the first week after my full time trauma therapy ended, i did a pretty good job of mostly rest and self care. doing just the basics to get ready for my upcoming exhibits and performances.
last night i slept from 5:30 pm to 10:30am (whoa) and then today my brain could barely chug itself around making a cup of coffee. i was confused all day and stressed because there were a few small details i had to figure out. i needed to call in a friend to help and now i am ready for the rest of the week, and i can mostly rest. my cognition can still drop out and then i feel like i can’t wrap my brain around much besides cuddling my dogs and making stuff.
i feel a little better now that i made this picture. and wrote this. making stuff is really the only way through for me.
his is a double blog post about the last two creative projects i was involved in.
how it must feel being in a zoo:
i had the pleasure of working as a performer with artist Kent Monkman for THE ART GAME, an installation at the Toronto Art Fair.
i played the most prolific artist in the world. the piece is a fun house with a side show feel. i was in a windowed room painting in a twelve armed outfit.
hundreds of people walked by the window in the time i was in there. and apparently if there is a piece of glass between audience and performer, the audience thinks you can’t hear them.
favourite overheard comments:
child: does that painter use all her arms to paint? father: (exasperated) people have two arms.
she’s not painting
she’s not real
she’s not dipping the brush
an hour ago she was a man
this is bullshit
i don’t want her to paint me
i don’t want her looking at me like that (I wasn’t even looking at that person)
bang bang on glass get to work
and the cake taker: a guy who started taking his clothes off and rubbing his nipples the evening of the gala. classy.
i’m making a little video about how it felt being in a box and watched. i’ll post it soon.
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the inspiration perspiration balance:
i recently had the pleasure of working on a music video for Jane Siberry’s latest album the THREE QUEEN’S TRILOGY.
this was the first time i generated creative content -by myself- for a project for someone else. running my own production company i was usually the overseer of the creative and had the final say with the director. in this case, i did have the excellent Ingrid Veninger as creative consultant which was terrific. this was my first hands on everything gig and boy did i love it.
the video is comprised largely of pixel paintings and animation generated by laptop, which is under equipped for such endeavours.
i started pixel painting when i was recovering from illness, i came up with the process during my art therapy. when i experienced waves of anxiety i would pixel paint to calm myself down. i literally would sit down at my computer, go out of myself and make something without any deliberate thinking whatsoever.
so this art creation was a far cry from my usual film maker workflow. and i had abundant faith that it would work out, but i wasn’t sure how. especially with a ten day deadline.
to prepare i listened to the whole album and specifically the song WHEN WE ARE A VAMPIRE. when i felt ready i sat down an made something. something to send in. a starting point. looking back that first cut was pretty balanced and flowed okay but was entirely images of me. so i start afresh with some notes from Ingrid and some pictures of Jane.
the second cut and the third cut felt less inspired and less artistic. i didn’t like what i was making.
i lost the effortless flow when i had to factor in the other parameters. and then all of a sudden, my worked kinda sucked. so here i was three cuts later, with three days to deliver and i had nothing. so i guess this is what my panicking directors felt like. not being inclined to panic myself, i broke it down like i would for helping a director.
i made steps and i followed them myself. i listened to the music without thinking, i re-read all the notes i had from my other versions, and took some time away and stay focused and relaxed.
i sat down with all these elements in my head and i started. i came up for a breath and the cut was almost done. it was coming today. yeah! i sent it in and got positive feedback.
from there it was familiar again, taking notes and finessing. i did it! the video is being launched today on hallowe’en and it came together.
i once told someone we were a faith based company and they though i meant religious. but meant faith in the project and faith in the process. faith in oneself and faith in ones creative ability.
Lisa Anita Wegner (°1973, Toronto, Canada) creates performances, installations, films and conceptual artworks. By parodying mass media by exaggerating certain formal aspects inherent to our contemporary society, Wegner makes works that can be seen as self-portraits. Sometimes they appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times, they seem typical by-products of American superabundance and marketing.
Her performances often refers to pop and mass culture. Using written and drawn symbols, a world where light-heartedness rules and where rules are undermined is created. By rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, her works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.
Her work urges us to renegotiate performance as being part of a reactive or – at times – autistic medium, commenting on oppressing themes in our contemporary society. By using popular themes such as sexuality, family structure and violence, she creates with daily, recognizable elements, an unprecedented situation in which the viewer is confronted with the conditioning of his own perception and has to reconsider his biased position.
Her works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, she touches various overlapping themes and strategies. Several reoccurring subject matter can be recognized, such as the relation with popular culture and media, working with repetition, provocation and the investigation of the process of expectations.
Her works are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes. They question the coerciveness that is derived from the more profound meaning and the superficial aesthetic appearance of an image.
Lisa Anita Wegner 