>>PREVIEW
QUEER PROJECTIONS
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
High Performance Rodeo: Mutton Busting
Runs January 11 and 12
Motel (Epcor Centre)
The Mutton Busting Festival has brought together a diverse group of queer and conceptually queer artists for a series called The Department of Soft Architecture. This includes the work of the award-winning Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, which is featured in Queer Projections – a cabaret divided into two programs, Video Mixdown and When the Music Stops My Troubles Begin.
The Toronto-based artist, who divides his time between Canada and Europe, has explored a variety of mediums. He’s ultimately found his niche in video, although he debates the ultimate accessibility of this medium for people who aren’t involved in the arts.
"On one level, I find that part of the success of my work is that I use video to mimic media forms that are recognizable to wide audiences – music video, television reports, surveillance cameras – a strategy that ends up letting many people into my work," he says. "On the other hand, few people outside of the art world know what video art is. Few Canadians ever go to contemporary art spaces, or even know that they exist. I always get a lot of good feedback from non-art audiences when my videos are aired on television, which I think is a clue about the accessibility of my work. I do think, however, that of all the media I have explored, my work in video has been the most successful in transmitting ideas and emotional impressions to an audience."
His short films explore – and critique – a variety of social and cultural elements, from love songs to queer identity. The short Lyric, for example, is composed of sound bites collected from a thousand love songs, while I Am a Boyband questions the ways that masculinity and gender are constantly reproduced by consumer media. The short film Patriotic (a collaboration with Pascal Lièvre) explores the language of terrorism in a seductive form of propaganda. And the films Forever Young, Je Changerais D’avis and Audition Tape also utilize a variety of languages.
"I love human diversity, and a fascination for languages and translation is a big part of that," says Nemerofsky Ramsay. "I'm mostly interested in using different languages as a way of seeking modes of emotional expression. I feel that few emotions can be truly translated into words, into language, so I am interested in juxtaposing languages and gestures and sounds in an attempt to create a more genuine emotional impression."
Living in Europe, he says, reveals how shockingly monolingual the average North American is. "It's true that many Canadians can speak some measure of French, but it's a far cry from the polyglot character of Europe. I have friends who speak upwards of six languages with mastery. I am convinced that their experience of emotions or ideas is much richer and more diverse than ours. It's true that many languages are on the brink of extinction these days," he adds. "It's a product of cultural colonialism, but also of a non-appreciation of the power, history and magic of language."
Nemerofsky Ramsay was born in Montreal but spent part of his adolescence in Calgary.
"I have never lived in Calgary as an adult, and so don't have a clear sense of what it is like to be an artist working in Calgary," he says. "I do know that the kind of things I need, as an artist and a person, are big, cosmopolitan, urban spaces, cultural diversity, a large, powerful gay community, more art, theatre, music and dance than I could ever manage to see. My experiences of Calgary as an adolescent are the opposite of those things, so it's hard for me to imagine finding Calgary a satisfying place for me to work as an artist."
However, Audition Tape, part of his Mutton Busting program, briefly makes reference to his adolescent grappling with gender and sexual identity while in Calgary. "(It’s) one way that my experience of the city has influenced (my) creative product," he says. |
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