Trinity Square Video and Pleasure Dome are pleased to present the two-person exhibition Don’t Talk to Strangers featuring a new single-channel video by Los Angeles artist Harry Dodge and video and prints by Toronto artist Alison S.M. Kobayashi. Both are gifted performance artists who portray a range of eccentric invented characters; they employ video to show these personalities scrutinized by the mediating force of the camera. Under its gaze, they act out a kind of highly theatrical multiple personality disorder. With each persona, the artists test out not only different identities but more importantly, different ways of reacting to the pressure of being recorded.

In Dodge’s This Beast Called Force (USA, 18 min, 2009) a character of unstable identity (and uncertain gender) is videotaped while sitting in a room with the television on. Instructed to be as “free” and “loose” as possible, this test subject spars with the TV images that flow by (weather reports, horror movies, etc.), offers harebrained theories about human digestion and magic brown dwarves, and describes and acts out disturbing movie scenarios. This volatile figure sports three grotesque masks—one appears to be made out of elaborate, flowery foam; another, a paint-smeared tote bag; the last, a torn white acrylic fur rug—with each marking a different persona. Whether Dodge’s character(s) are cogent and articulate or lost in nonsense and stutter, they plunge us into a sustained and sometimes frightful wrangle with forces that remain unnamable, unclassifiable.

While lighter in tone, Kobayashi’s DO GOOD (Canada, 11 min, 2009) also begins with a masked figure, a painfully shy little girl named Percy forced to do a (stilted) presentation explaining the brownie badge she has created (“Batman for a day”) and how she earned it. Ditsy Yoko, meanwhile, testifies of her love for animals, while keener Jenny warns us of the detrimental effects of TV (Dodge should take note) and chubby-cheeked Georgia encourages us to talk to strangers—unless they’re perverts. This ritual of forced testimonial about one’s ethical superiority seems designed to tame all the restless and reckless energies of childhood—the id of “this beast.” Kobayashi’s uncanny characterizations reveal all the bad behaviour, pubertal humiliations and failed attempts at maturity and normality that besmirch youth, all the mess that is unsuccessfully sublimated by the brownies into uniforms, gendered socialization and (supposedly) altruistic good deeds.

Harriet “Harry” Dodge is a visual artist working in video and sculpture, with a focus on shape, unnameability and hybridity/defiance. She has been acclaimed for her large-scale, performative monologues and her award-winning feature film By Hook or By Crook (2000). Dodge graduated with an MFA from Bard College, and became part of a videomaking team with Stanya Kahn whose work has been exhibited internationally, including at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Dodge is also co-founder of the collaboration TESTHOLE, which has undertaken a series of community-based interventions/partnerships experimenting with decomposition and fertility, and teaches art and writing at CalArts, UCLA and UCSD.

Alison S.M. Kobayashi is a visual artist working in video, performance, installation and drawing. Working with found narratives from a variety of sources, including lost letters and discarded answering machine tapes, Kobayashi imagines identities for the subjects of these marginalized media. She incarnates a panoply of personas that are both studiously and playfully rendered. Kobayashi won the TSV Artistic Vision Award for Best Local Short Film at the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival (2006) and was awarded the Mississauga Arts Award for Best Emerging Artist (2007). Her films have been shown in Canada, the US and Hong Kong.

Organised by: Trinity Square Video and Pleasure Dome

Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival (November 11-15, 2009) and TSV are pleased to present the work of two renowned artists, Berlin/Singapore-based Ming Wong and Vancouver’s Jin-me Yoon. Central to the works of both Wong and Yoon is the conflict between body and place—a conflict that is represented by the exchange between the artists’ bodies and the transitional spaces into which they insert themselves.

In Angst Essen / Eat Fear, Ming Wong plays all the characters in a densely layered restaging of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s seminal film about love between cultural outsiders. Using green-screen compositing, Wong is able to appear on screen as both Ali, a young Moroccan immigrant worker, and Emmi, a German cleaning woman – as well as all the secondary characters.

In a pivotal moment from the original film, Emmi and Ali are refused service at an outdoor café.  The couple imagines a “somewhere”— a place of reprieve that, when visited together, will alter the reality at hand. “When we get back,” Emmi says, “it will all be different.”  With his recreation of this scene, Wong suffers the same indignation: the alienation is echoed as his own race and gender are inserted into the narrative.  His redoubled return to this material assures difference.

Jin-me Yoon’s performance-based video series, As It Is Becoming (Beppu, Japan), features the artist, clad in black, crawling on the streets of Japan like an alien creature or a wounded soldier. These rigorous actions evoke scenes of evasion or survival combat techniques.  Her body moves through Kannawa District’s urban renewal, through a former U.S. army base converted into a park, and across an atomic treatment centre. Yoon’s odd physical feats do not fit here.  The contrast of her clothing against the landscape makes it seem as though she was composited atop the scene, hovering about its surface. Exploring the conflict between her body and these places is twinned with her identity as a Korean-Canadian foreign to Japan. Yoon’s haunting work creates a new, uneasy space for us to consider ideas of identity and nationalism.

Ming Wong lives and works in Berlin and Singapore. He represented Singapore at the 2009 Venice Biennale where he received a Special Mention for his solo exhibition, “Life of Imitation.”

Jin-Me Yoon lives and works in Vancouver and teaches at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. She has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally and was shortlisted for the 2009 Grange Prize. She is represented by the Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.

Organised by: Trinity Square Video and Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”

The insistent voice and vision of 1960’s New Left activists is largely responsible for many of the civil rights we have come to expect.  Their speeches, writings, images and actions exist as a critical mode of delivering change: such pictures, words and gestures serve as an important part of the lexicon of post-modern activism and act as a conduit for invoking many contemporary political engagements.  These “displays” of civil action are a crucial form that connects its participants – protestor and observer – to the protest and into it.

Organised by: Trinity Square Video