Shawna Dempsey & Lorri Millan

Lesbian National Parks and Services was founded in 1997 to insert a lesbian presence into the landscape. In full uniform as Lesbian Rangers, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan patrol parklands, challenging the general public’s ideas of tourism, recreation, and the “natural” environment. Equipped with informative brochures and well-researched knowledge, they are a visible homosexual presence in spaces where concepts of history and biology exclude all but a very few.

The Rangers are in near constant demand and have performed “tours-of-duty” across Canada and abroad including the Sydney Gay/Lesbian Mardi Gras (Australia) and Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (USA) in all manner of terrain from parks to city streets to university halls. They have also written brochures and books, created postcards and videos, informing and recruiting since to 1997. The Rangers’ work is on going.

“Do unto lesbians as you would have lesbians do unto you.”

https://vimeo.com/132492078

First performed: July 1997, Banff National Park, Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Alberta

Photos by Don Lee and Laura Vanags of The Banff Centre, Wolfgang Gunzel, Zab, Sheila Spence and Art Gallery at University of Lethbridge

The following is an excerpt from the Handbook of the Junior Lesbian Ranger, self-published, 2001.

Everyone wants to be a Junior Lesbian Ranger. Some want to wear the famous uniform. Some cannot wait for adventures in the bush. And some seek the companionship that comes from being more than a sister to a fellow Ranger. Whatever your reason for wanting to join the corps, you must ... understand all the duties and responsibilities that come with being a Junior Lesbian Ranger.

It might be hard to believe for the new recruit, but only 10% of any female population is lesbian. Surely with knowledge, spunk, and a little elbow grease we can improve upon this! But how? First and foremost, every Junior Ranger must do all she can to serve and protect the lesbian wilds. Get to know Flora and Fauna. We Rangers ask ourselves The Three Ws:  “Where does she live?”, “What does she eat?”, and “With whom does she sleep?” If you remember these helpful questions, you soon will be able to identify all kinds of fascinating individuals. More importantly, you will have the knowledge needed to help our numbers thrive and multiply. Study zealously and observe respectfully. In no time you will have wild lesbians eating from your hand.

The following is an excerpt form the Lesbian National Parks and Services Field Guide to North America (Pedlar Press, 2002). Available through bookstores near you!

Few among us can resist the roly-poly antics of romping bear cubs, the startling grace of prairie antelope or the sullen pose of nocturnal bar rats. Mammals contribute greatly to our enjoyment of the natural world. They provide solace, inspiration and a good excuse for a tromp in the bush.

Named for the aesthetically pleasing mammary glands that characterize the female of the genus, mammals range in size from the massive Blue Whale to the diminutive Pigmy Shrew and inhabit every known ecosystem, from arctic barrens to fragrant swamps, from deepest oceans to the desert sands, from lofty mountains to arid plains and from city streets to suburban sprawl. Mammals are our pets, our dinners, our workmates and our friends. There are 350 species of these hairy, warm-blooded creatures living north of the Mexican border alone.

Essential to our economies and our ecosystems, human life is inextricably bound to our mammalian brethren. Though we sometimes forget, even the lowliest of creatures, be they Big-Eared Bats or Hog-Nosed Skunks, are our cousins, for we are mammals ourselves.

Pilot Lorri Millan and Flight Attendant Shawna Dempsey board passengers for a performance aboard a vintage Vickers Viscount passenger jet. The metaphysical journey charts the entwined fates of a pair of newlyweds, a precocious child, a war veteran and a hijacker. However, it is the audience who are the true passengers, travelling through time and space as Dempsey and Millan spin a 1970s tale laced with disco, salted peanuts and transcendence.

“This is 1979. The flight attendant is modern. She is a product of the sexual revolution and women’s lib. She has a job and her own apartment. She’s been to discos in big cities. Whenever she looks up into the night sky, she scans for UFOs. This is 1979, when airlines simply take hijackers where they want to go. No security checks, no searches, no air marshals. Every international pilot is issued a map of Havana’s airport. It is that common. This is 1979, when everything seems possible because everything is impossible. The red button, the Cold War, nuclear war, nuclear winter… time is ticking! Nothing inspires living like imminent death.”

Duration: 35 minutes

First performed: May 2014, Western Canadian Aviation Museum, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Photos by Lorri Millan and Lief Norman

The Local Sky Tonight or What Is Being Refused is part planetarium show, and part rumination on Alice in Wonderland, the nature of rabbits and heroes: an off-kilter guide to the stars tonight.

"I'm late, I'm late for my entire life! To do lists referencing to do lists, referencing calendars referencing alerts long since ignored. The giant clock of the cosmos… sun rise, sunset: that song repeatedly stuck in my mind…."

