@ DEFINITELY SUPERIOR ART GALLERY (250 Park Ave.)

Featured Artist: Thirza Cuthand

Screening 1: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15 @ 8:00PM
Screening 2: SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16 @ 8:00PM

https://www.facebook.com/events/2041354389458443/

suggested donation $5-10 cash only, at the door

QALEIDOSCOPE: Refraction, Abstraction & Play features Canadian QTBIPOC films that explore, question and play with identity to propose and investigate diverse ways of looking at sexuality, gender and race. Images, characters, ideas, and realities collide in fantastical, personal, and playful ways.

 

Experimental, artistically rigorous, heavyhitting, and thoughtful, the films involve issues such as feminism, race, racism, class, identity politics, community, colonization, conceptual art, politics, religion, violence, popular culture, gender, sexuality, and transgressive and subversive play. A decidedly tongue-in-cheek disposition and sensibility inject the tour with moments of intelligent, incisive humour. QALEIDOSCOPE promotes the artistic vision of QTBIPOC Canadian media artists whose work might not otherwise be shown, so this is a great chance to see these works up close and in person.

Coming? tell your friends! 

Screening 1: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15 @ 8:00PM »

Where We Were Not – Feeling Reserved, Alexus’ Story

Jess MacCormack & Alexus Young | 2011 | 6:00 min

An experimental animated documentary about criminalization in Canada. In “Feeling Reserved” Alexus shares her story of a ‘starlight tour’, a practice of police brutality against First Nations peoples in Canada where individuals are driven out of town, stripped of their coats and shoes and left to freeze to death. In Alexus’ case a couple happened to drive by her and she was saved. Nonetheless the emotional scars remain, and many people were not so lucky. The realization that these murders are a continuation of the genocide of First Nations peoples today is horrifying for all. This work highlights the systemic violence at play and the silencing effect it produces.

Thirza Cuthand is an Indian Within the Meaning of the Indian Act

Thirza Cuthand | 2017 | 8:56 min

Contemplating mixed race identity in Canada, Cuthand presents us with images of blood ties and land ties for indigenous people, and questions the use of the words “white passing” and “light skinned.” As a light skinned indigenous woman, Cuthand reiterates that racism and discrimination still happen for her, just in different ways. Community belonging is contrasted with the difference experiences she has from her darker skinned family. Ultimately, a video with more questions than answers, it situates the artist’s body in historical trauma and ongoing colonial survival.

Paskw‚w Mostos Iskwísis (Buffalo Girl)

Howard Adler, Candy Renae Fox & Leo Koziol | 2017 | 4:00 min

Set in the backdrop of colonial violence and the extermination of the buffalo. The Genocide of the buffalo parallels the loss of Queer Indigenous and Two-Spirit knowledge. In this film a Buffalo Spirit transforms into an Nhiyaw Iskwesis (a young Cree women), and a ghost like apparition sings Maori songs and underscores the links between colonialism on Indigenous peoples across the globe.

Two Snakes

Kristin Li | 2015 | 9:33 min

An experimental animation and documentary about diasporic desires for foundational myths. Seeking a home in reclaimed ancestry and seeking a self in reappropriated narratives and finding fragments instead.

Do I Have Boobs Now

Milena Salazar & Joella Cabalu, | 2017 | 6:42 min

In 2015, Victoria-based trans activist Courtney Demone launched the viral online campaign #DoIHaveBoobsNow, in which she posted topless photos of her transition on social media while undergoing hormone replacement therapy. One year later, Demone revisits the global conversation she catalyzed on social media censorship policies and the sexualization of feminine bodies, and reflects on the impacts of being thrust into the critical spotlight as a visible trans activist and queer feminist.

HOME MADE

Diana Khong | 2017 | 10:00 min

Home Made is an intimate, contemplative portrait of two queer tattoo artists navigating an industry traditionally dominated by white, straight, cisgender males. The film weaves together the parallel narratives of Jasmine, a shop owner in Philadelphia, and sally, a stick-and-poke artist in Brooklyn, through their trials and triumphs

Call Tony

Mée Rose & Wy Joung Kou | 2018 | 9:00 min

Call Tony is an experimental documentation of queer kinksters exploring safety, healing, belonging, and play.

Casualties of Modernity

Kent Monkman | 2015 | 14:20 min

Celebrity artist and humanitarian Miss Chief Eagle Testickle (Kent Monkman) tours a hospital specializing in the treatment of conditions afflicting Modern and Contemporary Art. Led by the Doctor of Fine Arts (Quinton Neufeldt), and closely supervised by the no-nonsense head Nurse (Gillian Edwards), Miss Chief encounters romance, tragedy and triumph.

