Just Another Artist Statement

DIY Lover (Portland)

The performance consists of a textual reading that directs the onstage construction of a lover. The text Liddle delivers is compiled from a number of different dating guides, self help websites, and how to manuals. Semczyszyn reactively builds the lover from objects solicited in advance from participants who were asked to donate something they considered gendered. DIY Lover (Portland) is a performative inquiry into the material configuration of contemporary dating advice.

Part of the project was concerned with exposing the absurdity of these texts and their essentializing of gender in laying out rules to get a partner. The interplay between the text and the construction highlights the focus on control and responsibility in the dating advice, and the implications for identity in acquiring and maintaining a relationship.

Liddle and Semczyszyn are Vancouver based artists who have both shown internationally. They have an ongoing collaborative relationship using art practices as a methodology for analysis and criticism of social structures.

DIY Lover --the Not Sent Letters Show

So, I didn't get into detail about the project in the last post on account I didn't want to spoil it. Some people think that you can experience the work in the same way by watching the video without having to be "there". Personally, I disagree because there is just something wonderful about how performance works on your body. And you have agency over where you look, the details you focus on and the moments you gloss over. In fact, Nola and I had a long conversation as to whether we were happy showing the performance in its entirety online. For now, we have decided that future DIY Lover performances will be discrete, stand alone pieces, so for now we will leave it. And YES, that is correct, DIY Lover will be reinvented in Portland on February 19th, for a special Valentines Day performance. Stay tuned!

Rina out.

DIY Lover --the latest collaborative project with the lovely Nola Semczyszyn

Part of Jeremy Todd's ongoing project called Not Sent Letters, DIY Lover, had its origins, for me, in a collection of personalized email letters I received over the last year from Christian Carter, an expert in finding the perfect man. He intended, and succeeded, I believe to pray upon my insecurities around being chronically single, by repeatedly making the situation unacceptable and wholly my fault. Here is a small taste:

Ok Rina,
    Do you have the love and the kind of
relationship you want in your life right now? As you know, the holidays are for spending 

time with family and those you love the most. How are you going to feel when you're there 
with your family and friends over the
holidays 
and everyone else has great partners and 
committed relationships or marriages? What about you? Why haven't things fallen into place for you?

This style of rhetoric goes on for about 500-750 words, with "OK Rina" thrown in at intervals. Receiving these emails for a period of about 6 months started to make me think that I should indeed shell out $100 bucks for the 4 set DVD. After all, $100 is not that much if he has already sorted out the mystery of relational happiness, and is going to give me the goods and I will find that man and be happy and desired forever!
Nola has a fascination with dating didactics. Her contribution to the text came in about 10 short bursts of practical, in the moment, what to do exactly to "get the girl/boy". An example is:

6. Never call the next day. You will appear to be desperate with nothing better to do. You want to project that you are "in
demand" and that you are busy, which will make you seem exciting, fun and mysterious. If you game a woman effectively
during your initial meeting with her, chances are you won't need to call her at all because she'll call you first. On that note, it
would be wise to always exchange numbers with a woman rather than only getting one from her. This is easily done by
handing her your cell phone and telling her to put her number in it, then once she's finished you simply call her immediately
so she has your number as well.

We have integrated both texts, and with all the mentions of "tools", "steps" and "skills", the construction metaphors became evident. I will say no more, but hope you can make it!

Rina signing out.



NOT SENT LETTERS
& GUESTS



@ dharmalab, Vancouver, 1814 Pandora (N. of Hastings, E. of Commercial @ Salsbury)

Friday Night, January 14, 2011, 8pm SHARP!


Please join us for an evening of interdisciplinary works by:

Anaka Schofield & Lori Weidenhammer
Katherine Somody
LeanneJ & My Name is Scot
Rina Liddle & Nola Semczyszn
Ron Stuber Colin McLaine
Soressa Gardner & Dennis E. Bolen
Jeremy Todd w/ Margot Leigh Butler, Natasha McHardy, Dinka Pignon, Yi Xin Tong, Dennis E. Bolen & Andrew Short
postlude music by CORNER & friends.

$5 suggested donation (toward production expenses)

Anaka Schofield & Lori Weidenhammer (two Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artists & friends) expand Schofield's dialogue w/ Helen Potrebenko's 1975 Vancouver novel Taxi! through an embodied exploration of transaction involving readers/listeners. Weidenhammer's Security Guard examines these encounters by providing "market research" on various sitters.

Katherine Somody (part artist, critic, skeptic & cautious romantic) screens the first in a series of self-portraits exploring relations between music & video, memory & storytelling, textual & somatic language - while trying (perhaps in vain) to disentangle the personal from the socially prescribed.

LeanneJ & My Name is Scot (two interdisciplinary artists engaging issues of class, identity & agency while living in Vancouver's DTES) screen Calculating 63: More than 15 years, over 63 lives, way too many excuses, endless questions, zero good reasons & only 1 perpetrator? Something in this equation doesn’t add up. This collaboration sifts through the statistics, looking for feeling & m Leaning behind the numbers and finding out that poverty, violence & exploitation can disappear just about anyone.

Rina Liddle & Nola Semczyszn (two interdisciplinary artists exploring art making as a methodology for analysis & criticism of social structures) present DIY Lover, a performative inquiry into the material configuration of dating guides.

Ron Stuber Colin McLaine (a drummer/percussionist & visual artist/composer) perform Shed, a work composed in a Strathcona shed for electric guitar and drums that might also involve the shedding of light, skin and inhibitions.

Soressa Gardner & Dennis E. Bolen(a singer/composer/performance artist & novelist/editor/teacher/journalist) combine prose, poetry and electronica within a new collaborative work @ Not Sent Letters & Guests.

NOT SENT LETTERS is an ongoing series of epistolary detours by Jeremy Todd (an entanglement w/ technologies of the self & the politics of meaning) involving online image/text posts, digital film shorts & multi-media performances. The dharmalab letters set will include live scores by ANDREW SHORT, image projection, & letters selected from the project blog (notsentletters.blogspot.com) & read by Margot Leigh Butler, Natasha McHardy, Dinka Pignon, Yi Xin Tong, Dennis E. Bolen

Explore previous Not Sent Letters & Guests events here: www.notsentlettersandguests.blogspot.com
Email Jeremy if you'd like to host or contribute to a future N. S. L. & G. event: jeremytodd [at] shaw [dot] ca