Duration: 35 minutes

First performed: February 2016, FADO, Toronto, Ontario

Photos bt Peter Chen

Those of us who grew up in North America in the 1960s and 70s lacked art, Bible stories, and history as universal references. The tome that shaped our values most tangibly was the department store catalogue, a wish book of what we could have and who we could be once we got it. Gender was clearly defined, race was singular, and class was middle. In this performance we use the tableau form to enact a page from the Eaton’s catalogue, the most-read book of our Canadian youth. We have paired women’s formals (a look we have had difficulty successfully fitting into) with bathroom plumbing to invoke the endless bounty, cleanliness and hope that the catalogue implied. Three women stand in vacant stillness, water streaming from the spouts at their breasts.

Duration:  The 15 minute performance is repeated twice an hour

First performed: March 1998, Hallwalls Centre for Contemporary Art, Buffalo, New York. Subsequently performed at Counterposes, Montreal, curated by Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick.

https://vimeo.com/131932635

Commanders Dempsey and Millan are preparing to enter deep space, to develop revisionist stellar cartography and explore the resistant spirit of anti-matter.

In progress.

Duration: variable

First performed: September 2014, La Nuit Blanche, Calgary, Alberta

Photos by Lindsey Bond

The revolting and the revolutionary, the reviled and the revered are united by hair in this time travelling sing-along. From the wigged women of Ancient Rome to the hirsute heights of 17th century France to those very hairy 1960s: the world’s most infamous queen traces the history of radical tresses while pondering democracy.

"I want my own revolution. I want to save up box tops, and order one in the mail. I want anachronism and myth, and the anachronistic myth that things will get better. I want to be pretty and a little tragic, but not too tragic because that would make me dead."

Duration: 35 min.

First performed: June 2017 Queer City Cinema Camp, Trash, Filth festival in Regina, Saskatchewan, curated by Gary Varro

Revised: November 2017 Isolated Landscapes in Winnipeg, Manitoba, curated by Kathy Rae Huffman

Photos By Karen Asher and Anita Lubosch

The Dress Series (1989-1996), a group of performances that explore the dress as the female ceremonial costume and icon of femininity.  In these pieces, cloth is replaced by unlikely materials, creating juxtaposition, new meanings and upending expectations. All costumes fabricated by Dempsey and Millan.

In Arborite Housedress, the pro/antagonist defends herself against racial and economic difference by clothing herself in the domestic architecture of the times: the house/dress is her shimmering, clean fortress and her prison. Throughout the piece she reveals her fears (such as gravity, or the fear that “parts of my dangerously sagging self might end up in bad neighborhoods”) and her fantasies (border town romances, getting down with dirt, and the elimination of her family, so she will have time to devote herself more fully to being a homemaker). The wearable sculpture/costume has been exhibited at many art galleries and has been purchased by The Winnipeg Art Gallery as part of their permanent collection.

“Have you ever noticed that if you wash the floor in the morning, by nightfall it looks just the same as before you started? That you can do all of the dishes, and in a matter of hours someone has gone and dirtied them again? That children are little grime magnets, picking up all manner of stubborn stains and bringing them home again? Well, I've been thinking. If I could get rid of my family, it would effectively cut my work load by 60%.”

The Dress: wood, laminate, chrome kitchen hardware, screws, cloth, Velcro.

Duration: 25 minutes

First performed: February 1994, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Alberta

Photos by Sheila Spence 

https://vimeo.com/131843342

In Glass Madonna the world-weary mother of God proffers wry advice and sage warnings from behind her stained glass dress. Fashioned like a two-dimensional carnival cutout with holes for her hands and head, the dress is a colourful and explicit rendering of the Virgin Mary’s familiar garment, with a special peek-a-boo panel of clear glass to reveal the root of the Madonna’s fame: her 2000 year-old hymen. In her never-the-same-twice visitations, Mary comments on love, service, and the men in her life.

“When he comes to you on a dream-filled night, sends his angels to honk his horn at your door, don’t be home.”

The Dress: stained glass, leading, patina, oak, stain, hardware

Duration: 20 minutes

First performed: February 1994, Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Alberta (evolved from earlier performance piece The Plaster Virgin, 1992)

Photo The Banff Centre

In Object/Subject of Desire the central visual element in this performance is a large ball gown, constructed of crisp white paper, reminiscent of a debutante gown. Translucent and stiff, fragile yet unyielding, the dress rustles noisily as Dempsey moves and speaks.

Within this costume the many complexities of desire are discussed, including the many ways desire can be negated. The purity and innocence of the dress, the open expression of "wanting", and the sweetness of delivery, together create an assumption that the object of affection discussed is the traditional heterosexual partner. However, these cultural assumptions are confronted during the last section of the piece, as she finally, explicitly, reveals the carnality of her desire for another woman.

“I want you, to want me.  I want you to want me, even though I don't really want you.  I don't want you at all, but I want everyone else to.  I want everyone else to want you, but I don't want you to want anyone else but me.  All I want is your want.”

