Talk delivered at Winnipeg Art Gallery, April 7, 2017, at the opening of the 2017 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts (GGArts) exhibition.
l. So you’re 15 years old and just getting used to the line that divides your face between a zombie daytime and your real life at night. As soon as the light is low enough, and the corporate beer flows fast enough, you start to walk not run towards the secret you can’t keep a moment longer – that the only way for you to touch your hope and happiness – your pleasure – is to give some one else pleasure. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you but: your pleasure is a hand-me-down, a borrowed charm. So when they say yes, and allow you to touch their perfect body with your mind, you work doubletime to unwrap their old wounds and embraces, because you know that these contain the key to the most ancient and forbidden pleasures.
2. The cinema, the movies, invite us to jump into the bodies of strangers. I feel what you feel. It might could help us become more elastic, expand our repertoire of personalities, grant us the perfect and sublime and delicious loneliness we can only feel when we come together in a public space like this one. Here at last we can say yes to both sides of our face. And yours.
Winnipeg Art Gallery, April 7, 2017. Photo by Cecilia Araneda
