Gunilla Josephson

Gunilla Josephson at The Box Salon

October 8, 2011

The Box is a quarterly salon night of readings, performances, screenings, interventions and networking that aims to bring diverse communities and audiences into an environment of artistic and social intermingling.

October 26th, 8pm at the Rivoli (backroom)
The Box invites you to an evening of short words, film, performance and music by:

Laura Barrett
Henri Fabergé
Simla Civelek
Andrea Cooper
Dani Couture
John Doyle
Dyan Marie
Gunilla Josephson

+ door treats
from Alfred A. Knopf, Anchor Canada, Arc Poetry Magazine, Art Gallery of York University, Attack Records, Carousel, Coach House Books, Dandyhorse, Geist, Duncannon Press, Good for Her, The Malahat Review, Mercer Union, Pedlar Press, Pierre Poire, Random House, Shameless, Tsar Book, Worn Magazine and otherse

Where & when:
Rivoli (backroom)
8:00pm
332 Queen St W
Toronto, ON
MAP

Full Listing on The Box Website

Read The Box Salon Article  on Gunilla Josephson

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Screening of EVE Absolute Matrix

January 3, 2010

Read the article from Ed Video Website

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Review – Gary Michael Dault on E.V.E.

April 25, 2009

The Globe and Mail

A pianist and a camera make music of the id

Gunilla Josephson at Trinity Square Video

E.V.E. Absolute Matrix runs continuously at Trinity Square Video, 401 Richmond St., Suite 376, Toronto, until May 2; 416-593-1332

Swedish-born, Toronto-based video artist Gunilla Josephson has worked with pianist Eve Egoyan before, notably in the generation of soundtracks for Josephson’s Venus Hedda: A Video and Audio Installation (2001), Happy House: The Id, the Kid and the Little Red Fireman (2001) and The Blood-Red Heart of Johanna Darke (2005). But never until this new work, E.V.E. Absolute Matrix, has the fusing of their sensibilities, their presences as artists, been so fully and so startlingly realized.

E.V.E. is a 60-minute looping video installation. It is now showing at Toronto’s Trinity Square Video, as part of the city’s Images Festival. During the first half of it, more or less, you see Egoyan in extreme close-up, balletically bobbing and weaving before something or other – presumably her piano – as she brings her characteristic intensity to the performance of what Josephson says was actually a five-hour work for piano called Inner Cities by composer Alvin Curran, mounted in the autumn of 2007 at Toronto’s Glenn Gould Theatre.

Positioned before a fall of filmy white curtains – which, given Josephson’s virtuoso wielding of High Definition video technology, seem as sweetly diaphanous as clouds and as touchable as sugar – Egoyan’s face, with her darkling complexion and her mahogany-dark hair, becomes a kind of conduit to the idea of pure, absolute expressiveness. The music that accompanies Egoyan’s sublime agon is not any longer Curran’s, of course, but, rather, a strange, protracted, multilayered extrapolation from that music, a sort of bee-like rushing that flows throughout the video-hour like the progress of time itself. And all through this otherworldly screen-time, Egoyan’s fabulous face seems to register a whole encyclopedia of emotional states – as if she were the solitary exemplar of everything human emotion can be.

Josephson says she came to the idea of E.V.E. by watching Egoyan in the five-hour performance in 2007, noting that from her position in the hall, she could see only Egoyan’s face, floating above the piano. It led her to the idea of somehow capturing all of the modulations of what she calls “the extremes of de-contextualized emotional states.” Josephson points out that the film is all close-up, and is emphatically without “the usual tropes of cinema” (zooms, cuts, pans, etc.). There is, in other words, no escaping (as in escapism) the focused intensities of E.V.E. (how fortunate Josephson was that Egoyan’s name wasn’t something like Susan or Wendy – something that lacked archetypal resonance).

It is important to add, at this point, that E.V.E. is not simply a protracted close-up portrait of an artist in the throes of and in thrall to her work. Rather, Josephson has employed the already compelling Egoyan as the sort of raw stuff of endless transformation.

It’s not always easy to tell, but Josephson has continually modified Egoyan’s face and body (of which only her bare shoulders are visible) in the course of the work. If you pay a little peripheral attention to the entire Eve image – wrenching yourself away momentarily from Egoyan’s face – you will notice that subtly odd things happen: Her shoulders sometimes grow a little smaller, her face darkens, her movements slow imperceptibly (“the entire video is slowed by about 35 per cent,” Josephson tells me, as we sit watching the piece together).

