SHEROES - Dialogue between Rea, Lorna & Andrew

Tony Halmos's GIF from Sheroes #4: Madonna

We continue our post series on SHEROES, the monthly Toronto art event series that began in July 2011 and has curated on and offline works that playfully and performatively explore the iconography and fan culture surrounding the “League of Legendary Ladies.”
In the first part of our series, we published an essay by David Balzer called “Is She a Snob?” , an account of the series and its “vortex of gleeful, deconstructing snobbery”. Forthcoming will be interviews with some of participating artists in Virtual Season. 
In our second part, we have below a condensed and edited email dialogue between Sheroes founder Rea McNamara, GIF art curator/participating artist Lorna Mills , and participating artist Andrew Benson. See more;

I. On “Mythic Woman Power” 

ANDREW BENSON (AB): I feel as an artist involved with Sheroes for some time that it is something that always revealing itself in new ways, like its defiance of easy classification leads me to constantly develop my own perceptions of it. The "snob" stuff is good to consider, but I have to say that I see it in a totally different view.
Do either of you want to talk about how Sheroes itself is experienced from different angles and through different media and how that relates back to this whole thing about fandom being a collaboration with the celebrity that ultimately creates our understanding of the celebrity?

LORNA MILLS (LM): Looking at Sheroes from different angles is pertinent, because at the beginning I told Rea that we shouldn't document the events so much as mythologize them. (A photographer told me once that mythologizing artwork was what you did when you documented it.) 

REA MCNAMARA (RM): I do like that “fuckyeahsheroes” was often very “fuckyeahlornamills”. 

And even though "herstory" & "sheroes" & "mythic woman power" makes her cringe, she’ll still talk your ear off about a Virago Modern Classic . 

LM: Yes, “fuckyeahlornamills” worked out quite nicely for me. (And the dear Victorian and Edwardian Hens, who wrote all the novels reprinted by Virago Press, would never have used those goddessy terms.) 

But now you’ve touch upon my snobbery by taunting me with campy 70's feminist-speak. 

Rollin Leonard & Lorna Mills for Sheroes #5: Yoko Ono

RM: Andrew and I actually had a gchat about that "herstory" playfulness. I had related to him the number of times I'd been asked if Sheroes was an "all-woman" effort; he talked about how we'd managed to avoid the "sticky and sometimes ugly gender-political stuff". 

LM: I kind of thought the presumption that all the Sheroes participants were female showed an amazing lack of imagination. 

The sticky and sometimes ugly gender-political stuff was avoided because no one wanted to participate in a mono-culture; with that in mind, cultivating a wide variety of artists and performers came naturally. 

But it wasn't just about gender. Other classifications were broken down in terms of identity. The GIF artists really were as international as I could find and the age & exhibition experience of the artists covered a wide range. 

Nothing is more pleasurable than to ignore a current artificial hierarchy.

RM: Lorna, I love that. "Current artificial hierarchy". The Sheroes Stan residency definitely came out of that. 

LM: As a whole, all the Sheroes events were queer-friendly, racially mixed and damn sexy. And considering the cultural mix of the city we are based in, how could they not be? 

That said, the project is also very much about gender without leaving out men or leaving out women. 

RM: The Toronto-ness is a meta layer. I always like bringing up Will Munro & Vazaleen. 

We've been lucky with Sheroes in being booked at venues that had a reputation for being inclusive queer-friendly spaces. (And straight up: the gays loved Sheroes before anyone else did!) 

I do think it's worth pointing out though that we still have issues around racially-mixed events happening in Toronto. While it's definitely a diverse city, do enough events happen where you see that intermingling, especially within the arts & culture community? I don't necessarily think so. Toronto Arts Council only implemented a cultural equity policy in the early 1990s, so there's a complicated history there in terms of representation and support for particular practices. 

LM: WTF? Are we not post-racial??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? (Well, that amused me.) 

II. On Fandom 

RM: I think a lot about how the open space we created with Sheroes was akin to participatory online spaces like slash & fan fiction communities. 

Take the whole canon/fanon thing that's at the heart of many fandoms. A lot of the transformative works you'll find come from this process where seemingly individual, private yearnings for a canon (the original source material) produce these fannish works that, alongside other fannish works, create a better version of that favourite show/film/book/etc. This then created the "fanon" — the "fan canon" where fan-created facts are accepted as canon by the fandom. 

Does that make Sheroes a fandom? We brought together a seemingly disparate group, and presented them in such a way — with the pomp and pageantry of goddessy terms — that created a fannish-like narrative. 

