| Contributors |
Devora Neumark is a Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist and social activist. Her recent durational interventions and installations have been engaged with issues of community, mourning, ritual and memorialization. Emphasizing process, she has explored metaphors of temporality, transition and transformation through embodied experience. Neumark has participated in exhibitions, residencies and presentations of her interdisciplinary work nationally and internationally. A recent work exhibited as part of the Ashkenaz Festival at Harbourfront featured Neumark recreating and inserting herself into the pictorial space of Isidor Kaufmann's painting, The Friday Night, from the late 1800s. Neumark's piece, a truth, a fiction -- of sabbath clothes and feeling an impostor, is an exploration of personal and social patterns of religious inculcation. Wearing only a paper dress, sewn from a dressmaker's pattern, she documents the process of un-stitching and resewing the pattern pieces to form a blanket in which she wraps herself. A version of this work was originally commissioned for the Founding Congress of the Quebec Lesbian Network in 1996. Neumark has guest lectured across North America and Europe and was co-organizer of the 1994 symposium "Visual Art and Jewish Identity: A Contemporary Experience" at the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts in Montreal. For the last three years she has served as Vice President of Auberge Shalom pour femmes, the only Kosher shelter and center for women victims of conjugal violence in Canada.
Wende Bartley is a Toronto-based electroacoustic composer, whose recent investigations focus on sound images important in the collective stories of women. Concerned with the energetic effects and healing power of sound, she has been developing new timbral textures that give voice to women's cultural experience. Bartley received her Masters of Music in composition at McGill University. Relying on digital audio technologies, she designs innovative musical and sonic textures from original sound sources. Her work includes concert chamber music and electroacoustic compositions, film and video soundtracks, and music for dance, theatre and opera. Bartley has received several commissions through the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. Her works have been performed and broadcast throughout Canada, the U.S. and Europe. Bartley's works are currently released on three labels: Empreintes Digitales, Hornblower Recordings, and Artifact Music.
Naomi Kahane is a Montreal-based facilitator, who has focused on helping people listen and be heard. She facilitates groups around issues of diversity, aging, and women telling their stories.
Suzanne Alexanian is a composer and performer. She has completed three solo recordings and two co-productions, one with Bill Thompson and another with Brian Alexanin, exploring vocal techniques and ways of popular improvising.
Joceline Chabot is a visual artist living in Montreal. Her recent work is based on reflections about borders that elaborate visual fictions. She is particularly interested in the pervasive effects of frontiers on individual and collective behavior, such as inclusion and isolation.
Sibylle Preuschat is a writer, menstrual activist, and vocalist who lives in Toronto, Canada. She studies composition and musicianship with Reid Robins and singing with Mitzi Wolfe Zohar. Other vocal teachers have included Pattie Kellie and Fides Krucker.
Gin Bergeron is a Montreal-based singer, actress and composer who has been working and developing voice in many artistic areas. She teaches voice in relation to hearing-listening and healing.
Mimi Yano's love is wilderness and learning how to live with nature (foraging, hunting, shelter-building, fire-making, etc.). She studies theatre, and practices martial arts and various healing arts. She is currently attending the University of Toronto.
Loretta Bailey received her BFA in Acting from the University of Alberta. She has performed in theatres across the country and has a particular passion for developing new Canadian plays. This installation is a logical extension to express her own story in word and song cradled in the community of these women.
b. h. Yael contributed the original source footage for the wave video and is a Toronto based filmmaker, video and installation artist. She has been an instructor at the Ontario College of Art and Design for the past nine years and is currently Assistant Dean of Art. Yael's work addresses issues of family relations. Incorporating humor and the poignancy of fragmented narratives and hybrid forms, Yael's work alludes to the vicissitudes of memory, history and the questioning of social values and normative definitions of morality in human relationships.
Sonia Zylberberg is currently working on a doctorate in Judaic Studies at Concordia University; her thesis will examine contemporary Jewish women's rituals. She received her M.A. in Judaic Studies from Concordia in 1997, with a thesis on "Woman to Woman: Relationships in the Hebrew Bible". Her publications include a bibliography on Women and Religion and she is the co-editor of the Journal of Religion and Culture.
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| Acknowledgements |
The Sweeney Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges its donors and members; their support made this exhibition possible. The Gallery would like to express appreciation to Michael Beck, Director, New Initiatives and Economic Development at UCR, for loaning essential equipment for the installation of Iris, and to James T. Brown, Principal Producer-Director in UCR Media Resources for his contributions toward the promotion of Iris. Many thanks to Christopher Ezrré of the Good Guys! for sharing his audio expertise.
Devora Neumark acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council's Interdisciplinary Work and Performance Art Creation Grant Program and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
Appreciation is also extended to: Duane Mulder, John D.S. Adams; E. J. Lightman; Joan Stebbins, The Southern Alberta Art Gallery; Sonia Zylberberg; Shelley Craig; Lily Markiewicz; Fides Krucker; Richard Armstrong; Oriah House; Joanna McIntyre; Bernard Cúté; Roz Neumark; Mathieu Gaudet; Ann McMurtry; Kelly Morris; Saved by Technology; Charles Street Video; Toronto Image Works; Toronto Photographers Workshop; Pablo Neruda (Stephen Mitchell); Edmond Jabés; Stephanie Golden; Stanley Kunitz; Margaret Visser; Elias Canetti; Judith L. Herman; Carolyn Bell Farrell and the Koffler Gallery at the Bathurst Jewish Centre; Ormond Jobin; Nancy Ring; Janice Haaken; Professor Amelia Jones, UC Riverside; Katherine Warren, Virginia Field, Bill Galloway, Karen Rapp, Fernando Cardenas and the Board of the Sweeney Art Gallery University of California, Riverside.
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