Hand Gestures – Coral Short (2012) 2 min 54 sec
Arrangement – Coral Short (2014) 3 min 26 sec
Stone Mouth – Kai Bryan (2014) 3 min 14 sec
Slumberparty 2018 – Hazel Meyer & Cait McKinney (2018) 25 min 33 sec
Herstory of Porn – 1 FB event
[intermission]
Steam Clean – Richard Fung (1990) 3 min 30 sec
HERSTORY OF PORN – Annie Sprinkle (1999) 1 hour 10 min
In the Golden Rods – Jamie Ross (2015)
My Animal Wants and The Land that Carries Me
Saturday Evening, July 20th 2019
7:00 pm
Chimera – Coral Short (2016) 5 min 27 sec
Cry of the Loup-garou – Glen Gear (2014) 4 min 19 sec
the coyotes must see the moon… – Midi Onodera (2017) 1 min 38 sec
Being Green – Jess Dobkin (2011) 3 min 30 sec
[intermission]
Ikuma Siku – Glenn Gear (2013) 6 min 58 sec
Resettlement [floating home] – Glenn Gear (2013) 3 min 16 sec
Two to a Blanket, Feet to the Fire – Jamie Ross (2012) 8 min 40 sec
In the Golden Rods – Jamie Ross (2015) 1 min 47 sec
We have always been on fire – Sasha Wortzel 5 min 57 sec
Like you and me – Mark Adams (unknown) 1 min 44 sec
Sissy Boy Slap Party – Guy Maddin (2004) 6 min 19 sec
‘Water Makes Us Wet’, Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens (2017)
Saturday Evening, July 20th 2019
8:15 pm
Down the Drain – Midi Onodera (2017) 1 min 26 sec
The Apocalypse – ContraPoints (2018) 24 min 23 sec
Water Makes us Wet – Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens (2017) 1 hour 20 min
Artist Bios
Jamie Ross is a visual artist, preschool teacher and witch. His award-winning video works have screened on four continents. He works as a professional card-reading diviner, a consulting spellworker and as the first Pagan chaplain for men incarcerated in federal prisons in Quebec. In his practice, he aims to create space for contemplation, sensitivity and being together. Jamie lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal).
Website: jamieross.org
Lucas Morneau is an interdisciplinary artist from Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Morneau received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts at Memorial University – Grenfell Campus in 2016, where he spent a semester abroad in Old Harlow, England, and his Master of Fine Arts (Studio Art) at University of Saskatchewan in 2018. Using photography, video, printmaking, sculpture, installation, and performance, Morneau’s work is autobiographical and based in social activism. Through his alter-ego The Queer Mummer, Morneau deconstructs gender norms and challenges homophobic and heterosexist attitudes still prevalent in Western society.
Website: https://www.lucasmorneau.com/
Jason Wells is a visual artist and performer in St John’s Newfoundland, and is also known by the name Irma Gerd. Irma is a shapeshifter who uses the power of drag and lip-sync to tell her stories. They are interested in the fluidity of identity, and the documentation of queer history.
Instagram: @Queen.IrmaGerd
Website: www.jasonwellsart.net
Glenn Gear is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist of Inuit and Newfoundland heritage currently residing in Montréal. His work often explores personal and cultural connections to land, people, and animals through the use of animation, archives, craft, and research-based investigation. His films have screened in festivals throughout Canada and around the world.
Videos can be seen at: www.vimeo.com/glenngear
Jessie Short is a curator, writer, and multi-disciplinary artist and emerging filmmaker whose work involves memory, multi-faceted existence, Métis history and visual culture. Short obtained an MA degree in 2011 and an Undergraduate degree in 2006, and has also received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts council for her curatorial and film making practice. Short worked in the visual arts department at The Banff Centre for the Arts, and she also spent two years as the executive director of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective in Toronto, Ontario.