Doppelgänger Memorandum

Clark Nikolai | 2017 | 6:00 min

In this claustrophobically surreal and comical short, a film-score composer is distracted by a haunted video monitor in the confines of his sound studio, where he watches scenes of disconnected conversations as a result of mis-dubbing. The slippage between dream and reality, past and present, here and there, leaves the viewer in a perplexed state.

Outcognito

Wrik Mead | 2017 | 5:00 min

Fear meets gay desire against an audio background of sitcom homophobia and jarring personal testimonies. Textured layers of figures, rotoscoped and real, move in and out of difficult scenarios, resolving into knowing acceptance.

Niagara

Shelley Niro | 2015 | 5:00 min

A simple story of love and loss. Niagara originally called Ongniaahra, a Mohawk word, from the Haudenosaunee Nations.

Screening 2: SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16 @ 8:00PM »

Regalia: Pride in Two Spirits

David Ng & Jen Sungshine | 2015 | 5:00 min

Duane Stewart shares his story as a First Nations queer person, who identifies as “Two Spirited”. Duane talks about the importance of culture in his life, and his journey coming out to his family.

Amour is love

Hanna Che & Harry Forbez | 2018 | 10:00 min

Mariana, Jodie-Ann, and Diane are three queer as f*** women of color who discuss their past, present, and future without any filters or taboos.

I Like Girls

Diane Obomsawin | 2016 | 8:00 min

In this animated short from Diane Obomsawin, four women reveal the nitty-gritty about their first loves, sharing funny and intimate tales of one-sided infatuation, mutual attraction, erotic moments, and fumbling attempts at sexual expression. For them, discovering that they’re attracted to other women comes hand-in-hand with a deeper understanding of their personal identity and a joyful new self-awareness.

My Fuzzy Valentine

Ben Edelberg | 2018 | 5:00 min

Put the Playboy centrefold in the hands of a Dyke and she will make her into a monster. A pulsating world of bug-eyed lesbian sasquatches and vaginal caves created from reclaimed textiles. Visual artist Allyson Mitchell’s shape shifting materials and colors explode off the screen on hand processed and scratched 16mm film.

Emerge: Stone Braids

Evelyn Pakinewatik | 2018 | 8:00 min

Shot during Toronto’s inaugural Indigenous Fashion Week, Emerge: Stone Braids explores the medicine that community and family, as well as forms collective prayer can take.

Fluids

Rob Fatal | 2017 | 14:33 min

6 years ago two artists attempted to make a queer, sci-fi porno: it failed. What emerged 6 years later out of its campy/ tragic/melodramatic ashes is this erotic experimental documentary; a meditation on the intersections of failure and fetish as well the meticulous, accidental processes of constructing of cinema and identity.

Bedding Andrew

Blair Fukumura | 2011 | 4:42 min

On the eve of his 30th birthday, Andrew Morrison-Gurza reflected on his life as an LGBTQ man with Cerebral Palsy, and the event that helped shape his identity as a gay man. With wit and candour, Andrew’s unvarnished recounting of his loss of innocence shines a light on the culture of desire perpetuated within the LGBT community, and ideas of body image, abelism and gay identity.

Old Home

Katharine King So | 2016 | 5:30 min

This experimental dance film explores the influence of post-war melodramas on experimental queer filmmakers. It also illustrates the media hysteria surrounding the AIDS crisis as an important time for the destruction of the nuclear home and ceasing the “othering” of minorities in order to move towards a time of queer solidarity and expression.

I Want To Kill Myself

Vivek Shraya | 2017 | 8:32 min

Contemplating suicide: a biography.

Exhumations

Dan McIntyre | 2018 | 8:00 min

Peeling back the shrouded image, Exhumation is a reanimation of long lost desire. A response to news of a celebrity paternity suit and the mythology adhered to it, Exhumation obsesses over buried memories to create one’s own monster from memory. Re-composed of images chemically treated to disintegrate, the figures peel their identities away to remain as ghosts of what once was. At once a diary of a death mask and of speculative hope, Exhumation dives through years of hurt feelings to find that although the body was here, you vanished.

2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99

Thirza Cuthand | 2015 | 4:47 min

Don’t worry if you are just coming out as a 2 Spirited person, we have just the introductory special for you! New to the 2 Spirit lifestyle? Want to talk to someone in the Spirit and the Flesh instead of reading The Spirit and the Flesh? We have just the service for you! Call now and for only 19.99 a month you can get instant unlimited telephone access to traditional knowledge and support. We also provide monthly gifts for subscribers, call now and we can hook you up with this beaded whisk! Perfect for DIY spankings and pancakes the morning after your first snag! Don’t hesitate, ring those phones!