Amber Christensen

emerging curator, cinema and media studies graduate student, librarian and sometimes video/film maker.

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Tour of the exhibition Vulgar Era at Xpace Gallery in Toronto for the Images Festival 2016 Blog

A tour of the exhibition Vulgar Era with curator Tobias Williams and one of the artists, Maya Ben David at the Xpace Gallery on April 20th, 2016 in Toronto for the…

VULGAR ERA: Images Off Screen Exhibition at Xpace. 

Exhibition video tour with curator Tobias Williams and artist Maya Ben David by Amber Christensen

Vulgar Era is an exhibition of work created by artists who grew up swaddled by the internet. Taking its title from the Latin term ‘aerae vulgaris’, meaning the common people and a synonym for ‘Common Era’, the exhibition curator Tobias Williams has brought together the work of six post-graduate artists who have probably never accidentally spelled internet with a capital I. The works, whether having physical material existence or whether living only in digital form, draw a clear lineage to Web 2.0 – that time around 2004 when BBSs and LiveJournals were being swapped for MySpace and that relentless pariah known as Facebook.

All of the pieces in the show, although not necessarily readily apparent, are in some way screen based works. The pervasiveness of the screen and screen culture has an overwhelming presence even when it exceeds the screen and slips into the material realm. Whether or not this exhibition fits into your personal definition of post-internet art, it is a collection of works that are seemingly unencumbered by concerns about the end of analogue mediums. Of course, this does not preclude the absence of lineages to pre-internet art as it seems that online chat rooms have transformed into a performative space that is akin to early analogue video art.  

Curator Tobias Williams and artist Maya Ben David were generous enough to spend an afternoon giving me a tour of the exhibition as it is sometimes better to see the work than to simply talk about it. CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO TOUR WITH TOBIAS AND MAYA.

Thanks to Clint Enns for his camera work, to Trinity Square Video for the use of the equipment and Jeff Morton for allowing me to include his gentle electro beats in the background. The video clips featured during Maya’s chat are from her video We’ve Met Before, which is a part of Vulgar Era, but is located at the offsite location at OCAD University Learning Zone located on level one of 113 McCaul Street.

Xpace is located at  303 Lansdowne Avenue the exhibition is open until April 30th.

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The Secret Lives of Housewives and a History of Mind Control: The Kitchen - by Amber Christensen

The Kitchen, is a fifteen channel performance-based video installation, by Winnipeg artist Sarah Anne Johnson installed at Gallery 44 as part of the Images Off Screen presentations. The work is composed of 15 monitors mounted in varying compositions around the gallery, each displaying a view of a brightly lit kitschy 1950s kitchen and a backwards facing masked archetypal housewife character. The back gallery video offers a bird’s eye view of the same figure, but this time shot in black and white with the camera in constant rotation following the movements of the trapped housewife on the floor performing a sort of claustrophobic choreography. 

Although Johnson’s work adopts the language of retro-feminist wave critiques of gendered binaries, she uses this aesthetic in a way that moves beyond reductionist readings, allowing an emotionally rich exploration of both feminism(s) and her own family history. Johnson has been delving into her family archives for a number of years (in her capacity as a photographer she created the series House on Fire (2009), but turning to performance she embodies the fractured figure of her maternal grandmother, who was a victim of grossly unethical psychological experiments conducted in the 1950s/60s.

Unknown perhaps to many Canadians, Canada was a central testing place for psychotropic drugs, including LSD as well as various forms of experimental mind control agents from the mid 1950s to the 1960s. Much of this research was funded under the umbrella of a CIA project ominously titled Project MKUltra. Sounding like a Bradbury penned dystopian novel, these  aberrant histories have been making their way into current awareness through academic research and the occasional magazine and television coverage. This history is intriguing for it’s unbelievable fictional-like qualities and sometimes the individual stories get lost along the way as they take on novelty-esque qualities. 

