Of Self and Home: Queer Faces, Queer Places is a documentary artwork created with queer-identified folks who have experienced homelessness or other forms of displacement, and combines painting, video, and personal stories into an engaging installation. Six people, including the artist, paint self portraits and talk about their experiences of queerness and of struggling to find or create a sense of home within themselves and in the world. Whether through immigration, adoption, living on the streets or disability, displacement occurs geographically, culturally, historically, physically and emotionally. At times traumatic and painful, these experiences also strengthened the painters as they overcame obstacles, and infused their ways of being in the world with compassion and creativity. Finding themselves at various locations within the queer spectrum, there is a characteristic fluidity of sexual identity that reflects openness and resilience in other areas of participants’ lives.
Erin Clarke is a Toronto media artist who began working with video and digital image making in the mid-nineties. Erin has created low-tech animations, video artworks, such as the nine-screen installation, Borne, and a documentary short, Woman With Cats, which was broadcast on the U.S. Documentary Channel from September 2008 to March 2009. Experimental, wistful and whimsical, her work has been exhibited in Toronto and New York and she was awarded a Toronto Animated Image Society prize in 2005. Mixing analog and digital media, Erin engages the personal, her own and others’ stories, and her work is informed by experience in both frontline social work and the information technology industry. Erin Clarke studied at the Ontario College of Art & Design, the Polytechnic Institute of NYU and The New School. She holds Bachelor and Masters degrees in Fine Art and Integrated Digital Media, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Opening Reception: June 11, 5 - 7 p.m.
June 11-21
80 Spadina Ave., Suite 305
www.ryersongallery.ca
(416) 703 - 2235