The Dress: vellum, packing tape, Velcro

Duration: 5 minutes

First performed: Red Deer College, Alberta, December 1988 (earlier version performed in 1987 before Dempsey began collaboration with Millan)

Photo by Lorri Millan

https://vimeo.com/131476697

In Plastic Bride, the performer wears an iconic wedding gown, the classic raiment of femininity, virginity and promise. However, the gown’s intended meaning is transformed by its construction, from veil to train, of clear vinyl. The material encases the bride suggesting more clinical references to body bags and scientific specimens, or commodities bagged and displayed for purchase. Disturbing, dream-like and funny, love and fashion, desire and denial are performed within the gown’s unforgiving folds. 

“You have gone shopping with a friend, your sister or even your own mother, and been told, ‘It's perfect. It's you. It's a knockout,’ only to find out later that it's a funeral, not a wedding. It's July, not December. You’re a nurse, not an aviator.”

The Dress: clear vinyl, fishing line, buttons

Duration: 20 minutes

First performed: November 1994, University of Winnipeg Students Association, Winnipeg, Manitoba

An off-the-shoulder evening gown is the symbol for the sophisticated, “proper” lady.  However, in The Thin Skin of Normal formal wear is created out of Saran Wrap, pierced with outward pointing, 4" roofing nails. The costume references that tome of enforced femininity, “The Total Woman”, which advised women of the seventies that to keep their marriage alive, they should greet their husbands, arriving home from a hard days work, at the door, wearing only cling wrap. The long nails rupture both this concept and the surface of the garment, and inspire the performance text that angrily and ironically confronts the absurdity of gender role definitions.

“2000 years of patriarchy haven’t dampened my sense of style. When I get dressed in the morning, I’m doing more than covering a little original sin.”

The Dress: cling wrap, roofing nails, packing tape, zipper

Duration: 10 minutes

First performed: October 1993, West End Cultural Centre, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Growing Up Suites I and II explore the lesbian body as a site of both pleasure and difference. Lesbianism, defined by desire for other women, creates the label “homosexual”. At the same time, fear of so-called social deviance is played out on queer individuals in a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, from isolation to censorship to violence. 

Clad in mid-century lingerie reminiscent of architecture as much as erotica, Dempsey recounts the mysteries, discomforts and delights found in the taboo subject of childhood sexuality. These stories tell tales of growing up lesbian: the allure of sleepovers; the frisson of “unmentionables” in the Eaton’s catalogue; the uncertain world from ages five to fifteen, marked by equal parts wonder and confusion.

“Ten pages of lingerie that resembled architecture, covered in buckles and zippers and snaps! Industrial strength underwear concealing body parts I did not have, body parts so powerful they needed hardware to keep them in place.”

https://vimeo.com/131843315

Duration: 10 minutes each

Part I first performed: March 1994, Le Lion D’Or, Montréal, Québec

Part II first performed: October 1994, Rumours bar, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Photo: The Banff Centre

What does a feminist superhero look like? Can she leap tall buildings in a single bound? Bend steel with her bare hands? What is her name? And does anyone remember it? In an era ruled by reality TV and celebrity culture, when everyone can be a superstar, Dempsey wrestles the notion of “super” to the ground. Learn the history of masked avengers and caped crusaders! Hear tales of dazzling academic prowess! Be astonished by an aging, spandex-clad superhero and her alter ego, an untenured women’s studies professor. Each performs astonishing feats of bravery armed with little more than poetry.

“Who will save us now? Now that everyone is so busy self-improving, self-constructing, self-promoting? If Superman has time to update his Facebook status, who is vanquishing evil? If everyone is now a superstar, who is really super?  For want of a better answer, all I can say is: the least among us. The Clark Kents, the Peter Parkers. The unassuming, unambitious, the underpaid, the worried, the well meaning, the homely, the lonely, the goat, the square, the drone, the also-ran, the struggling, the weird or at least a little different. In short, it falls to us. They didn’t ask for superpowers. They had them thrust upon them. They rose to the occasion. They rose to leotards. And so must we.”

Duration: 30 minutes

First performed: May 2008, rt Building Community Symposium, Mentoring Artists for Women's Art, Winnipeg Manitoba

Photos by Lorri Millan and Janet Shum

http://fingerinthedyke.ca/super_feminist_mov.html

In the summer of 2007 (40 years after the Summer of Love), Dempsey and Millan created a web-based performance/media piece featuring a mock freedom-fighting liberation force dedicated to rampant thoughtfulness, criticism and satire. Performance artists, once feared, have in recent years been overshadowed by nameless, faceless militants! Terrorism is our culture’s current fear, not art, not ideas, not day-long happenings with body fluids! No more. Indeed, art and ideas have been overshadowed for too long!