Guy Maddin, a 2015-16 visiting lecturer at Harvard, has created, over the last 30 years, countless shorts and 11 feature films, including the just-completed The Forbidden Room, which premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, and opened the 2015 Berlin Film Festival Forum. Earlier in his career he helmed Emmy Award-winning ballet film Dracula — Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002); The Saddest Music in the World (2003); Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), and US National Society of Film Critics Best Experimental Film Prize-winners Archangel (1991) and Heart of the World (2001). He is also an internationally acclaimed installation artist and the author of three published books. He is a member of both the Order of Canada and Order of Manitoba, and was awarded the Telluride Silver Medallion for life achievement in film in 1995.
Website: https://guy-maddin.com/
Kai Bryan is an award-winning visual artist, curator, and drag weirdo based in St. John’s, Ktaqmkuk. Their works in video, performance, and installation deploy craft-based practices, cinematic references and eroticism to playfully undermine and question experiences of intimacy, pleasure, and desire. They love large bodies of water, puzzles, and puns.
Website: www.Kaileybryan.ca
Instagram: @backslash.garbagefile
Mark Adams is a queer artist and drag performer based in St. John’s Newfoundland. His work explores the combination of queer entertainment and dance music culture with the everyday vernacular, conflating and subverting the normal into the uncanny and kitsch.
Mikiki is a performance and video artist and queer community health activist of Acadian/Mi’kmaq and Irish descent from Newfoundland, Canada. Their work has been presented throughout Canada and internationally in self-produced interventions, artist-run centres and public galleries.
Their identity as an artist is informed and intrinsically linked to their history as a sexual health educator, harm reduction worker and activist. Mikiki’s creative themes often address safety and responsibility, disclosure and self-determination, community building and reckoning with trauma and loss.
Jess Dobkin’s performances, artist’s talks and workshops are presented internationally at museums, galleries, theatres, universities and in public spaces. Her creative endeavors have received wide support and recognition, including awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council, and repeated funding from the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art and the Astraea Foundation.
Kent Monkman, born in Canada in 1965, is a Cree artist who is widely known for his provocative interventions into Western European and American art history. He explores themes of colonization, sexuality, loss, and resilience—the complexities of historic and contemporary Indigenous experiences—across a variety of mediums, including painting, film/video, performance, and installation. Monkman’s gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle often appears in his work as a time-traveling, shape-shifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples.
Midi Onodera is a Japanese-Canadian artist born and raised in Toronto, Canada. She is an award-winning filmmaker who has been making films and videos for over thirty years. Her work explores social constructions of sexuality, gender, race and culture. She has over twenty-five independent short films to her credit as well as a theatrical feature film and an abundance of short videos. Her recent works feature a collage of formats and mediums ranging from 16mm film to analogue video to digital video and “low end” digital toy formats. From 2006 to 2010, Midi has made over 430 online videos or “Vidoddles” for projects that include: A Movie A Day, Movie of the Week and Baker’s Dozen.
Richard Fung is a Toronto-based videomaker and writer. His tapes, which explore the intersection of race, sexuality and representation, have been widely screened and collected internationally, and his essays on cultural policy and politics have been published in many journals and anthologies. Richard frequently programs film and video, and has served on the boards and committees of many organizations. He has lectured and taught across North America and is the recipient of many awards, including Rockefeller and McKnight Foundation fellowships, The 2000 Margo Bindhardt Award and most recently The Bell Canada award for excellence in media arts.
Mirha-Soleil Ross is a performance artist, videomaker, transsexual activist, curator, sexworker. Transplanted Québécois Ross is Toronto’s most visible and prolific transgender cultural voice. The star of the National Film Board’s well intentioned documentary In the Flesh (Gordon McLennan, 2000, 47), Ross’s sixteen or so own video productions have much more raw artistic energy and political bite—“gut-busting, ass-erupting and immoderately whorish,” as she says in the compilation of video excerpts. The tapes, often made in collaboration with Xanthra MacKay and Mark Karbusicky, blur boundaries among document, demonstration, performance, narrative, autobiography, representation… and provocation. From her own personal body, history and experience to the political fields of reproductive technology and animal rights, Ross’s restless art covers a broad landscape of politics and desire. Ross founded Toronto’s “Counting Past Two” trans-arts festival in 1998.
