Johanna Householder and Judith Price
Johanna Householder works at the intersection of popular and unpopular culture, making performance art, audio, video, film and choreography. Her interest in how ideas move through bodies and has led her often collaborative practice. She has performed across Canada and at international venues for 40 years. One of the founders of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, she co-edited two books with Tanya Mars: Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance art by Canadian women (2004), and More Caught in the Act (2016). She is professor emeritus at OCADU, where she taught performance and time-based media. Her current work concerns the vexations of the anthropocene.
Judith Price combines a 30+ year transdisciplinary art practice with a background in modern dance. Her body of work includes performances, performative videos, video installations, site-specific installations and short films. Her performances include site-specific street actions, interventions, and collaborative and durational works, and her solo performances in galleries and festival events incorporate still images, video projections, and sculpture, merging performance and video installation. She is a founding member of the Open Action performance collective. Price lives in Victoria, BC, and is retired from teaching post-secondary courses in time-based art. Judith is an uninvited guest on the Lekwungen/Esquimalt, Songhees and WSÁNEĆ territory.
Artist Statement
Only connect.
We humans, we animals, are mimetic beings. This quality gives choral singing, unison dancing, synchronized swimming and starling murmurations the power to enthrall, to mesmerize. Empathy matches energy.
Lockdown.
"Our minds are together when our bodies feel we're not. That dissonance, which causes people to have conflicting feelings, is exhausting."-- Gianpiero Petriglieri
Recorded on Zoom, this video is an attempt to restore peripheral vision to a world now condensed into a 2880 x 1800 slab of metals and electrons. The crude imprecision of the technologies through which we now communicate flattens geographies and obliterates time zones. It also subtly renders affect ineffective, demanding that we tunnel our visions. All backgrounds appear as virtual.
In order to pry apart the digital compression of our formerly multiform lives and regain a sense of humour about it all, we challenged each other to rigorously improvise a new relationality: not speaking, not editing, just doing. With the desire to reach around and through the screen we improvise and explore, approximating each others appearance, gesture, and surroundings and by doing so, mapping potential new relationships and processes. We are learning to read one anothers' surroundings differently--what surrounds us accrues meaning when read as mise-en-scène. Cedar and Bamboo is a brief excerpt from this ongoing research.