The visual vocabulary of Consideration Liberation Army was inspired by the iconography of American radicals of the 1960s. Many groups of that era combined flamboyance, militancy, and eloquence to push democratic and social reform forward (The Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, etc.). The histories of these radical movements are rife with heartbreak, failures of judgment, foolish extremes and bloody tragedy. They are also brimming with brilliant ideologies, inspiring orators, profound collective action, great cultural/artistic achievements and high style.

Not unlike many of these radicals, Dempsey and Millan were moved by an urgent need to cut through the non-stop noise of commercial interests, political and corporate spin, media saturation and fear mongering. Consideration Liberation Army invaded the web: a sits that is overwhelmed with status quo cultural and commercial content. They also ventured into the real-time world to insert signs, symbols, tracts and sounds designed to provoke thoughtfulness, care and action.

The project was unleashed on the public in Winnipeg on July 1, 2007, and continued until September, resulting in The Summer of Thought. The artistic/political “cell” gained recognition, momentum and legitimacy through a website featuring manifestos, video communiqués, “audio bombs”, stencil downloads and a revolutionary walking tour. Stickers, buttons and graffiti marked public spaces. Using diverse sites throughout the community, such as the local anarchist bookstore and coffeehouse, artist run venues, and downtown locations, CLA created an environment of dialogue, and a stage for surprise, delight, and thoughtfulness.

https://vimeo.com/132492045

To fully experience the project, go to http://considerationliberationarmy.ca.

Performed: July-September 2007, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Photos by Wiliam Eakin

This project began as a short performance piece in which the Medusa icon was reconceived as a successful, Margaret Thatcher era businesswoman. It then evolved into a longer, multi-media performance exploring modern female icons and questions of power (“Who has power? Do I have power? Where can I get some?”).

This piece is one of Dempsey and Millan’s Archetype Performances in which familiar characters examine the lessons and images from the stories, myths and codes that have shaped us. Dempsey and Millan subvert these icons accepted meanings and re-tell their tales from a contemporary female perspective.

“I know this might surprise you, but beneath this demure, feminine exterior lurks a dark side. An animal nature if you will that from time to time slips out. You can't tell by looking at me, but it's there.  It's sneaky. It's sexy. And it wants to tell you about a weight loss program that really works.”

Duration: short version 5 minutes; long version 40 minutes

Short version first performed: January 1992, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Long version first performed: February 1993, Festival du Voyeur, Prairie Theatre Exchange, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Photos by Lorri Millan

Grocery Store was a site specific performance installation developed by The Co-Op Collective:  Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, jake moore and Zab. For three weeks in August 2002, it provided food and food for thought in downtown Winnipeg’s Ace Art Gallery. The installation (a functioning food store staffed by Dempsey and Millan) sold over $5000 worth of food, and essential provisions unavailable in Winnipeg’s core. Radio ads, a circular advertising sale prices, and a mail-in-coupon campaign to the mayor requesting real-life downtown services, expanded the discussion about the direction of urban revitalization in our city.

Duration: 3 weeks

Performed: August 2002, aceartinc., Winnipeg, Manitoba

https://vimeo.com/131932638

At Scentbar, clients are asked a variety of questions about their memories. Using the results of these questions, a technician then creates an individualized formula to reflect the clients’ anxieties and desires. The perfumes are blended from an odor palette that includes ubiquitous, modern scents such as junk food, light industry, rental car and grandma’s purse. Unlike mass-produced consumer products that cannot possibly make one “unique”, Scentbar delivers truly one-of-a-kind fragrances in just 15 minutes. Each fragrance is as personal as our memories, hopes and fears. Two lab-coated clinicians, artists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, staff the bar. Dempsey administers the scent-questionnaire and Millan creates each personalized perfume.

This gallery piece inhabits the space in a non-theatrical way, acting as living sculpture or imitation of “real-world” commercial site.

https://vimeo.com/131843323

Duration: one evening to two weeks

First performed: September 2003, Reminiscents Festival, Fado Performing Arts, Toronto, Ontario, curated by Jim Drobnick

Photos by Cindy Baker, Sheila Spence and Nicole Burisch

Larger than life, We're Talking Vulva publicly talks about all of the private things that vulvas do. These basic human functions are presented with open good humour and pride. In this hilarious wear and care manual, the giant vulva is unselfconscious as she describes her parts and functions. She has fun. She raps and dances her experience, and in the process exorcizes some of the negative socialization about female anatomy.

The live performance was reconceived by Dempsey and Millan, and became a film in 1990. Created as a mock music video, it upends expectations by replacing the usual brooding, straight, white, male star with a giant vulva. She goes about her day (shopping, banking, working at a construction site), embodying the most basic part of her female identity.