But in the course of the work, E.V.E. becomes considerably more disturbing than the oddness these delicate distortions cause. Gradually, and then all during the second half, Josephson transports Egoyan from performer to a soft series of emblematic shapes that gnaw at the very essence of the birth of expression, at the wellsprings of art. By changing Egoyan into a kind of Rorschach-like series of terrible, severe symmetries, the pianist becomes a feral creature – a spidery miasma of expressive urgencies so extreme she seems to modulate into a dark, vulvic organ – throbbing with the agonies of generation. Astounding.

mail@garymichaeldault.com

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Things of desire – E.V.E. Interview

April 12, 2009

THINGS OF DESIRE
Canada’s Alternative Art Weekly
Volume 1, nr 30, April 9-15, 2009

Read original article

See excerpts

Interview:

As part of the Toronto’s Images Festival, video artist Gunilla Josephson is presenting her new work E.V.E Absolute Matrix. The 48-minute looping video installation is Josephson’s latest collaboration with musician/pianist Eve Egoyan.

Josephson kindly answered some questions for us here at ToD, and we now present them to you blogling.

E.V.E Absolute Matrix will be on display until Sat May 2 at Trinity Square Video in Toronto.—How was the residency at TSV? Did anything interesting come out of it, or was it just work on E.V.E?

GJ: A month’s residency at TSV was much more than working on E.V.E. Absolute Matrix. Working in a place that has art as its raison d’etre was a very affirming experience and reminded me that I wasn’t alone in my hopes and dreams.

—How did you first get involved with Eve Egoyan?

GJ: She was my piano teacher briefly. Then we moved on to making sound together.

—What was Eve’s response to the video?

GJ: Eve generously gave me full license to create the work after we had shot the performance, a year ago now. She is interested in the video solely as one of my art works and we have not seen it together or talked about it.

—Was there any reason to capture the performance of “Inner Cities”?

GJ: No more reason than any other sense of ‘urgency’ which triggers my interest in pursuing the idea for an art work. I attended five extraordinary hours of Eve performing “Inner Cities” at Glenn Gould Studio in the fall of 2007 and the perspective I had of Eve’s head and the piano only, triggered all kinds of thoughts and images of what was going on in Eve’s mind through a marathon performance such as this one

Also the general disinclination of the Toronto public to commit to a few hours of a Saturday afternoon to attend a major music event such as this one, made me think that Eve’s generosity and huge talent has no real place in the world. That in itself provoked me to make this work.

—”Inner Cities” is 5-hours long, but E.V.E is only 60 minutes. What happened to the other 4 hours?

GJ: The distillation of an art work demands reduction and concentration to reach the intended conceptual and aesthetic goal. I’m not at all interested in making a documentary of Eve Egoyan playing the piano. She is the medium through which I’ve articulated my ideas.

—I am really interested in your dissection of the emotional and intellectual impact of music on the performer. This is often not considered. What got you thinking about it?

GJ: Ideally, and this will be the case when viewers don’t know who Eve is or what she is doing, one should not know that the woman in the video is playing the piano. So there isn’t really supposed to be a correlation between what you see and any notions of the effect of music on the musician. I was prompted by Eve’s performance to make a statement about emotions, not about music.

—Does your interest in this emotional impact have to do with an ability to commiserate with the mental fatigue of being an artist?

GJ: It is IN the work, it IS the work, so by visiting the video at TSV you will find my answer or at least my proposition. I would say that more than commiserate it is the personal recognition of and empathy with the complex process to achieve at least an approximation of an art work.

—The camera is described as “insisting,” what does this mean exactly and how/why do you accomplish this?

GJ: There are very few of the usual tropes of cinema, i.e. zooms, cuts, pans. There is only the closeup. The camera insists that we see what it sees, and it doesn’t allow us to ever escape outside the frame. You are not released into the fantasy or escapism that comes with watching commercial manifestations of moving image.

—What attracts you to the “extremes of de-contextualized emotional states?”

GJ: Just as I am not interested in the commercial language of cinema, I am bored by the representations of emotion in movies and TV. Emotional gestures viewed outside of the usual contexts allow us to see again with fresh eyes.

—Does this interest have any political aspect to it, like are you making a comment about our emotional states?

GJ: I am making statements about representations of women, and my politics is in opposition to the misrepresentations and basic dishonesty presented by consumer culture.

