FEMINISTRY IS HERE

Buzz, Jazmine V.K. Carr, Victoria Cheong, Marcelline Mandeng, Lido Pimienta and Zoe Solomon in collaboration with Cameron Lee

Text work by Laurie Kang

23 February 2017 - 18 March 2017

Opening Reception and Performance: Thursday 23 February 2017, 7PM with performance by Marcelline at 8PM

Offsite Event: FEMINISTRY at The Round, Friday 24 February, from 10PM

Closing Reception and fashion presentation of ReBaie by Rebe: Saturday 18 March, 7PM

Mercer Union is delighted to present FEMINISTRY IS HERE. FEMINISTRY IS HERE is a declaration for a cute party: an exhibition and event series, where fabulosity and beautiful visions abound. FEMINISTRY IS HERE occupies space, and disorients it. A space to strut through the limited definitions for queer femmes. The entrance is also an exit. It is a negotiation of space by non-binary artists, who DJ, make objects, music, fashion, perform online, and IRL; sloughing cells of categorization, shifting, working, and sharing. FEMINISTRY IS HERE is messy. You might say ew, and that is a good thing.

Buzz is an emerging fashion thing who runs a label called ReBaie by Rebe with co-creative director Cameron Lee. Buzz is on the bored of some stuff and never salts her driveway before she tastes it.

Jazmine V.K. Carr is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores human behaviour using sculpture and installation, integrated media, performance and photography. Identity, sexuality and black diaspora are the foundations of her works aimed towards exposing the absurdity of reality. Often associated with vulgarity and rawness; she commands a collapse of traditional environments and relationships, asking the viewer to reconsider themselves inside of it.

Victoria Cheong is a multi-disciplinary artist working across music, video and performance including site-specific installation and cross-disciplinary art happenings. She makes solo music as New Chance, DJs and organizes events with the Toronto-based collective Boop! and co-runs the record label Healing Power Records. She has a history of creative collaboration in contemporary dance as a performer, composer and visual/video artist, working with Barb Lindenberg, Allison Peacock and recently with Ame Henderson on her new work with TDT, Noisy. She is currently collaborating with dance artist Zoja Smutny, on the conceptual album and performance work, Ros Porn, recently presented at Night Gallery, Los Angeles. She has exhibited sound installation and video work, most recently with Iris Fraser at ESP Gallery in Toronto; at BLACKROCKs Hot House in Harlem, NY; and with Night Gallery at the site-specific exhibition, Nachter Glaubengen in Berlin.

Marcelline Mandeng is a Cameroonian-born artist using their body as a primary medium and subject alongside video, sound and sculpture to create ephemeral installations artworks. With a strong belief in community building, their practice questions the socio-political landscape that informs the experiences of a naturalized citizen living at the intersections of blackness, gender non-conformity and sexual deviance. They received their BFA from the Maryland Institute college of art in 2015 and have exhibited works at Company Gallery in Manhattan, No Nations Art Gallery In Chicago, Superchief Gallery in LA and also toured in Canada.

Lido Pimienta b.1986 is an Indigenous to Colombia interdisciplinary artist-curator and musician based in Toronto. Her work explores the politics of gender, race, motherhood, identity and the construct of the Canadian landscape in the Latin American Diaspora and vernacular. In 2010 Pimienta saw the release of her first album Color LP, she toured Latin America, USA and Europe gaining international recognition not only as a music performer but as advocate for Women in technology and Arts and the reform of immigration policies in Canada. In 2013 she created Girl Talkz, a curated show featuring female-up-and-coming performing artists in Toronto. Currently, Pimienta is gearing up to tour her latest music release La Papessa, all while exhibiting and performing nationally, internationally and taking care of her son.

Zoe Solomon aka Effie Eff aka Fresh Flesh aka DJ Diva Cup aka Cathys Cleaners is an interdisciplinary artist born in 1985 at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Having studied in Vancouver at ECIADU, and graduated from NSCADU in Halifax, Solomon brings concepts from opposite coasts back to Toronto.

Cameron Lee is a Toronto-based artist, curator, and DJ. Cameron performs as Marilyn Mansion, an alter ego who builds installations, collects ephemera, combining these with humour, making familiarity feel strange. Camerons monthly DJ event FEMINISTRY is a queer oriented, ongoing project growing from music, fashion, writing, conversation, ideas exchange, centred by feminism; acknowledgement of difference, assertions of self-exploration and respect. Cameron is a founding member of Toronto-based gallery 8-Eleven and they collaborate with Buzz on a fashion project Rebaie by Rebe, presenting work at Art Metropole and the Art Gallery of Ontario.