Since its inception, this piece has created a bewildering array of controversy,  considering is contains no sex, nudity or violence. When the film was released in 1990, a provincial Member of Parliament suggested that an X rating be created in Manitoba, to ensure children would never see it. The National Film Board of Canada, which funded the film, received threatening phone calls. Because of We’re Talking Vulva’s inclusion in Hallwalls Centre for Contemporary Art’s support material in 1998, the US National Endowment for the Arts suspended all funding to Hallwalls for one year. After screening the film to high school students at University of Winnipeg in 2001, a parent complained, resulting in a media firestorm locally known as “Veggiegate” (Dempsey and Millan were erroneously accused of teaching teenage girls how to masturbate with vegetables).

Nonetheless, this piece has played globally to an estimated audience of over one million viewers, and has been aired on the CBC in Canada and Canal+ in Europe. It represented Canada at the 3rd Istanbul Bienali in 1992 and is held in the National Gallery of Canada’s collection.

https://vimeo.com/131598871

Duration: 5 minutes

First performed: Coming Together Conference, OISE, Toronto, 1986 (before Dempsey began collaborating with Millan)

Film version: 1990 (with Millan)

Photo by Sheila Spence

Lift is a performance situated in the smallest of spaces, an elevator. The doors open to the iconic elevator operator of collective memory (Lorri Millan), dressed in a jaunty red pillbox hat and uniform circa 1940. She holds doors and announces floors, conducting passengers up and down a functioning office tower. Also present in the elevator is an anonymous everywoman, a contemporary office worker (Shawna Dempsey), who, once the doors close, begins to tell her fellow passengers a story. Her 20-minute looping story-cycle interrupts the normal flow of 9-to-5 with a fairy tale about a modern woman’s descent into a mysterious underworld. The gothic fable explores the pliable nature of time, and the ways in which our perception of time affects our actions, inactions and relationships. Just as Einstein used a moving train to describe time and relativity, Dempsey and Millan use the elevator to discuss time and mortality.

The performance takes place in an actual office building over an entire business day or week. The riders/audience generally only experience excerpts from the tale during short journeys. Sometimes they choose to ride to extra floors. Sometimes they swap details with their fellow workers over the water cooler. The full story is accumulated as the day or week progresses.

“A woman snaps her heel in a sewer grate. “Damn,” she thinks to herself, “those shoes were expensive.” She turns and bends down to pick up the broken part thinking, “Maybe it can be reattached.” But she cannot dislodge it. She struggles and struggles and, as she does, she happens to glance down into a pair of eyes looking up at her.”

https://vimeo.com/131843321

Duration: a working day or week

First performed: September 2008, invisible cities performance festival, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Text published in Bedtime Stories for the Edge of the World, Arbeiter Ring Press, 2012.

Photos by Wayne Glowacki, Winnipeg Free Press

First produced with the assistance of the National Arts Centre Atelier, this piece uses perhaps the most feminized and commercialized female icon:  the mermaid. Drawing on Kirk Douglas films, Girl Groups of the 60s, and the toxic history of the Love Canal, this performance posits an antidote to romanticism.

This piece is one of Dempsey and Millan’s Archetype Performances in which familiar characters examine the lessons and images from the stories, myths and codes that have shaped us. Dempsey and Millan subvert these icons accepted meanings and re-tell their tales from a contemporary female perspective.

“You only exist in stories. Make sure the stories have got it right.”

Duration:  40 minutes

First performed: 1990, National Arts Centre Atelier, Ottawa, Ontario

Photo by Lorri Millan

The last remaining speaker of Old English (not to be confused with Older English, the language of Chaucer) itemizes the reasons for the demise of global communication.  In short:  Where did language go?  The professor gives an illustrated slide lecture that no one else can hear, in an archaic tongue she has taught herself from videos of Dynasty and The Kathy and Regis Show.  However, in the tradition of utopic novels Looking Back and Looking Back 2000 (from which the performance takes its name) not all is as bleak as it seems.  Nostalgia is replacing cynicism, and people are learning to say, “I’m sorry.”

(Sound of a rocket launch.) “That is the sound inside each of us when we want to run away.  Four billion people dreaming of packing a space suitcase and heading for the door.  Fearing there’s nowhere left to go, and hoping there’s some reason to stay.  Hoping, that as we reach the threshold, someone will touch our sleeve and say, “Please don’t go. Please.’”

Duration:  15 minutes

First performed: October 2000, Space Camp, The Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, Saskatchewan

Photos by Sheila Spence

This series of performances that takes as their inspiration the stories that form North American mythology: yarns and fables belonging to cowboys, Indians, voyageurs, spinsters, and big city Horatio Algers. These are tales which have been glamourized by popular culture, and which exist in iconic proportions. Yet they are relatively young, pliable stories, no more than 200 years old. Dempsey and Millan bend them so they reflect a different perspective. By imposing an ironic lesbian and feminist reading/retelling upon these tales, they illuminate our history and our present, and create alternative archetypes that propose new “new worlds.”