—The character Hedda is liberated yet tormented, also your work captures both ecstasy and despair. I have to wonder if you feel liberation is ever possible, or does our torment come from having the hope/fantasy of liberation?

GJ: Art allows us to consider liberation, and perhaps even to achieve it.

—What was the most challenging part of the work, and did you do anything particularly new or different for the work?

GJ: The technical aspects of working with HighDefinition technology and Terrabytes of information presented extreme challenges.

—Do you think the general public can handle bare emotion like in E.V.E?

GJ: Artist should never underestimate the general public. In fact, we should make our work for them.

—Is there anything else you want to share with the readers about yourself, work, or the exhibition?

GJ: This work is in some ways a synthesis of my earlier videos and I am pleased to present it in the Images Festival context.

Comments (0) | Tags: E.V.E., EVE Absolute Matrix, Eve Egoyan, images festival, interview

Sewil Otosed – E.V.E. Essay

April 10, 2009

Women are money

We see it every day and everywhere.

Open the newspaper and they’re looking out at you. Walk past the magazine racks and their faces are there in the dozens. They’re on television every few minutes, they’re on the bus shelters, they’re on your computer, their giant faces peer down at you from the sides of buildings. Everywhere, images of women, used as instruments of barter and manipulation.

What do they sell? Everything. How? By offering fulfillment; the realization of fantasies of ecstasy, sex, glamour, and envy. But never power. At least not for women. And only if you give away your money.

It’s a lie, isn’t it? We all know that. Well then, why are we so complicit?

When the arena of public interaction, and discourse, is commerce — buying and selling, and when it becomes so much the norm that we don’t notice, the result is pornography — the offer of a fantasy that will never be realized and is perverse at heart. The predatory manipulations of the fashion/cosmetic industry are the most blatant and obvious example of women as currency. As insidious, and perhaps more dangerous, is that vague conglomeration called the Media, which attempts to exploit the production and dissemination of images into an official Culture that is indistinguishable from the entertainment/commerce nexus. And running through it all is that currency called Woman.

What to make of this woman, this E.V.E?

We keep waiting for her to reveal what she will sell, how she will be sold, but instead she convulses, grimaces, twists, turns, and rotates. She even disappears. She is sinister at times, strange and indecipherable. Is it even a woman? We have met Gunilla Josephson’s transgressive, de-idolized females before — her modern Joan of Arc re-interpreting history in the streets of Paris, her Hedda emptying and filling a room like a triumphant female anti-Sisyphus, her misbehaving twin princesses in the cow merde. Josephson always insists on an acknowledgment of those places that women occupy, those cracks and fissures, that have not been colonized by the dominant male hegemony that continues to hijack art.

E.V.E Absolute Matrix might be a portrait, but not of a lady. This is not the mannequin we are so comfortable with, that submissive, sexualized image that infects our visual landscape. Josephson insists that art’s gestures must be expansive and powerful. Necessity demands it. If a woman makes a spider, as Louise Bourgeois did, it must be large enough to devour the Tate Museum. If an artist makes a portrait, it must never be a seduction and always a threat.

Josephson states that video is a female medium. It is untainted by ‘old masters’ and is largely separated from the fantasy industry. Video is a medium that straddles the official art world, the entertainment industry, and the bumbling disclosures of the amateur. It is difficult to own, to control, or to co-opt. It is fundamentally subversive. And as such, it is life-affirming. It insists on true revelation and true beauty.

Sewil Otosed

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Review – Art Thieves

September 28, 2008

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Review – Gary Michael Dault on The Blood-Red Heart of Johanna Darke

July 15, 2006

The Globe and Mail
Gallery Going by Gary Michael Dault

Gunilla Josephson at Archive, Inc.
300 King Street East, Toronto

Chief among the three video works by Gunilla Josephson now at Archive Inc. Gallery + Art Library is her 68-minute magnum opus, The Blood-Red Heart of Johanna Darke (link to video).

The principal videography for this feature-length video was accomplished three years ago, but the continual editorial fine-tuning to which Josephson has been subjecting the work for the past two years has given this highly ambitious piece a wondrous richness, timbre, pace and density.

The name of the Josephson’s heroine, who is and is not the artist herself, is both an echo of “noir” or blackness in the conventional literary-cinematic sense and also, at the same time, makes inescapable reference to Jeanne d’Arc — though the voices and visions of Josephson’s Joan impel her to try to save France in a quite different way.

