Art Gallery of Mississauga Video Programme

Bedroom Community

Tuesday August 14, 2007
9:00 pm – 10:30 pm

Main Stage, On the grounds of the Mississauga Central Library

Curated by Su-Ying Lee, Curatorial/Administrative Assistant, Art Gallery of Mississauga

Peeking into bedrooms

Referring to commuter suburbs, the term “bedroom community” implies a primarily residential municipality that arises to feed the demand for workers in the urban centre. Suburban lives, it would seem, are ordered into predictable units of work and domesticity, a template that is used again and again. The conventional lore of the suburbs has been one of a place called “normal”; but what do we truly know about normal?

Built in 1954, our first Canadian suburb, the community of Don Mills, signified the recovery of famillies and the economy following WWII. Work, which is often synonymous with purpose, greatly shapes lives, permitting the ability to purchase a home and sustain a family. Tim Eckman, who has been working since adolescence, now lives in the rafters at the Scotia Bank towers, informed by a mystical being, “The Clock.” This scenario from A Cure for Being Ordinary by Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby, although seemingly fantastic, is intensified from the same work/time locus which has suburban residents flocking en mass, daily. While the fictional Tim Eckman has moved away from the flock, the paradox of work limiting individual agency while enabling individual freedom has suspended the characters in Aleesa Cohene’s Supposed To.

Suburban identity, rooted in recent history and pervasive in popular culture, has mutated. The current perception of the suburbs is no longer of the idyllic, nuclear-family enclave of Leave It To Beaver but of unrestrained, gluttonous communities which cannot be sustained. In a story broadcast by the CBC on April 14, 1963, one suburban resident waxes idyllic while foreshadowing the vehicle dependency and consumption that suburbanites would come to be associated with: “There’s just one concern: A mother says she’s always having to taxi her children around. But besides the transportation issue, ‘it’s perfect.’” Mississauga’s expansive streets, more accommodating to vehicles than to pedestrians, lead to City Centre where Heather Keung & Michael Connor encapsulate the intensity of the municipality’s traffic—just one of the contemporary suburb’s larger-than-life attributes.

Torontonians often marvel disdainfully at all the ways in which the surrounding suburbs are not Toronto. Such intimate knowledge of our differences is come by honestly since, truth be known, many urban inhabitants lived their childhoods and adolescences in bouroughs, villes, and dales. It is this combination of superiority and sheepishness that marks a self-loathing suburban fugitive. Alex Grant’s Magic Memory captures the passing of a moment of childhood before the development of suburban self-loathing. A childhood set against a backdrop of orderly subdivisions does not preclude profundity. Libby Hague’s Our Town casts watercolour and ink children against a dolly shot of a subdivision: brutality and play exist side by side; children and adults share a world, but not without difficulty; the banal and the profound are inextricably linked.

The extraordinary emerges when individual lives push against the norm of the suburbs. From suburban detritus found on Mississauga’s Winston Churchill Boulevard, Alison Kobayashi gleans the disquiet typical of early adolescent desire in From Alex to Alex. Such ordinary tensions are at once enchanted and heart-rending, appearing interspersed throughout Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure by Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby. Like a clamour rising up from the psyche of the suburbs, we praise and long for the natural world and loathe ourselves as we destruct it; youth impart insights, brave and regular; we struggle as inhabitants of a conflicted world; conjurers warn with advice; domesticated animals are charmed.

The themes of work, traffic, coming of age, and enduring our days are typical of those prescribed to the suburbs. The depths of these themes, when mined, reveal the fantastically banal, mystical, and absurd all residing in bedroom communities.

- Su-Ying Lee

Heather Keung & Michael Connor
City Centre, 2006
4 min 30 sec

City Centre examines how the suburban landscape functions and facilitates the lifestyles of the people who live there. Comprised of thousands of digital photographs, the video illustrates human traffic patterns and highlights the activities that happen at the centre of the city of Mississauga.

Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby
A Cure for Being Ordinary, 2004
6 min

While in a self-imposed exile from the corporate world, a man describes his relationship to the clock from early recollections to his entry into the working world.

A Cure for Being Ordinary is one segment of a musical video-art science-fiction trilogy entitled The New Freedom Founders.

Aleesa Cohene
Supposed To, 2006
7 min

Supposed To examines how work in a capitalist system divides people from themselves. Work often succeeds at limiting our individual agency while paradoxically promoting individual freedom. Lack of agency breeds apathy and despondency: we feel guilty for things we didn't do, and shirk responsibility for things we made happen.

Re-editing sampled footage and dialogue from science fiction films, psychological thrillers, and corporate training videos, Supposed To builds a hybrid narrative of characters exhausted by work, acting out, escaping conflict, and misdirected blame, and ultimately returning to an inevitable deep, wordless knowledge that shapes our shared reality. Supposed To questions our ontological vocation, reminding us that our destiny is still unknown.

Alex Grant
Magic Memory, 2006
2 min 55 sec

This piece is about saying goodbye to one's youth and boyhood.

Libby Hague
Our Town, 2001
9 min 10 sec

A child’s society—its vitality, violence, and distance from the adult world—is underscored by the suicide of a friend’s mother. The slippage between the child’s and adult’s world is personified by a technique of static animation in which hundreds of watercolour ink drawings are superimposed on an out-of-register real world, composed of a nine-minute dolly shot of a suburban housing project.

Alison S.M. Kobayashi
From Alex To Alex, 2006
6 min 11 sec

In the fall of 2003 I found a letter on the Winston Churchill Blvd QEW overpass. It was labelled “From: Alex To: Alex.” This is a film based on the contents of that letter.

Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby
Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure, 2006
14 min 40 sec

As with earlier works, Songs of Praise takes on difficult, often painful subject matter. Themes of addiction, violence, the destruction of the natural world and the agonies of adolescence are woven through the work, but as Sarah Milroy writes for the Globe and Mail, the tape is "anything but depressing... [it is founded in] a sense of wonder at the endearing weirdness of life and all the vulnerable, furry little creatures immersed in it (especially us)."

My Mississauga - Come Celebrate Summer at City Centre
June – September 2007

Bursting at the seams, the Art Gallery of Mississauga has exploded into the Civic Square offering dynamic summer performances and engaging multi-media presentations for the My Mississauga festival. The Gallery invites you to join our summer long open house of ideas and entertainment.

If you have any questions please contact 905-896-5507 or suzanne.carte-blanchenot@mississauga.ca

Art Gallery of Mississauga would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Pendle Fund at the Community Foundation of Mississauga, Ontario Trillium Foundation, My Mississauga, University of Toronto, and Vtape.