The Short Tale of Little Lizzie Borden is a piece that posits rage as a justifiable, indeed logical emotional response to contemporary world events. There are two components to this work, a printed text that is given to the audience to be read at their leisure, and a performance that examines a modern woman’s anger. The written narrative tells the story of the childhood of Victorian murderess, Lizzie Borden, who was accused of killing her parents. In contrast to the print work’s 19th century, poetic style, the live performance tells a tale of present-day kleptomania, grooming, and the rush to war. In an irony-laden tirade, Dempsey explains why she steals women’s magazines.

“This is not a weapon.  This is not an axe.  This is a hatchet. A smaller, scaled down, more feminine, less effectual version. Not a tool, an accessory! And accessories create interest...”

Duration:  5 minutes.

First performed: October 2001, Locating Feminisms conference, Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Printed text published in Bedtime Stories for the Edge of the World, Arbeiter Ring Press, 2012

Photos by William Eakin and Elaine Stocki

Other live pieces in the series include The Headless Woman and The Lesbian Love Story of the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Miss Gray's Marvellous Truth Machine exists as an installation and recording on vinyl.

The Winnipeg Tarot Co. and its hope and enlightenment specialists offered free tarot card readings throughout Winnipeg during the fall of 2010. Well-known artists from a variety of disciplines staffed the portable fortune-telling tent: Shawna Dempsey (performance artist), Sandee Moore (performance artist), Ian Ross (playwright), Ross McMillan (actor), John K. Samson (musician and writer), Caroline Gray (puppeteer and playwright), Rodrigo Munoz (musician), Maggie Nagel (actor), Christine Fellows (musician) and Charles LeBlanc (writer and actor). Readings were available in Spanish, French, Japanese and English. The crew of art-intuitives travelled from senior homes to shopping malls, the airport to the hockey arena, for five weeks, tapping into Winnipeg's powerful psychic emanations. The tool of their trade was a completely redesigned tarot card deck featuring well-known sites and icons of Winnipeg, developed by Dempsey and Millan, illustrated by Bonnie Marin and designed by Mike Carroll.

The performance began at Portage Place Mall on Saturday September 25, 2010. Even before the tent was set up, a two-hour line-up formed, including an octogenarian World War II war bride and her Canadian-born husband, teenagers still awake form partying the night before, a Latin American health care worker on her way to work, a businessman in a suit and tie, a heavily tattooed biker, and an architecture student. At this and at all other venues, audience/participants came from all walks of life to unburden themselves and ask questions regarding the direction and meaning of their lives. The intimacy between the artists and the participants at those moments was profound. Although the artists prefaced each session with the words, “I cannot read the future”, people brought their hopes and fears, and they were listened to.

Payment for the fortune-telling service was only accepted in stories about Winnipeg. Citizens could also go to the website and have an electronic card reading and type in their Winnipeg tales. Over the course of the project almost 1000 stories were collected and later deposited in the Winnipeg Archives. 

This Cultural Capitals project, commissioned by the Winnipeg Arts Council, tapped into the magic and mystery of our city, and created a meaningful intersection between artists and citizens to talk about our shared futures.

To have your fortune read, hear a story or leave a story, go to http://winnipegtarotco.ca.

https://vimeo.com/131932636

Duration: 5 weeks

Performed: September and October 2010, throughout Winnipeg, Manitoba, in coffee shops, parks, libraries, cafés, etc. 

Photos by Lorri Millan and Leif Norman

The ways in which news media has transformed our relationship to language and activism is explored through thi first-person narrative into which the symbols of terrorism literally drop from the ceiling.

It is estimated that within the next two centuries, 40% of the world’s extant languages will no longer be contemporary modes of thought or expression. At the same time, “dominant” languages are devolving into the brevity of advertising and journalism. Sentence length is shrinking, and descriptives are seen as superfluous. With this de-languagification, concepts as well as cultures are being lost. These performances look at the irony of the fact that, at a time when we have the means to dialogue and advocate locally, nationally and globally, we losing the very language with which we communicate.

“The following performance contains no nudity, violence or coarse language. No animals were harmed in the creation of this piece, and no meat will be prepared or eaten on stage. Be forewarned that there will be no strobe lights, fireworks or pyrotechnics of any kind, and no gunshots will be fired. What you are about to see will bore children, the elderly, and those of you in-between. Time will crawl by and you will curse the friend who brought you here. You will consider asking for your money back, but that would require one-on-one interaction with the performer and then you might never get out of here (smile). No, tonight’s spectacle will in no way be spectacular. In fact the spectacular will be studiously avoided, so this won’t be much of a spectacle at all.”

Duration: 20 minutes

First performed: October 2006, Studio XX, Montréal, Québec

Photos by William Eakin

http://fingerinthedyke.ca/target_marketing_mov.html

Dempsey and Millan have created films and videos that reconceive pre-existing performance pieces, that are ancillary components of performance projects and that are stand-alone single-channel works.