The video is about a young woman who, in Josephson’s words, while “lost in the city of history,” is compelled to depart “the hothouse steam of her upbringing by the Grey Nuns Order in Quebec” in order to fulfill her destiny, as she sees it, as a member of the French Resistance in Paris in 1939. Through what the artist calls a “time warp” wrought by Johanna’s “own compulsion and belief,” the girl straddles space and time, arriving “time-capsuled” by train (by bullet-train!) to the Paris of 2003, still determined to play a role in the Resistance.

Clearly believing, like legendary French new-wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, that movies ought to have a beginning and a middle and an end, “but not necessarily in that order,” Josephson, working with novelist-husband Lewis DeSoto and composer-pianist Eve Egoyan, has put together an aggregation of seamlessly beautiful, constantly moving tableaux made up of unforgettably vivid images and passages.

Johanna makes pilgrimages to Notre Dame Cathedral (sometimes it’s a hand-held model and sometimes it’s the real thing) to receive Resistance “instructions” from Joan of Arc; she rallies round the cause with a Pierrot companion/familiar who steps out of Watteau’s commedia dell’arte painting, Gilles, in the Louvre; she helps to blow up a train — at least I think she does — and finally, in the end, languishes in prison, awaiting death at the hands of the Gestapo.

What is bemusing is how little of Johanna Darke’s story and its meaning can be circumscribed within this bald plot outline (if plot it can be said to have). Josephson’s video lives within its own hues and visual textures. Her painterliness (for she was a painter-sculptor-installation artist before turning to video) is everywhere apparent in the work: Scarcely a minute goes by during which you don’t feel the need to stop the film at look at an image at length, as if it were a still photograph. The video proceeds (often hectically) by means of its sheer onslaught of visual inventiveness. Sometimes you lose track of it, but it never seems to matter: Josephson floats you along on a foaming sea of images and ideas, marshalled to the music of high poetry.

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Gunilla Josephson in conversation with Cameron Bailey

June 24, 2006

On the occasion of her show “3 Lies” at Archive Inc.
Gallery, 26 Berkeley Street, Toronto
Canada June 24, 2006

Read original published  article

From the press release:

Archive Inc. is pleased to present My Lies, three video works by artist Gunilla Josephson. As “fictional histories” these videos are perceptual chronicles of experience, in which history is the result not of facts, but of perceptions.

Artist’s Talk

Cameron Bailey: I’ve been following Gunilla’s work for many years so I’m glad to be here to talk about it with you in person, particularly The Blood Red Heart of Johanna Dark (68 minutes 2006). The first thing I want to ask is who is Johanna Dark?

Gunilla Josephson: She’s composed of two historical characters, the one we know and a Resistance fighter from 1939. She is a hanger for my work that is about history and architecture and my own personal self. Whether Johanna Dark existed or not is an open question. I think she did. I am looking for her.

CB: Were you working from actual historical sources or was this an invention?

GJ: Neither one nor the other. The meeting between ‘the one we know’ and the Resistance fighter from 1939 is clearly fictitious. I did enough research to be able to substantiate some of the truths/lies in the film. But the work also derives from my four-month residency in a Paris studio in 2003. I started to imagine someone else who was either coming with me or who was already there. She was taking my place and I was taking hers, we were going back and forth, and that’s how she was created. I started to give her a wardrobe and her own things, starting with one of these bags they carried in the Resistance. It grew into a film about the Resistance, but very much a story as if… I’m here and what if… I’m here what if I’m somebody else? If I’m here with the Resistance what if… this is another time.

CB: Paris really is one of those cities where you can feel layers of history as you walk through it and live in that architecture. In the film you layer present day Paris with Paris from the 40s, and of course there are echoes of Joan of Arc. Can you talk about the levels of history you wanted to work with?

continue…

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INVASIONS Part Two

October 4, 2004

Press release – Toronto Arts Online.

The Elements Collectve will present its 5th screening event

Invasions is a two part screening event that brings together artists from both Northern and Southern Ontario. An accompanying programme catalogue will feature an essay by writer Jessica Wyman. Artists included in this project: Mercedes Cueto, Gunilla Josephson, Annette Mangaard, Pamila Matharu, Darlene Naponse and Cheryl Rondeau.