In many ways, this work does conjure up sentiments of the well-worn 1970s feminist slogans, like ‘the personal is political,’ but, however redundant this slogan has become or however flawed 1970s feminism may be, here the personal is a necessary micro lens to remind us that these fantastical histories have both bodily and psychological impacts on real individuals. Johnson’s grandmother after seeking help for postpartum depression at the Allen Memorial Institute at the McGill Hospital in the 1950s, became a non consensual test subject for these psychotropic experiments. Johnson’s inverted inhabitance of her grandmother enacts the damage inflicted on her grandmother that carried through to Johnson. The legacy of early feminist performance and video art can be seen in The Kitchen, but this engagement is not pastiche nor the end goal of the work. The Kitchen is rooted in a personal and painful history that moves us beyond the  believe-it-or-not angle of a little known but highly disturbing episode in Canadian history.

In addition to The Kitchen at Gallery 44, Johnson’s live choreographed performance Hospital Hallway, which delves further into her Grandmother’s history is taking place at Division Gallery’s Arsenal space for a final performance on Saturday April 16th at 2pm. To guarantee a seat RSVP to [email protected]

You can also read the interview between Images Artistic Director, Amy Fung and Sarah Anne Johnson conducted for the Gallery 44 exhibition RIGHT HERE

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I’m blogging for the 2016 @imagesfestival

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A screening curated for Neutral Ground in Regina, SK

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My curatorial talk for "Hanging out in Deephaven" a screening that I curated for Vtape in Toronto.

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See original post on Vtape site here

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Tiny magic. Conjuring all kinds of feelings. Film and video from ten Saskatchewan artists. Sometimes surreal, sometimes serious, sometimes whimsical and sometimes sweet, all filled with tiny potent magic.

A screening curated for the Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative

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From the suitcase of Amber Christensen. http://amberdchristensen.tumblr.com/

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curated program film and video from Saskachewan for Regional Support Network presented in cooperation with Videofag, Saskatchewan Filmpool and PAVED Arts. 

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Light as a Feather....super low res iphone documentation…shot on Super 8, hand processed and projected into a blanket fort …. blanket fort, film and sound made at the Handmade Film Residency led by Zoë Heyn-Jones at Artscape Gibraltar Point in June 2014.

with help from some lovely teen witches: Anna, Caitlin, Zoë, Karen, Nisha and John.

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(iphone) Photos from Handmade Film Residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point led by  Zoë Heyn-Jones. June 2014. 

Blanket forts, Mariah Carey altars,  and Super 8 handprocessed film = best summer camp ever. And I only lost one roll of still film. 

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Light as a Feather...more low res iphone documentation...shot on Super 8, hand processed and projected into a blanket fort .... blanket fort, film and sound made at the Handmade Film Residency led by Zoë Heyn-Jones at Artscape Gibraltar Point in June 2014. 

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Musophobia. I made this. It screened last year (2013) at Antimatter and WNDX.

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Daddy Set's the Beat was installed at PAVED Arts for awhile in January 2014 as part of Toon's Kitchen. 

Toon’s Kitchen XIII: Daddy Sets The Beat

Amber Christensen & Karen Polowick Essay by Megan Morman January 17 – 31, 2014 Public Reception: Friday, January 17@ 8:00.

Amber Christensen and Karen Polowick have been working together since 2009 and are inspired by the work of early feminist video artists such as Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen and also by contemporary artists Shawna Dempsey & Lori Millan. Their collaborative project, bearing the full title Daddy Sets the Beat: the subjugation of an orphan girl, is a self-reflexive parody of the dogmatic politics that often accompany “second wave feminism.” Filmed on Super 8 and hand processed, the medium is employed to evoke a sense of nostalgia, given that the scratches and imperfections of hand processing also reflect qualities associated with found footage. Daddy sets the Beat acts as a performance of an imaginary history, evoking the possibility that these works could potentially be the product of a feminist video artist working in another era. Christensen and Polowick mix this content with a contemporary perspective; one which is caught between rejection and adoration for the didacticism of early feminism.

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video club fun. making of our film, 'the picnic' for the SK Filmpool's One Take Super 8. video club is jason cawood, ian campbell,amber christensen and colby richardson.

Picnic also screened at the 2015 Calgary Society of Indepedant Filmmakers $100 Festival and in Winnipeg at  WNDX 2015

Watch “Picnic”  here

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Cuba. Vacation Photos. Disposable Camera.