 Film and Videography

2014     Vigilance Super 8 Film 3 min. Commissioned by 8Fest, Toronto

2009     Endangered Species Lesbian National Parks and Services PSAs. Video. 6 min. Commissioned by Pride Toronto.

2008     Super Video. 2 min. Commissioned  by Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art.

2007     Consideration Liberation Army Five-part video. 12 min.

2003      Archaeology and You Video. 6 min. Five part site-specific installation and single channel versions, Royal Ontario Museum. Nominated for Canadian Museum Association Award. http://fingerinthedyke.ca/archaeology_mov.html

2002     Lesbian National Parks and Services: A Force of Nature Video. 24 min. http://fingerinthedyke.ca/rangers_mov.html

2000     Calamity Video. 5 min. Commissioned by Ottawa Gay/Lesbian Film Festival.

2000     Peril!  Video. 9 min.

1998     Homogeneity Video. 3 min. 1998. Funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation.

1996     Good Citizen:  Betty Baker Film. 27 min.1996. Winner of 1999 Manitoba Motion Picture Industry Association Blizzard Award for Best Short Drama.

1995     A Day in The Life of A Bull Dyke Video. 10 min. Winner of 1997 Blizzard Award for Best Experimental. Second prize at both the 1996 US Super 8 Film and Video Festival and the 1997 University of Oregon Gay/Lesbian Film Festival. http://fingerinthedyke.ca/bull_dyke_mov.html

1994     What Does A Lesbian Look Like? Video. 1 min. Produced by Much Music. Played in rotation on national TV (Much Music). Screened at the UNESCO conference on women in Beijing.

1993     Object/Subject of Desire Video. 5 min. Screened throughout India and Sri Lanka (as part of a touring video package organized by Opera. Other screenings include Carillo Gil Museum (Mexico City), Magnetic North touring exhibit, Walker Arts Centre (Minneapolis), the Museum of Modern Art (NYC). http://fingerinthedyke.ca/object_subject_mov.html

1992     Medusa Raw Video. 10 min.

1990     We're Talking Vulva Film. 5 min. Co-producers and directors with Tracey Traeger. Part of Studio D's Five Feminist Minutes program. Winner of 1993 Blizzard Award for Best Music Video. Audience choice,1997 Sydney Gay/Lesbian Film Festival. Represented Canada at 3rd Istanbul Biennial, 1992. http://fingerinthedyke.ca/were_talking_vulva_mov.html

FILM AND VIDEO RETROSPECTIVES

2009 Kunst-und Theorieprojekte, Frankfurt; 2008 Galerie sans nom, Moncton; 2002 Inside/Out Director’s Series, Toronto; 1999 Making Scenes Gay/Lesbian Festival, Ottawa; 1998 Cornell Cinema, Ithaca; 1997 Image et Nation Gay/Lesbian Festival, Montreal; 1997 Out on Screen Gay/Lesbian Festival, Vancouver; 1996 YYZ Gallery, Toronto.

Publications by Dempsey and Millan

 Bedtime Stodies for the Edge of the World. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2012.

Winnipeg Tarot Co. Tarot Deck. Winnipeg: Finger in the Dyke Productions, 2010.

Lesbian National Parks and Services Field Guide to North America: Flora, Fauna & Survival Skills. Toronto: Pedlar Press, 2002.

Handbook of the Junior Lesbian Ranger. Winnipeg: Finger in the Dyke Productions, 2001.

In the LIFE: Portrait of a Modern Sex-Deviant. Winnipeg: Finger in the Dyke Productions, 1995.

 Mary Medusa: A Testimonial. Winnipeg: Finger in the Dyke Productions, 1992.

Dempsey and Millan have created four major installations.

Miss Gray's Marvellous Truth Machine was created for the Winnipeg Art Gallery's exhibition Winnipeg Now in 2012. The installation impeccably recreated a fictional parlour/sitting room of the character Miss Grey, inventrix and dance instructor. Gallery-goers were invited to sit (itself a rarity in an contemporary gallery setting) in cosy Edwardian chairs, and read or listen to the story of Miss Grey, played on a phonograph. The medium through which this tale is delivered, vinyl, echoes a central object in the story: Miss Gray adapts a record player to create a truth-telling machine. The many disjunctures between the modernist building and the old fashioned "room", the public gallery and the private home, and questions of truth vs. fiction upon which the story relies, created both a familiar experience (being told a story in a "grandmotherly" environment) and questions regarding the superior knowledge or "truth" that progress and technology imply.