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Hello Ingmar wins International Short Film Festival Prize, Oberhausen

October 22, 2001

Link to Kurzfilmtage website, 2001 award winners

Prize of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (DM 1,000): Hello Ingmar, Gunilla Josephson, Canada 2000

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Exhibition at Textitle Museum of Canada – Memento Vitae

October 13, 1996

original article

Exhibition Overview

The title of Gunilla Josephson’s 1996 solo exhibition, Memento Vitae, translates as “reminders of life.” The exhibition is a meditation on memories and rituals connected to domestic Swedish textiles such as blankets and tablecloths. While family heirlooms such as these have both functional and symbolic value, Josephson’s objects are multi-layered with wax and therefore do not share the function of their historical prototypes. Josephson has referred to this separation of form from function as “a liberation of the cloth from itself.”

A curatorial essay  by Jennifer Kaye

Memento vitae is a Latin phrase, which, literally translated, means “reminders of life.” It plays upon the better-known phrase, memento mori, which means “reminders of death” – those allusive symbols incorporated into Renaissance and Baroque paintings as reminders that beauty, possessions and life itself are transitory and fleeting.

Like these paintings, Gunilla Josephson’s work is also highly symbolic, but in a much more affirming way. She draws her inspiration as an artist from the rich cultural legacy of her native Sweden and its Nordic neighbours, creating objects that make reference to specific types of historical textiles such as blankets, tablecloths and cushions. Made from felt or linen and multi-layered with wax, her objects do not share the function of their historical prototypes. Josephson has referred to this separation of form from function as “a liberation of the cloth from itself.”

Josephson recognizes that liberation is a process in which there is something both gained and lost, and she presents both sides of the process. What is lost, in this case, is the usefulness of the prototypes to which Josephson’s objects refer. Her “blankets,” for example, are interpretations of historical blankets that were handmade for use during specific life rituals such as childbirth, marriage and death. They were an important element in the observance of rites of passage and were considered valuable family heirlooms. Thus, they acquired a symbolic value in Nordic society that arose specifically from their utility, and which was enhanced by their beauty.

Josephson’s Untitled (Barnfilt), for example, is an interpretation of a blanket that was made by a mother for her child in the 18th century from the cloth of a dead soldier’s uniform. The utility of the original is emphasized through an inscription at the bottom of the work that reads “SOV GOTT,” meaning “sleep well.” There is clearly symbolic value in the original, which derives from its intended daily use as a cover for a mother’s child. This value would have been appreciated throughout Nordic society at that time.

In Josephson’s wax interpretation, however, the utility of the original is lost. No longer capable of helping anyone to sleep well, Untitled (Barnfilt) can participate only symbolically in these past traditions of textile creation and use. The loss of utility that is achieved through Josephson’s act of liberation gives her work a melancholy air, which is reinforced through her use of wax as the primary medium – a substance that can itself vanish through use.

At the same time, there is something gained through this act of liberation. Stripped of their function, Josephson’s objects have become purely symbolic. As such, they take on an iconic quality that makes them “larger than life.” It is as if the originals, now immortalized in wax, have acquired a life of their own through the intervention of the artistic process.

In discussions about her work, Josephson has addressed this dichotomy of gain and loss through liberation in the juxtaposition of two Swedish words – tjeld and lösöre. Tjeld is an old Swedish term that means “covering cloth.” The historical traditions of textile creation and use, to which Josephson’s work refers, centre around tjeld - textiles that have an intrinsic social value that is derived from their utility. Lösöre, on the other hand, is a more current term that means “the stuff that we cart around with us when we move from place to place that is seemingly insignificant, but that nevertheless gives us a sense of ourselves and our history.” In a sense, lösöre is like tjeld that has been liberated; it has lost its utility, and thus no longer plays a central role in daily ritual. But lösöre also gains in symbolic value, acquiring the ability to define personal identity and history.

A familiar type of textile whose value has shifted in this manner is the quilt. Once valued equally for functionality and beauty, quilts are increasingly becoming collectibles valued as precious objects that only symbolically refer to the past traditions of their creation and use. In fact, since the widespread industrialization of textile manufacturing began in the late 19th century, this shift in the perceived value of textiles has become quite common in keeping with the post-Industrial Revolution commodification of items that were once humbly essential to daily existence.

Through the works of art in this exhibition, Gunilla Josephson has indeed liberated cloth from itself. Consequently, her works function as memento vitae – reminders not of death, but of the lives that were lived in meaningful connection with their historical prototypes, and of the symbolic lives of the objects themselves.

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