Mark Karbusicky (1972-2007) accomplished artist, director and editor. Director of Rod Coronado: A Voice for Liberation (2001). Collaborator with Mirha-Soleil Ross: Journée Internationale de la Transsexualité (1998), Tales from the Derrière (2000), G-SPrOuT! (2000), Tremblement de Chair (2001), Madame Lauraine’s Transsexual Touch (2001), Lullaby (2001), Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts from an Unrepentant Whore (2002), Proud Lives (2002), ALLO PERFORMANCE! (2002), MATERSTINA (Langue Maternelle) (2003), Live eXXXpressions: Sex Workers Stand Up (2006), Brandee aka Al Lana Lamarre (2007) and Les Vérités Vo(i)lées (2007). Assistant Editor on Proteus (2004) by John Greyson. Editor of Tom (2002), Imitations of Life (2003), In the Dark (2003), Public Lighting (2004), and Fascination (2006) by Mike Hoolboom.
Michael Connors Jackman PH.D is a writer and researcher and course instructor at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, who was a long standing performer at the Eastern Edge Art Marathon in the early 2000’s as Ana Felaxos. As Ana Felaxos their performances often involved inducing anaphylactic shock while delivering hard hitting monologues.
Rachel Jean Harding is a photographer and videographer who documented a significant amount of the early 2000’s drag and music scenes capturing a large amount of the queer perfomers featured at Eastern Edge’s 24 hour Art Marathon.
Paul Wong is a media-maestro making art for site-specific spaces and screens of all sizes. He is an award winning artist and curator who is known for pioneering early visual and media art in Canada, founding several artist-run groups, leading public arts policy, and organizing events, festivals, conferences and public interventions since the 1970s. Writing, publishing and teaching have been an important part of his praxis. With a career spanning four decades he has been instrumental proponent to contemporary art.
Stephen Andrews was born in 1956 in Sarnia, Ontario Canada. Over the last twenty five years he has exhibited his work in Canada, the U.S., Brazil, Scotland, France and Japan. He is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Belkin Art Gallery, the Schwartz Collection, Harvard as well as many private collections. His work deals with memory, identity, technology and their representations in various media including drawing, animation and recently painting.
Sasha Wortzel is an artist and filmmaker working between New York and Florida. Blending documentary and narrative storytelling, her films, installations, and performances explore how structures of power shape our lives around race, gender, desire, and place.
Hazel Meyer is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, performance, 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 designs immersive installations that bring various troublemakers—lesbians-feminists, gender outlaws, leather-dykes—into the performative spaces of athletics.
Hazel often collaborates with her partner Cait McKinney. These collaborations explore their shared attachments to queer histories through research, writing, and archival interventions.
Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle have been partners and collaborators for 16 fertile years. Annie was a sex worker who morphed into an internationally known performance artist touring one-woman shows about her life in sex and a feminist post porn pioneer. Beth was a feisty punk rocker dyke turned interdisciplinary artist and professor at UCSC exploring themes of gender, queerness and feminism. In 2008, Beth and Annie married the Earth and came out as ecosexuals. Their “Ecosex Manifesto” launched a movement and they officially added the E to GLBTQI-E. Their award winning documentary film about coal mining, Goodbye Gauley Mountain—An Ecosexual Love Story is available on iTunes and from Kino Lorber. They just finished a new environmental doc film, Water Makes Us Wet—An Ecosexual Adventure. Currently they are working on a book about their work, “Assuming the Ecosexual Position” for University of Minnesota Press. Their visual art, films and performances were presented the world’s biggest best art exhibit, Documenta 14 in 2016-2017. These girls have gone green and are dirty and proud.
Coral Short was born on a beautiful island off the west coast of Canada and was raised by a lively river in the countryside where her eccentric family lived off the land. She spends a fair amount of time dispersing her magic around the globe – in the air, on railroad tracks and highways all the while curating and doing artist residencies. Coral has lived and created art in Asia, North America, and Europe for the last 15 years. She has many beloved people, communities, and locations that she calls home. Short and her countless projects move at the speed of light; ironically she is the most still when she travels.