Wild Ride was presented at La Nuit Blanche, Toronto, in Oct. 2009. The project involved installing a functional midway on Bay Street, the heart of the nation’s financial district. Two carnival rides, Avalanche and Super Fun Slide, were staffed by carnies in business suits who greeted riders with handshakes. More so-called “downsized Bay St. workers” distributed free cotton candy. Further references to the financial crash were made through carnivalesque signage  (i.e. “Absolutely free and worth less all the time”), an amplified soundtrack of pop songs about money, and a carnival barker who growled unexpected phrases such as, “Do you want to go lower?” Bay Street, usually empty on a Saturday night, was returned to the people who paid for it. Literally hundreds of thousands of people waited up to two hours to go on the rides. The carnival lights beautifully reflected in the glass bank towers. Screams of joy were heard, not financial terror! 

Archaeology and You  was commissioned by the Royal Ontario Museum Institute for Contemporary Culture in 2003. Dempsey and Millan created a five-part video installation (now also a single channel work) in the Gallery of Ancient Greece. Amidst the headless statues of idealized feminine beauty, they inserted Milan's head, speaking on video monitors, about history, war and the power of language. https://vimeo.com/132492044

Mirror Mirror was site-specific piece installed in Central Tech High School, Toronto, in the fall of 2000. Conscious of the overwhelming amount of image-related information being targeted at young women, Dempsey and Milan made distorted body-image manifest, and reflected fears and anxieties back to the viewer. Inspired by the huge glass mirrors in the girls' washrooms, in which seeing one's reflection is unavoidable, they constructed fun house mirrors that warps the viewer's image. These were placed over the existing mirrors as a comment on our preoccupation with a narrowly-defined beauty and social codes of physical presentation. In the tradition of the freak show, clown and the grotesque, the distorted images contained humour, in contrast to the contemporary relationship of a woman and her mirror, which often involve judgment, control, and shame. The mirrors became a performance site for the high school students, a site of play. The mirrors were not functional; they were of no help when applying make-up or doing one's hair. They were created simply to be experienced in a moment of surprise and laughter, and to inspire critique of the distorted self-images that haunt us. 

One Gay City was created in 1997. Each life-sized bus-shelter ad depicted a cheerful Winnipegger (a toddler with her birthday cake, an fisherwoman with her catch and a beautiful boy dressed as Manitoba's symbol, The Golden Boy), with the tag line, "Winnipeg: One Gay City".  This referenced the city's slogan, "Winnipeg: One Great City". The project came about because Winnipeg's then-Mayor, Susan Thompson, refused to give Gay Pride Day official sanction. This series of artist-created ads was never installed because the advertising agency who controlled the bus shacks objected to their gay content and were supported by Canadian Advertising Standards who deemed them potentially upsetting. Dempsey and Millan re-created the project as a series of postcards and filed a Manitoba Human Rights complaint. They settled with the ad agency in 1999, before the case went to committee, at the same time that Winnipeg elected the first openly gay mayor in North America. 

We have news! For the past year, we have been working on a proposal for the LGBTQ2+ National Monument in Ottawa. The site will be a public admission of all the ways the Canadian government has perpetrated homophobia and transphobia. https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/art-monuments/upcoming-projects/survey-national-monument-lgbtq2.html

We were really excited to be shortlisted for this competition, along with friends and teammates Liz Wreford, Peter Sampson and Albert McLeod. The other shortlisted teams are HUGE international architecture firms, with Canadian artists attached. We are the only all-Canadian team, the most grass-roots contestants, and as Winnipeggers, a real dark horse in the competition. But on the other hand, we know gay! We have lived this history. And we are excited to build an active site for our people to use.

Our proposal is to create a dynamic place for gathering and honouring, for contemplation and performance (the queer super-power). It is a site suitable for protests, for dance parties, for ceremony, for picnics, for sunbathing… for our bodies. It also involves inside-out mirror-balls: there is a solemnity about it on the outside (we have all been through a lot), but the interior is luminous, all sparkle and shine.

We chose a barely-contained thundercloud as the central image for the monument. LGBTQ2+ people have always been part of nature. Our social justice movements have been powerful enough to move mountains. And we have certainly lived through some storms. The thundercloud is an expression of energy transmuting, rising and transforming. It is a symbol of renewal and hope, cleansing the earth through life-giving rain. Our colleague Elder Albert McLeod has taught us that thunderclouds are also where the Thunderers live, divine spirits who set things right. That’s what the monument will try to do: set right a history of anti-queer discrimination from colonization to present.

Please check out our design (Team Wreford!). And feel free to let the selection committee know what you like about it. There is a survey which allows for public feedback on all the designs, and this will have impact on the jury’s decision. Please take a few moments to look at it and vote for us! https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/art-monuments/upcoming-projects/survey-national-monument-lgbtq2/team-wreford.html

Public art is a bit of an unexpected venture for Dempsey and Millan, but our work has always been rooted in our LGBTQ2+ community. And basically, we like putting on a show! A lot of our more recent work has given the public an opportunity to perform themselves. This piece is right in line with that. It is a queer space where all of us can see ourselves, be ourselves, and stand on that stage and say, “I am”.