Tor Lukasik-Foss and I remain very very still at the Art Gallery of Ontario

To Lukasik-Foss and I recently performed, along with live model/artist Tanya Hampshire at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Our performance riffed off the current Alex Colville exhibition. These snapshots show Tanya posing in the iconic "To Prince Edward Island" pose with binoculars. 

Our performance was based on the concept of a drawing class, and indeed, there was an actual drawing instructor and AGO patrons sitting on donkeys (the art kind) with paper and pencils sketching us. Tanya actually works as a professional life model and she was remarkable in becoming vibrantly immobile. A living sculpture. 

Tor and I explored a number of ways of disrupting the notion of being live model: We had changing silent-movie-style subtitles for the poses. I posed with a book which I intermittently read from (though always the same frozen page of Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller). Without moving, we gave voice to our thoughts as 'live models.' Tor delivered a brilliant monologue about being concerned that people would draw him with a big head. We screamed without moving. Yodelled. We thought of ourselves as channelling Wes Anderson films, themselves very influenced by the aesthetics of Colville. (There's a great riff off To Prince Edward Island in Moonrise Kingdom.)

It was a remarkable experience for me. Not only were we performing in the presence of Group of Seven sketches and paintings (see the Lawren Harris above) as well as Norval Morrisseaus, but the performance was somewhere between a performance art installation where we eschewed a dramatic perforative arc, but instead were some kind of live installation and an actual performance where we played with elements of performative drama and development. 

And here, the AGO brilliantly misspells both my first and last name in a bit of conceptual legerdemain. 

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thanks to Lesley Chan for the photo which includes me.