The Queer City Cinema Blog

WE WALK WITH ZOMBIES DOWN THE PRIM ROSE PATH  BY MARTIN O'BRIEN AND SHEREE ROSE AND THE GHOST OF BOB FLANAGAN ASSISTED BY JEFFREY VALLANCE The entanglement of a community is often rooted in a use of similar language and meaning; a trust of shared understanding and knowledge. For Sheree Rose and Martin O’Brien, performance has meant taking personal practices and activities around S&M out of the bedroom and into the wider world, extending its meaning from the privacy of being among other enthusiasts and inviting others in the public to consider the ways that marginalized bodies, in this case sick with cystic fibrosis, can have agency over illness; to be sick the way a person wants to be sick by pushing and embracing heightened experiences around symptoms.  Three shallow graves, mounds of dirt covered in cut roses, laid out on the floor of the gallery space. In true spectacle form, the artists were summoned from the dead, displacing dirt and worming their

THE REMAINS OF MEMOR Y BY MARILYN ARSEM Marilyn Arsem’s  The Remains of Memory  was a performance for one participant at a time. Set up directly in front of the main window at Dunlop Gallery, Arsem sat at a table working at solving a figural jigsaw puzzle. Next to her on the table, pointed towards an empty chair, sat a book of calendar pages. As each audience member sat with the Arsem, the artist worked on the puzzle while discussing fear of loss about memory and relative understanding of time.  Being invited to speak quietly and intimately about such vulnerable ideas as the artist's personal fear of memory loss due to her experience mother's disease, despite existing within a public fishbowl, quickly shrunk the space. It was surprising how quiet the moment became. The artist invited the participant's own perceptions on memory, and conversation turned to a question -- can you remember what you were doing on any given day if you close your eyes and randomly point to

GORDURA TRANS (TRANS FAT) by MIRO SPINELLI As the audience entered and sat on the ground of the Dunlop Gallery, curtained off from the window to the Public Library and sphere of the general public, the pre-performance scene set by artist Miro Spinelli appeared like a still life of a kitchen prep station. A large square of plastic taped to the floor, punctuated by five glass mixing bowls half-full with pillows of off-white bison fat, created a sterile island in the middle of the space. The artist, standing naked in the centre of the plastic, posed in a series of familiar sequences evoking nude-art-school-model-meets-classical-European-sculptures, slowly turning while steadily, quietly, intently meeting the gaze of the audience members. Reaching for a bowl, Spinelli began working the bison fat. Having performed iterations of this work several times before, the artist had requested a local fat be provided and the organizers of the Festival sourced from the body of this