Diptychs: Background Check
Johanna Householder and Judith Price
Cinq à sept (5-7 pm), Friday, August 9, 2024
Householder and Price will present work in the Gallery Space developed during their senior production residency. The reception will focus on their collaborative use of Zoom video conferencing tools in ways that open up artistic possibilities.
During the first hard lockdown of 2020, Johanna Householder in Tkaronto, ON and Judith Price in Victoria, BC began exploring what a video conferencing platform like Zoom could provide as a kind of studio space for experimentation with connectivity, improvisation and architecture; working within an image/space. While in residence at Paved Arts the artists intend to further develop the paradoxical relationship between dis- and connection in the screen space, and to explore what narratives might shed light on this conundrum.
“On screen, we move around in an apparently two-dimensional flatland consisting of focal lengths: foreground, mid-grounds, background. The background can of course be replaced with an image of anything – something that the video conferencing world is pushing to comical limits. But we would like to get in there and really dig around digitally, introducing projections and performance. We will inhabit the glitch space, moving in and out of the background, as our bodies fragment. The figures may penetrate the ground in this figure/ground relationship, or is it that the ground is overwhelming the figure. We want to tell the stories that ask these questions, and bring the background forward.”
The artists will both be in attendance to discuss their work and meet members and artists of our community.
Johanna Householder
Johanna Householder has been making performances, dance, video and intermedia art since the late 1970s. Working at the intersection of popular and unpopular culture, she shapes plundered source material in order to talk back to mass forms. She co-founded Danceworks as a venue for post-modern dance and performance in Toronto in 1978. As a member of the notorious feminist performance ensemble, The Clichettes, throughout the 80s, she helped establish lip sync as a viable medium for cultural critique. Householder continues to practice her own brand of cultural détournement, often in collaboration with other artists.
Her video collaborations with B.H. Yael (Approximations 1- 3 ) and with Frances Leeming, We did everything adults would do, what went wrong? have screened internationally and her recent series Diptychs, made in collaboration with Judith Price have been exhibited at the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, SK (2022), the J.B.Aird Gallery, Toronto, ON (2023) and Flux Media Gallery, Victoria, BC (2024).
She has performed site-specific works at LIVE in Göteborg, Sweden and Guangzhou, China; Swan Lake in Victoria, BC; and Performancear o Morir in Chihuahua, Mexico; and in performance festivals like undisclosed territory in Java; M:ST in Calgary, AB; Art Nomade in Chicoutimi, QC; and VIVA! in Montréal.
With Tanya Mars she edited Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance art by Canadian women, YYZ Books (2005), and More Caught in the Act, YYZ Books and Artexte (2016). She is one of the founders of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art which will hold its 14th biennial festival in Toronto in October 2024. The Clichettes currently have a retrospective, Lips, Wigs and Politics, on view at the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, ON. She is professor emerita in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University.
Judith Price
Judith Price (MFA, UBC, 1988) combines a 30+ year transdisciplinary art practice with a background in modern dance. Her body of work includes performances (street actions, interventions, and collaborative, durational works), video installations, site-specific installations and short films. Solo performances have included still images, video projections, and sculpture, often merging perfomance and video installation.
Over the past two decades, much of her film and video work has focused on the ephemeral, transitory nature of memory and the vicissitudes of the act of remembering. Two recent solo projects speak to those concerns: Here/Not Here, an 8-channel video installation for the Flux Greenlight Project, Victoria, 2019 and Bearing Witness, a performance with video, Open Space, Victoria, 2017.
Since 2020, Price has collaborated with Johanna Householder on an improvized performance project over Zoom, resulting in the Diptychs Project. The 6 Episodes were presented online at the Dunlop Gallery, Regina, in 2022 and as a video installation at the Aird Gallery, Toronto, for the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival, in 2023 and at the Flux Media Gallery, Victoria, BC in 2024. Other episodes were shown online for the IMAF Festival 2020, Serbia; R-A-W, Belfast, 2021; and Digital Moments, Victoria, 2021.
The British Columbia Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the City of Victoria have funded her works and they have been shown nationally and internationally.
Price is a founding member of the Open Action performance collective, and is retired from post-secondary teaching (time-based art), living and working in Victoria, BC; an uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen/Esquimalt,Songhees W̱SÁNEĆ nations.