Helen Adamidou's GIF for Sheroes #8: Marianne Faithfull

AB: I like the relationship to fandom that you talk about, but I think one thing that is pretty interesting about Sheroes is that often you have artists with very little relationship with a celebrity's image or work contributing. It's sort of posing as the actions of fans, but really it's something else, or maybe it's positioned as fandom. 

There were a few Legendary Ladies that I wasn't that familiar with, TBH, like Dusty and to some extent Etta , so part of the assignment for me was the research that went into it. Even ones that I'm really a fan of (Yoko , Nina , Dolly ) I spend a lot of time researching on YouTube and Google image searches and Wikipedia.
LM: True, the fandom wasn't always genuine. There were a few legendary ladies that I couldn't have cared less about, but even if I was a fan, I still had to look for some sort of way my work could enter into the stream. That's why I was easy-going about submissions not being literal. I would have hated the project if everyone submitted portraits. 

RM: Madonna was a "difficult" Shero for me. Early on, a few of the Sheroes were chosen based on speculation around which Shero would bring the ppl out. (Apologies if this punctures any mythologizing efforts!) 

AB: I'm SHOCKED. But really, I suppose it's important to always remember that this thing wasn't just a conceptual feminist art project but also had to function as an event that people actually showed up to. Had to have a little appeal to the rest of the world. 

IV. On “Sexiness” (part I) 

RM: Why's the "sexiness" so important? What was it about that quality that drew in the GIF artists? How has the exhibition of the GIFs at Sheroes events been different from any other exhibitions? (Ie. BYOB , Speed Shows , etc.) 

 Yoshi Sodeoka’s GIF for Les post-Gendered et les autres group GIF show at Sheroes #10: Grace Jones.

LM: The sexiness is refreshing. Outside of some queer art practises in this city, anyway, there's still a lot of passive-aggressive minimalism with an exalted sense of its own importance, purity and rigor (plus the delusion that it’s original). I'd rather sleep on a bed of nails. Real BYOB events, where a bunch of young artists ACTUALLY bring their own projectors, can have the same sense of occasion as Sheroes, but obviously we are thematic and an integral part of something bigger. 

As for what draws in all the good GIF artists, I can't be sure. I was so surprised at how it snowballed from six or seven artists to 30. Treating it as an organized crew of artists rather than a different curated group show each month was easier for me. The excitement we generated for each other, each month, as we started to post our new GIFs was pretty infectious. 

AB: The relationship to other on/offline shows of internet artists is interesting. Many of these shows seem to me to function as an establishment of boundaries around a particular clique of Internet Artists. I guess this is what Lorna is referring to with her "current artificial hierarchy" comment. Sheroes might be just as cliquish (the Facebook group ?), but it seems like it's running on a different logic. 

LM: I was concerned about Sheroes GIF artists appearing cliquish. And that's a risk when you work with a regular crew. But I was always happy to hear from people who wanted to take part, especially if they came out of left field with great work I had never seen before. 

AB: I'm curious how strategic you guys were in who you invited to join in. Or was it just a friends of friends kinda thing? 

LM: Initially the invitations went out to artists that we were connected with on social media and who we thought might say yes. (That sort of thing is important, as we didn't want to deal with rejection). 

The only strategy I employed (that I'll admit to) is that this whole thing was a great opportunity to connect with artists I admired and to find out about younger artists who hadn't received much attention. The fact that almost everyone from the beginning wanted to continue contributing, shaped how this ended up being organized. 

AB: I like what you said about it being an excuse to meet and get to know some artists. I feel like the monthly rounds of contribution really got me acquainted with a bunch of really cool people, and had me paying more attention to people I was already aware of, because they would pull out some random thing that showed a whole other side of them or their methods. 

LM: My regret is that I'm now finding out about some more really good artists who would have loved to be involved. I wish I had known sooner. 

V. On “Sexiness” (part II) 

AB: To respond to Rea's earlier question about "sexiness" — I think it's hard to have an honest celebration/exhumation/invocation of female celebrities without dealing with the "sexy". 

I tend to think a lot about drag in relationship to Sheroes for whatever reason: the overt performance of absurd and at times disturbing sexiness, or some sort of mimicry of it. 

Dolly Parton, for that reason, was the ultimate Shero for me. 

LM: It’s all about drag and otherliness. 

RM: Drag and otherliness and Dolly were revelations. I felt like we were at a point where everyone was comfortable with the space that was created. The works by Manuel Fernández and Rollin Leonard in particular seem especially emblematic of that. I really enjoyed the work-in-progress jpegs folks shared. 

