TELLING QUEER STORIES: ARTIST WORKSHOP

Dec. 1 / 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. / FreeExposure, Edmonton's queer arts and culture festival, Canada.

Listen to, learn from and network with established queer artists/writers Ivan E. Coyote, Ann Cvetkovich, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan. This three-hour workshop is directed toward Edmonton's emerging queer artists working in all media. Bring your questions, aspirations and realities. Lunch will be served.
RSVP by Wednesday, Nov. 28 to todd@exposurefestival.ca.

As I don't know the performace and visual artists Shawna Dempsey and Lori Millian, I have decided to quote the University of Lethbridge webpage for background information about them:

"Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan are best known as performance artists. Their work is experimental, passionate, and irreverent. Collaborators since 1989, this duo were catapulted into the national spotlight with the controversial, now world-renowned performance piece, “We’re talking Vulva”. Since then, this duo has toured extensively throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan. Their film and video works have been screened in venues as far-ranging as women’s centres in Sri Lanka and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. They have also created installation (Archaeology and You, for the Royal Ontario Museum); published books, (Lesbian National Parks & Services Field Guide to North America, Pedlar Press); and curated exhibitions."

I wish the organizers and participants of this workshop all the best with their queer projects.

The Hasselblad Foundation award the 2007 prize to Nan

Nan Goldin is one of the most significant photographers of our time. Today she is awarded the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography.

As many other women artists she turned her private world into public works of art. She is known for her intimate photos, especially her slideshow and first book 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency', 1986. The rough aesthetics of her snapshots started a new trend among photographers around the world.

I am happy to see that for the third time in 27 years the Hasselblad Award Winner is a woman. You can see her photos on the Hasselblad Foundations webpage or visit the Guggenheim Museum's webpage, where you can see 11 of her works online.

L-calendar 2008, beautiful photography

Fátima Pombo, University Professor and writer. Porto (Portugal) autumn 2007 reviews the new L-Calendar:
"In the L-Calendar 2008 each month is celebrated with the presence of two bodies, as if the photographer wants to suggest that the body is the landscape to bring into light all the other subjects that shape daily life.
I believe that many decisions in life are aesthetical statements, either intuitive or justified by reasoning.
It seems that for Cristina de la Madera the black/white image proposes a perspective for the world: the experience of intimacy with one’s own and with the other, specially framed by the experience of time suspension.
The photographs of this calendar call life, not the prudent day, not the repressive day, not the flawy day… but the free day, the accomplice one, that that expresses the desire of union, lasting or ephemeral. A day after the other, a month after the other, a year after the other… time as a renewed possibility of being alive and free."

More info: www.lesbiancalendar.eu

Flickr.com and lesbian art

I have been looking at the group photo pool "Lesbian art" on http://www.flickr.com/. This is how the group's owner/moderator describes the pool:

"Artistic and inspiring images portraying women together. Joyous and erotic moments shared together. Lesbian girls who want to show their artwork to the world and their way of looking at it. Lesbian women showing themselves to the world in an artsy manner. Esthetic. Erotic. Lesbian Art."

This sounds wonderfully lesbian only. Like women making works of art for women, but if you study the profiles you will see that some male photographers have posted their 'lesbian art' images in this pool too. This makes me wonder how they define lesbian art.

Among the members of the group there is debate at the moment about what lesbian art is - see what they write about the question: What is lesbian art?? I find that all their different points of view are equally interesting, as there is no common consensus about what Lesbian Art is.

I am editing this blog and the resource site Feminine Moments to promote Lesbian and Queer fine arts by women artists and discuss matters which are of interest to my lesbian and queer readers.