On Hallowe’en I put up some Roscoe Tough White Diffusion in the front Window of the Haus of Dada. It makes a terrific crisp rear projection both inside and out. I played clips of black and white monster movies and the scariest scenes from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Even before the sun set it was nicely visible from the street and I was surprised that even on such a rainy night people stopped and watched for longer than I expected. Some came back several times and some sent other family members.
On Nuit Blanche I did a performance projection installation where I was a 25 foot Queen at the corner of Queen Street West and University Ave. It was interesting to have huge walking by audience and again I was surprised how long people stood watched and interacted with me.
So I had an idea for a Happening. I think that is a perfect term for what I have in mind. On New Years Day from 7pm to 11pm I will project a selection of my Moment Study Videos out the large front window of The Haus of Dada.
I made an invite on Facebook, for some folks who have expressed an interested in seeing my video studies projected. But I’m not sending out invitations like a usual event, I am more interested in the experience of the passerby. I will set up a GoPro camera to catch the silhouettes of viewers.
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.