Rhonda Abrams Song and Allegories
Rhonda Abrams, still from the video Lament of the Sugar Bush Man, 1987
Curator: Marilyn Burgess
Opening on Saturday, November 7, 1998, at 5 pm
Artist talk and new video launch on Wednesday, December 2, 1998, at 6 pm
Rhonda Abrams is a unique voice in Canadian video art. Spanning the last fifteen years, her tapes explore our imagined relationship to nature in operatic vignettes peopled by Canadian “types” such as the hunter, the fisher and the bush man. Clearcut forests, artificial nature set indoors and smoke choked urban skies define Abrams’ “wilderness”, ordering a visual geography of Canada determined by the needs of industry. In these tapes, the great outdoors becomes the setting for our deadliest socializations, the ground that both prepares us for and destines us to see ourselves as separate from the natural environment. In the nature/culture divide that orders this universe, gender is both its organizing trope and its send-up. Women embody nature only to subvert it. Forests are sites of romance and lovers themselves. Reveling in a certain essential feminity, these operettas also interrogate the cultural construction of nature as feminine.
Marilyn Burgess is an independent scholar and media artist. She holds a Ph.D. in Communications Studies from Concordia University and has taught Film, Communications and Fine Arts. She publishes on Cinema and Cultural Studies, and has curated video programs for a number of Canadian and Quebecois film and video festivals. The exhibition Indian Princesses and Cowgirls is currently touring throughout Canada. Marilyn is now working on a new book entitled Dark Devils in the Saddle: Gender and Race in the Wild West, which will be published by McGill-Queens University Press.
Rhonda Abrams, still from the video Lament of the Sugar Bush Man, 1987
Rhonda Abrams est une vidéaste dont les bandes ont été largement diffusées depuis 1985. Son travail a fait l’objet d’expositions personnelles à New York, à Kleinburg et dans plusieurs villes canadiennes, et a fait partie d’expositions collectives à travers le monde. Elle s’est mérité le prix de la meilleure vidéo au Video Culture International en 1986. Elle vit dans la région de Toronto.