In fact, the “work in progress” tag was something I felt you actually kinda started, Andrew. 

AB: I guess maybe I did start the process screenshot thing, but that's sort of something I always just do now and then. I have this sort of superstition about my working process, where enough things have crashed or been accidentally deleted or hard drive busting where I often pull screenshots from whatever I'm working on. There's a really fleeting quality to a lot of things that I do, especially the more experimental video and programming stuff, so I have made a real discipline of constantly taking screenshots and doing recordings of whatever is happening in case that's the last I see of it. 

Anyways, that's how I started making GIFs in the first place, actually. 

RM: I really enjoyed the open process. It was like doing a residency, but instead of talking over breakfast or dinner the status of your written work or art piece, you'd see an image in the FB group or on G+. That kept me going with the documentation. I really enjoyed the generosity folks had with their artistic process, especially from the more established artists. 

AB: Sheroes really felt like a communal thing sometimes, and I was part of a conversation with other people struggling to meet their responsibilities. My favorite example was Rollin Leonard's painstaking struggle to do Dolly drag. It was obvious that someone had to do it, and felt like it was such a great morale thing to watch that take place. 

I work really hard on Sheroes things (partially because I'm procrastinating on other big scary projects and I'm a workaholic), but it's really cool that you can sense there are all these different levels of intensity that people treat Sheroes with, and it all has a place. The conversation around Youtube videos, process shots, and later on the Stan contributions really took it deeper for me. I liked that it felt like the conversation got started on G+ but then moved around to different online spaces (Tumblr, Facebook) and how the different spaces created different conversations. 

VI. On Being “An Event” 

AB: I sort of wish more art things functioned in these hybrid spaces. Are there any other ways where it being an (IRL) event created specific constraints? 

RM: There's an ease to the online aspect — the Tumblr, the interactions, screen shooting those interactions, capturing the process & work that occurred — that isn't there for IRL. It is an event that needs to be "sexy" the same way that the Shero has to be for their mainstream. Which is funny, because the IRL is the operating theatre that makes these performances, event GIFs, videos, etc. exist. It's the spectacle. 

That being said, the limitations and the hybrid space that was created definitely was the equivalent, of say, punk's three chords or that experience of being in an after-hours at 5 in the morning. When everything aligned — great performances, willing participants, good chunes, seizure-inducing GIFs, etc. — it was really magical. 

Follow the SHEROES post series at http://www.triangulationblog.com/search/label/sheroes

SHEROES - Is She a Snob? by David Balzer

Andrew Benson’s GIFs for Sheroes #9: Dolly Parton

Today we are proud to launch a post series about SHEROES and all movement around this monthly programming series which started just one year ago in July 2011 and which has been curating on and offline works that playfully and performatively explored the iconography and fan culture surrounding the League of Legendary Ladies.
Over the course of a year, the Toronto art event became a hub for a myriad of Canadian and international contemporary artists featuring frenetic assemblages of performance art, music, GIF and GIF-based video art, DIY projects, and various other activities.
Herstory has finally been done right. This week, SHEROES will celebrate the so-called batshit genius of its final inductee into the League of Legendary Ladies, Madame Nina Simone, on Thursday July 26th at the Beaver. Soon after, a culminating co-presentation of new and past works from the event series — Virtual Season — will take place in Toronto's Kensington Market on July 29's Pedestrian Sunday.

Taking the opportunity of the end of SHEROES, we start a little series of posts to know more about all these great shows and works exhibited. Starting today with an essay by David Balzer called "Is She a Snob?" (see it into the post), and the upcoming posts will bring an email dialogue between (founder) Rea McNamara,  (curator and participating artist) Lorna Mills and (participating artist) Andrew Benson. Also we will have several individually interviews from different participating artists involved in SHEROES!! See more;


Is She a Snob? by David Balzer, July 2012_

Let’s begin by talking about what Sheroes is not—or not just. Sheroes is not just a club night. Yes, it takes place in a club but also, vitally, online, and, at the risk of sounding whimsical, in the dreamworlds that both spaces cultivate. And so it is not just a party. And it is not just a celebration of women musicians and performers. It is also a celebration of their fans, and of culture-at-large. What it proclaims, enthusiastically, is that culture is made not only by its agents or even its most avid consumers, but also by the collaboration between them and, most intriguingly, by the ways in which that collaboration generates dialogue within its initial and, then, ever-evolving contexts. Accordingly, Sheroes is not just for women. As shown by its participants and attendees, who span ages, races, genders and sexualities, Sheroes is for everyone—everyone, that is, who understands what it means to induct a female pop superstar into “an ever-expanding ‘League of Legendary Ladies.’”

