Issue 14

folio magazine
issue 14 - fall 2015
folio staff
Hortense Chauvin
Aaron Dishy
Levi Easterbrooks
Emily Enhorning
Megan Jezewski
Josh Marquis
Ruby Ross
Clarissa Sorenson
Kate Whiteway
about
Folio is a student-run visual art and design magazine that
acts as an ongoing archive of McGill’s artistic community
by providing a venue for student artists to showcase their
work. It is published biannually.
All contents © the respective artists.

content
Yufei Wang
Flowers II
Kara Katon
Darastu and diteluk
Levi Easterbrooks
Metal Scene 2 & 3
Maxine Dannatt
No Name
Catherine Jeffery
Side of the Road
Kenneth Koo
Grey Matter
Folio
Notes on a Proposal

Kara Katon
diteluk & Darastu

Levi Easterbrooks
Metal Scene 2 & 3

Maxine Dannatt
No Name

Catherine Jeffery
Side of the Road

Kenneth Koo
Grey Matter

Notes on a Proposal for a Screening
­Kenneth Koo (McGill 2015), Looking At You, Looking at Me, 2014
­Ann Hirsch, Here For You (Or my Brief Love Affair with Frank Maresca), 2012
­Em Rooney, Flesh & Ground, 2015
­This screening is meant to act as a sort of introductory dialogue linkingstudent video art
practices at McGill within the broader practices of contemporary video art.
­The critical repurposing of the “stock” options of both chatroulette and reality television
programming provide new spaces for artistic embedding in non­institutional grey areas
(uncertainty of art value). (Kenneth & Ann)
The medium of video is also interesting as a site of new modes of art­circulation. What happens,
for example, when you can engage with something that is considered “art” on tv, on your laptop,
in your bed, on your phone, etc.? Video allows new modes of interacting with art. (all of them)
­Kenneth’s placement of institutionally validated performance works (Abramovic etc.) as foil to
the expectations and lecherous gaze of mostly male chatroulette users (dissatisfaction with the
disruption of their mechanical desires) (frustrating in its duration → no sexual (read porn­like)
immediacy
­passivity/decontextualization as disruptive to typical sexual flows of the site (joke in art
performance vs. performance of digital sexuality)
­Ann’s “infiltration” of reality tv circuit for art purposes similarly complicates the expectations of
the performance of sexuality and/or femininity within these contexts
­Unlike Kenneth, who appropriates performances that are already validated as art, Ann’s
participation in “Frank the Entertainer in a Basement Affair” is classified as art retroactively? (at
least it would not be apparent to other participants and viewers of the show) is the work the
performance or the edited documentation that forms a new video work? Both? ​How does this
relate to performance as an everyday practice?
­Em’s work is not as clearly related visually. Dealing with the sexuality of the mechanical in a
more literal way. Joke on these same sorts of desire machines? Sexual agency given to objects
and their anthropomorphic actions (and fluid byproducts of production) sex as production?
Technological discourses of desire
­Tie in Ryan Trecartin (it’s an intro to contemporary video practice after all) à Reality television
and corporate embodiment à again, desire machines (as always) and the corporate co­option of
sexuality etc.; ​intensities of performance
circulation of the everyday – his wordplay incorporates absurd takes on everyday sayings, they
are remotely familiar to things we can recognize, but still alien. Intensifying ways in which
people perform a self mediated through technology; the desire­machines these characters
perform cannot accede to recognition, but break down. He intensifies the kinds of relations that
we see in Ann’s performance – reality television features people who speak but say nothing.
She says things that we can recognize as everyday but mean nothing.

folio contributors
Maxine Dannatt
Though originally from New York, she spent high school
in Paris before moving to this mad city of Montreal. She
occasionally takes pictures in between composing analyses
of Sufi pop songs, interviewing anarchist poets and
engaging in all night essay writing rituals with friends in
McLennan.
Levi Easterbrooks
Bruce Willis in: Die Hard (1988), Die Hard 2 (1990),
Die Hard: With A Vengeance (1995), The Fifth Element
(1997), Armageddon (1998), The Sixth Sense (1999), Sin
City (2005), Planet Terror (2007), Surrogates (2009), &
Looper (2012) /// Jude Law in: Gattaca (1997), eXistenZ
(1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Sky Captain
and the World of Tomorrow (2004), Lemony Snicket’s A
series of Unfortunate Events (2004), The Imaginarium of
Doctor Parnassus (2009), Repo Men (2010), & Contagion
(2011). Also that time I watched Charlize Theron in Æon
Flux (2005) on a plane.
Catherine Jeffery
I found this lawnmower on the side of the road in my
hometown and it struck me as beautiful, despite the rust.
I like to photograph abandoned places and items that may
seem like trash to most people, using my photography to
capture simple objects. I don’t spend a huge amount of
time setting up composition or doing anything technical—I
simply take pictures of things whose textures I find
interesting.
Kara Katon
I spend most of my time exploring flow art with my
hoop and wishes to transfer the bodily movement to
my visual artwork. Through my submission I present
two distinct senses of home; one that is already left
behind and the other that is currently occupied. Darastu
captures the incessant movement of the ocean
that surrounds the native island where I grew up.
While diteluk disperses the interior of my living place,
unsettling what is already settled.
Kenneth Koo
Kenneth creates art as a way for him to raise questions
without necessarily answering them. His practice of
photography explores the medium’s ability to transcend
inherent qualities of photography and tap into the latent
possibilities of other media (i.e. painting, sculpture,
installation).
Yufei Wang
While I love science, I also love art because it allows
us to explore of the myriad of perspectives of those
belonging to the world around us, not often privy to our
eyes when society interacts in passing. Art is a really
important aspect of my life that often gets lost on the
never-ending list of priorities, but I aspire to make time
for it because not only is it a therapeutic outlet for the
chaos in my mind, but there’s something exceptional in
the process of creating something from nothing.
Thanks to the AUS Fine Arts
Council and the Students’ Society
of McGill University for their
generous support.