Jeanne Randolph & Glen Johnson

Winnipeg, MB (April 16, 2008) – Video Pool Media Arts Centre proudly presented an evening of performative lectures on creativity and technology by Jeanne Randolph and Glen Johnson.

Psychiatrist and cultural theorist Randolph uses psychoanalytic methods and concepts, themselves amenable to productive misuse, to reveal the ways in which technological devices and/or their depictions are open to creative and critical interpretation. Johnson projects digital slides in a manner reminiscent of corporate culture and middle management to support his thesis that technology has ruined art, while Randolph uses a technology associated with yesterday’s middle-school science teachers and art historians – the conventional slide projector – to comment on mass media culture. Through a hilarious presentation based on classical scholarship, Johnson took his audience back to scenes of Lascaux, urging artists to abandon “all this technological nonsense” and to “go back to crushing berries and burning sticks.”

ARTIST BIOS:

Jeanne Randolph is one of Canada’s foremost cultural theorists. A practicing psychiatrist, Randolph is also known as a performance artist whose extemporaneous soliloquies (on topics varying from cat curating to boxing to Barbie dolls to Wittgenstein) have been performed in galleries and universities across Canada as well as in England, Australia, and Spain.

Glen Johnson is a performance and installation artist whose work invariably involves text. He has delivered faux-lectures to stunned audiences in at least two provinces. He has hung a bed on one wall and nailed tiny words to another. He has performed at aceartinc, The Annex, Gallery 803, Platform Gallery, Mount Saint Vincent University, the University of Winnipeg and the Winnipeg Art Gallery. He is largely responsible for the website www.persiflage.ca. He received a Bachelors Degree in Classics from the University of Winnipeg in 1993 and expects that some day they will ask for it back.

These performances were presented thanks to generous financial support from The Canada Council for the Arts, The Manitoba Arts Council, and the Winnipeg Arts Council.

Video Pool thanks the Winnipeg Film Group for their generous presentation support.