International Women’s Day 2016 Online Screening
Video works by Christine Kirouac, Divya Mehra and Wendy Geller curated by Bev Pike were available to watch online March 8 & 9!
In celebration of International Women’s Day on Tuesday, March 8, Video Pool was excited share three works in our collection made by incredibly talented Manitoban women, curated by Bev Pike.
Girl on Girl Action by Christine Kirouac
2001 | Video | 5:33
This short film combines two opposite contexts of social interactions, one being life-size rock em’ sock em’ boxing footage at a seedy cowboy bar, and the other a refined tea party for two set against the dramatic fall forest. Both activities share a ritualistic nature that appears as natural as the absurdity of the situation itself. The result challenges expectations of feminine behavior, using a humorous narrative, as well as leaving the viewer unsettled and the match uncharacteristically unresolved.
Like Me by Divya Mehra
2008 | Video | 4:03
In this video, I perform a traditional dance of the North Indians to a song that was first sung by my ancestors.
Missed the online screening? See Like You on VUCAVU now!
Jill Skinner – Diary of a Star by Wendy Geller
1985 | Video | 9:20
Through multiple costume changes and by assuming multiple personas the artist deconstructs the idea of celebrity. As the videotape unfolds the costumes and personas become increasingly transparent while the environment surrounding the artist becomes more and more claustrophobic. With a darkly humorous undertone the artist examines the suffocating effects of vanity and the conflict between desire and disappointment that underlie cultural notions of celebrity.
SOPHIE TUCKER’S SISTERS
This program for International Women’s Day 2016 is evocative o f the following quote by Sophie Tucker, the Last of the Red Hot Mamas (as told to the BBC in 1964).
I’ve always made up my mind to do what I wanted to do. With numbers, with songs, with dresses, with anything with people. If I make up my mind that’s what I want to do it’s done. Â
I get what I want, I do what I want, I am the boss.
Tucker was a singer famous for her saucy Flapper era songs. The 1920s and 1930s were lively times in which Manitoba women tossed their Victorian corsets, raised their hemlines, and some even sought professions and higher education. Cheeky humour was, and so it remains, part of any emancipatory movement. Sophie’s part in the revolution built on decades of feminist lobbying so women could be persons under the law, could own property, could claim their own children and vote.
Many of her songs advocated women take charge of their own romances.
Video Pool has many artworks by women that embody Sophie’s role-modelling. This program features three tapes that compliment each other to embody her witty iconclastic mission.
– Curator Bev Pike