Rea McNamara founded Sheroes in 2011. As a close friend of hers, I can attest to its improvisatory evolution over the past year, as well as to its absolute dependence on collaboration, but can also say with confidence that it is a project only she could have created. The first Sheroes, celebrating Joni Mitchell, was on July 6, 2011, at the now-closed NACO Gallery, and was described on Facebook thusly: “A live chopped & screwed remix tribute to Joni Mitchell (AKA first lady of the canyon) via DJ reeraw (AKA Rea McNamara). Snobbery will abound—only focusing on samples & clips between For The Roses to Don Juan's Reckless Daughter.” Summative hashtags at the end of the description, which became standard for all forthcoming Sheroes events, read: “DO EXPECT: #helpfulhenrythehousewifesdelight”—Mitchell’s putative 1970s nickname for cocaine, found in the liner notes for her 1975 album The Hissing of Summer Lawns—“#adorothylamoursarong”—a lyric from “Dreamland” on Mitchell’s 1977 concept album Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter—“DON'T EXPECT: #trillysopranofolky #woodstock.”

Giselle Zatonyl’s GIF for Les post-Gendered et les autres group GIF show at Sheroes #10: Grace Jones

Here, then, is the seemingly unlikely germ for Sheroes: snobbery. Virginia Woolf privately presented a paper entitled “Am I a Snob?” to the Bloomsbury group at the Memoir Club in the 1930s, and her defiant, if tongue-in-cheek, answer to the titular question—a resounding yes—is, after a fashion, McNamara’s. In both women’s cases, this affirmative is about redefinition and rarefaction: indeed, about looking at culture from the outside in, or perhaps from the inside up. Sheroes was, from the start, concerned with paying tribute to undercurrents, obscurities and secret histories. There’s more to Joni Mitchell than Blue or “Big Yellow Taxi”; there is, for instance, that period McNamara used in her DJ set, Mitchell’s so-called difficult, jazz-inflected period of the 1970s, which, despite its infamy, is now seen as Mitchell’s major accomplishment by music critics. It also marked Mitchell’s breakthrough to African-American audiences, one of whom was a young Prince who, as Mitchell attests in a New York magazine piece (which McNamara duly posted on the event’s Facebook wall), used to send her fan mail “with all of the U’s and hearts that way that he writes. And the office took it as mail from the lunatic fringe and just tossed it!”

The snobbery of fandom, then—its paradoxical inclusiveness, or its strange, reverse-exclusionism—has become Sheroes’ mantra. As a teen, McNamara became deeply involved in online fan fiction, following and writing narratives (many “slash,” especially “real-person slash,” in which fans invent same-sex sexual scenarios between band members or celebrities) on the Beatles, the Strokes and *NSYNC. While studying at York University, McNamara was a guest lecturer on fan fiction for Marcus Boon’s Sampling and Contemporary Literature class, which led to her eventually being included in the acknowledgments of his 2010 Harvard University Press book, In Praise of Copying. Sheroes would not exist without both fan culture and its special iterations online. For the second, Chaka Khan edition of Sheroes (the party became a monthly at NACO; for its sixth iteration in January 2012, it moved to The Beaver on Queen Street West, where it currently resides) McNamara bought thigh-high black PVC boots in tribute to Khan’s outrageous funk accoutrements, and made a video in which she pranced around to the singer’s “Clouds” (a favourite of Paradise Garage DJ Larry Levan, one of the many guiding spirits for Sheroes). The point? According to her Facebook post, McNamara was “riffing on the classic YouTube private dancing genre.” She wasn’t just indulging in fandom; she was commenting on fandom while expressing her own fandom.

