God Play
Tanya Mars and Andrew James Paterson
Tuesday October 1 – Saturday October 19, 2024
Open Tuesday – Friday 10 am – 5 pm ; Saturday 1 – 5 pm
Bashir/Yerex Presentation Space, 401 Richmond Street West, suite 440
OPENING RECEPTION
Friday October 4, 5 – 7 pm
(artists will be present)
Presented by Vtape; curated by TPAC
Vtape and Toronto Performance Art Collective enthusiastically present God Play, an exhibition featuring Tanya Mars and Andrew James Paterson, this year’s Émineces Grises at the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art. Bringing together video and performance works from 1987 to present, the exhibition embraces the melodramatic mayhem of two artists who have consistently explored the tropes of popular culture and their underlying motivations.
The works in this exhibition reflect on the media imperative to (re-)construct truths through familiar images and personas. Sharing a savvy use of celebrity and theatrics, Mars and Paterson inhabit and re-frame iconic figures from history, film, literature and visual art within critical explorations of power and influence. In his 1987 video work Immortality, Paterson fades in and out of view as the lustfully glamorous Norman Desmond, a superstar famous for his pursuit of fame as well as his suspicious death. Legacy, memory and the media that create them are called into question in this take on a made-for-cable-television documentary. Following the infomercial form, Mars’s Mz Frankenstein features a monstrous Dr. Frances Stein demonstrating the body-shocking “Relax-a-cizor,” a simple machine that uses electric currents to stimulate muscular exercise, as popularized in 1950s beauty products. Verging on body horror, Mars’s performance in Mz Frankenstein juxtaposes the spectre of Frankenstein with images of women’s bandaged bodies, recovering from the pursuit of the perfection idealized by celebrity and consumer culture.
In their most recent works, Mars’s and Paterson’s melodramas take a serious turn, reflecting the brutal truths of our shared realities with themes and images of climate crisis, war, and sickness. In Waiting for God (2024), Mars (performing as a beaked 17th Century Plague Doctor) stands with collaborator Stein Henningsen (contrastingly costumed in a bright yellow emoji-esque smiley face) while they patiently wait for God to revitalize a clear-cut forest. In formal contrast, Paterson’s Elemental (2022) takes a frantic pace in a montage of found internet clips depicting extreme weather, fire, and war scored by a haunting artist-produced soundtrack.
Parallel to the works in the presentation space, two viewing stations in the 401 Commons offer an opportunity to revisit selected video documentation of performance works by the artists. Tanya Mars’s ambitious Tyranny of Bliss from 2004 used Toronto’s urban landscape as a backdrop to reimagine the 7 heavenly virtues and the 7 deadly sins in service of a 7-hour social satire on the human condition. The work featured a cast of 30 performers simultaneously animating 14 different downtown locations. Vérité documents from the first two 7a*11d festivals capture the deadpan play that informed Andrew James Paterson’s mediatized appearances of the period. In 1997’s Performance; A Performance, a teleprompter-reading Professor Wordsworth warms up the audience with his musings on performance before ceding the stage to a series of projected and televised images of Paterson sparring with different versions of himself decked out in varying forms of queer fetish gear. Then, to the familiar strains of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, the performer re-emerges as his nakedly performing self: a singer. In 1998’s Symptoms of Whatever, Paterson sleeps in a storefront window against a backdrop of colour field paintings, small drawings, and concrete poetry while a soundtrack broadcast to the street offers a stream-of-conscious dreamscape monologue that speaks of — what else? — the weather.
Ranging from the partially-pessimistic to the silly-serious, the works in God Play highlight Mars’s and Paterson’s commitment to probing how the personal becomes political in unexpected ways as the secular and sacred, the human and the larger-than-life, intermingle in a play of contamination, transformation, and perpetual reconfiguration.
Tanya Mars is a feminist performance artist who has been actively involved in the Canadian art scene since 1973 doing many different things. She has lived and worked in Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia. Since the ’70s Mars’ work has focused on creating spectacular feminist imagery that places women at the centre of the narrative. Since the mid-’90s her performances have included endurance, durational and site-specific strategies. Her work is political, satirical and humorous. She has worked both independently and collaboratively to create both large-scale as well as intimate performances in Canada and internationally. Ironic to Iconic: The Performance Works of Tanya Mars, was published in 2008 by FADO, edited by Paul Couillard. She is the recipient of a 2008 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Recently retired from teaching at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Mars lives off-grid in Nova Scotia. She has one daughter and 3 grandsons.
Andrew James Paterson is an interdisciplinary artist living in Toronto, Ontario. His work engages in a playful questioning of language, philosophy, community and capitalism in a wide range of disciplines, including video, performance, writing, film and music. Now a senior artist, Paterson has contributed to artist-run discourse for nearly four decades — serving on the boards of Trinity Square Video, A Space, and YYZArtists’ Outlet. He has curated media-arts and other programmes for these organizations as well as Cinematheque Ontario, Mercer Union, Images Festival, Pleasure Dome, and Available Light in Ottawa. He has edited and co-edited books for YYZ’s publishing program; and contributed to anthologies published by Gallery TPW and to periodicals such as FILE, IMPULSE, FUSE, and Borderlines. Between 2011 and 2017 he worked as coordinator for the8fest Small-Gauge Film Festival. His media-arts works have shown locally, nationally, and internationally over three and a half decades — in Seoul, Bangalore, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Amsterdam, Paris, New York City, and many other centres. Paterson’s artist’s book Collection Correction was published in 2016 by Kunstverein Toronto and Mousse of Milan. His novelette Not Joy Division was published by IMPULSE B in Toronto in early 2018. In 2019, Paterson received a Governor General’s Award for his work in Visual and Media Arts.
