PATERSON, Andrew J.

Pate’s Salt Carp
Thursday October 10, 7 pm
630 Queen Street East

Pate is a senior gentleman whose life is suspended between analogue and digital. Pate downloads analogue documents prior to a daily memory exercise. After concluding the durational exercise Pate prepares a special meal. This is a performance concerned with aging, remembering, and house cleaning, as well as the parameters of language and disclosure.

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.

I was flattered to be chosen as one of 7a*11d’s 2024 Éminences Grises, as I haven’t really thought of myself as a performance artist for years. But I do have a performance history. I was originally a performing guitar player for VideoCabaret in Toronto, who used to be an interdisciplinary company mixing theatre, video, and live music. I performed and wrote some music for Electric Eye, a video play by Michael Hollingsworth. Unscripted, I reacted against the characters on the video….both verbally and sonically (with the volume control on the guitar). My role in Electric Eye attracted the attention of performance art practitioners and I wound up beginning a performative practice.

Tension between live body and prerecorded or preexisting bodies or texts has been a throughline in my performance practice. Tension between bodies and technologies has also been a recurring motif through my better-known video art practice. Language has been a constant….. the pleasures and inadequacies of language. I recently presented a performance Pate’s Salt Carp, which of course refers to Samuel Beckett. Here an aging body dismantles a recording technology and then remembers significant events on a particular day over many years duration. I have always been overly dependent on calendars and schedules. I am hopelessly locked into grids but I enjoy disrupting them.

Pate’s Salt Carp
Saturday May 11 4 pm
the plumb
1655 Dufferin Street (basement), Toronto

Pate’s Salt Carp is co-presented by Toronto Performance Art Collective (7a*11d) and FADO Performance Art Centre as part of the plumb‘s retrospective exhibition Andrew James Paterson: Never Enough Night, running April 26 – May 26, 2024.

Presented by the plumb and curated by Laura Carusi, Anthony Cooper, and Kate Whiteway, Andrew James Paterson: Never Enough Night is the most extensive survey exhibition of the seminal Canadian artist’s work to date. The exhibition will include a wide selection of Paterson’s video work spanning from the early 1980s through to the present, as well as poetry, painting, music, archival material, a live performance series, and an original catalogue. Never Enough Night includes a wide selection of Paterson’s video work spanning from the early 1980s through to the present, as well as poetry, painting, music, archival material, a live performance series, and an original catalogue.

the plumb is a DIY artist-run project dedicated to offering a surplus of space in a city where space is at a premium—particularly for artists, community organizers, and marginalized groups. We are interested in providing exhibition space to emerging artists, fostering dialogues with established voices, and providing a platform for culturally diverse artists and curators. the plumb is administered by an ad hoc collective of artists, writers, and curators working alongside guest programmers and collaborators. We strive to be responsive, quick-moving, and non-bureaucratic in our operations while maintaining principles of anti-racism, inclusivity, and consensus-based collaboration.

Symptoms of Whatever
Thursday November 5 4 pm
Friday November 6 6 pm
Saturday November 7 3 pm
Zsa Zsa, 962 Queen St W (storefront window)

Curated by Shannon Cochrane and Paul Couillard as part of Field Trips

Toronto artist Andrew Paterson returns to 7a*11d with this storefront performance that considers fear, obsessive behaviour and agoraphobia. Working off of the gallery’s location across from the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, Paterson weaves drawing, tableau, music and text into a complex street level piece that draws parallels between dramatic meteorological phenomena and stigmatized mental and physical behaviour.

Well-known for his hip, engaging performance and video work, Andrew J. Paterson has also curated many programs of film, video and installation work that deal with mental health issues and institutions as well as projects that give voice to psychiatric survivors.

Performance: A Performance
Friday August 8 8 pm
Symptom Hall | 160 Claremont St (just south of Dundas St W, west of Bathurst St)

Curated by Johanna Householder, Louise Liliefeldt, Derek Mohamed & Tracy Renée Stafford as part of Prognosis Terratoid Cabaret

Andrew James Paterson has created video and performance art pieces for 15 years.  Many of his video tapes are in active distribution, their completion assisted by a dozen grants over his career.  He has presented pieces and had screenings all over Canada, in Atlanta, Berlin, Belgium and Ireland. Performance:  A Performance has been produced at A Space in Toronto, the Stride Gallery in Calgary, and was published in the Spring 1996 issue of Canadian Theatre Review.

Eyewitness account