Se Ye (AKA Lavish Bat, our Grace Avatar) from Sheroes Grace Jones

This vortex of gleeful, deconstructing snobbery continued with the third Sheroes, which honoured Tina Turner, and generated another video in which McNamara and guest collaborator, performance-poet Naila Keleta-Mae —at this point, Sheroes was enlisting a variety of participants—danced like Turner to “Proud Mary” in McNamara’s living room, in emulation of moves from the Nintendo Wii game Just Dance 2. McNamara wore a wig, created by John Taccone of Navigate Salon and one of the many she would don for subsequent Sheroes, in tribute to “cosplay,” in which fans dress up, in real life, like their idols. At the event, McNamara took on the act aggressively, arguably disturbingly, adding to the wig a black eye applied by makeup artist Roxanne DeNobrega, in reference to Turner’s physical abuse under her ex-husband, Ike Turner. Tributes paid by Sheroes were clearly unorthodox; each event was becoming a kind of on- and offline operating theatre for its respective legend. The Tina Turner event’s “DON’T EXPECT” hashtag was, of course, “#ike.” For Yoko Ono, the fifth Shero, it was “#14yearoldbeatlesfans,” a reference to the droves of adolescent Beatles fans who continue to vilify Ono as “witch” and “bitch” on sundry online message boards. On the Facebook event page for Ono, one person wrote, “sorry, I really can’t stand Yoko Ono,” to which McNamara responded, near-inscrutably, “the kitchen door is the new front door. why do you choose to enter nutopia?” (Ono, by the way, is the only shero McNamara has made contact with, via a back-and-forth Twitter Q & A.)

The Tina Turner Sheroes also introduced animated GIFs: looped bitmap images that have existed since the early days of the Internet and have been revived on social-media sites like Tumblr as memes. Toronto-based GIF-artist Lorna Mills joined a handful of other creators, including McNamara, who looped Turner’s quivering lips as the Acid Queen in Ken Russell’s Tommy, and these GIFs soon became a bridge for Sheroes, both glittering party projections and online teasers—and, then, cheeky commemorations. Mills and colleague Sally McKay were formative in encouraging McNamara to emphasize Sheroes’ fan-ishness in the context of online outsider art. Mills has come to curate Sheroes’ GIF component, and its roster of GIF artists is now international, discussing and debating each shero via Google+. Mills gives a new, wink-wink-nudge-nudge title to this coterie every month: for “The Global GIF Aristocracy (von Sacher-Masoch Line),” a reference to Faithfull’s relation on her mother’s side to Venus in Furs author and masochism namesake, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

GIF by Grace McEvoy for Sheroes #6: Erykah Badu

In addition to GIFs, Sheroes’ online existence is predictably prolific, as illustrated by its frequently updated site, fuckyeahsheroes.tumblr.com, a mimicking of single-topic Tumblr fan sites with “fuckyeah” prefixes. All the performances at Sheroes are recorded and posted; photos abound. (In this manner, one doesn’t actually have to go to Sheroes to experience it.) A newer, entertaining feature of Sheroes has been its “Stan Residency Program,” for which a superfan works with Sheroes’ Facebook presence in the weeks leading up to the event, sharing tidbits and analyses around the woman-of-the-month.

But Sheroes’ IRL (in-real-life) existence, and indeed its classical affiliations, cannot be discounted. Álvaro Girón , who played with McNamara in the band T∆nG∆, should be credited with initiating the event: he was the one who invited McNamara to fill in for him at NACO that fateful July day, and is Sheroes’ on-and-off resident DJ. (Sheroes is most definitely pro-dancing.) Tony Halmos, a.k.a. Silk Degrees, not only introduces performers and karaoke-ers (Sheroes is most definitely pro-karaoke) but also designs the posters as well as trivia-filled trading cards for each shero, adding to the event shades of pre-internet fan culture. Halmos is also responsible for the coinage “League of Legendary Ladies,” which naturally recalls comics and their superheroes.

Sheroes at NACO

Sheroes’ pre-internet-isms go further. McNamara calls herself Sheroes’ “salonnière,” bringing to mind modernist figures like Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney and the avant-garde movements they helped propagate. Sheroes’ latest project, Virtual Season , takes the concept full circle. An all-day, all-night outdoor and indoor extravaganza, co-presented by Whippersnapper Gallery, Virtual Season marks the end of Sheroes’ first run. Here, all of the Sheroes—Joni Mitchell, Chaka Khan, Tina Turner, Madonna, Yoko Ono, Erykah Badu, Etta James, Marianne Faithfull, Dolly Parton, Grace Jones, Dusty Springfield and Nina Simone—converge. The women are conjured by McNamara and various performers in a kind of séance of the dead and absent, recalling pagan and Christian festivals from Ancient Egypt and Greece to present-day Africa and Latin America. The worship is charged and cultish: snobbish, one might say. But it is also radically interpretive and fan-positive. Sheroes wants to liberate, and represents the liberation of, those who really get it.

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Essay by David Balzer for the online publication Triangulation Blog - July 2012 

David Balzer is the author of the short-fiction collection Contrivances (Joyland/ECW Press). He has written about art and film for The Globe and Mail, The Believer, Modern Painters, PopMatters.com and others. He is currently working on a novel.

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