Opening Reception
Saturday, November 22, 2014
2:00 to 5:00pm
Curator’s talk 3:00pm

Viewing Hours
November 22 to December 19, Monday to Friday, 10am to 5:00pm

VTape
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 452
Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8 Canada

Deephaven is a place imagined by Sarah Orne Jewett in her 19th century novel of the same name, where age trespasses the confines of the body, and multiple versions of self intermingle through unfixed time. The videos curated by Amber Christensen in Hanging Out in Deephaven adopt a similarly ambiguous relationship with the concept of age. Both irreverent and sincere, they conjure curiously circuitous moments by performing a form of temporal drag that languishes in-between adolescence and adulthood.

In these videos, past and present jumble and bump against each other, looking back in a manner that is neither random nor precise. This is not The Wonder Years—there is no overly saccharine narrator interminably pining over their childhood love. Instead, the videos come together in a sort of polyrhythmic rambling through the back alleys of adolescence.

In Hanging out in Deephaven, the invocation of an aesthetic of adolescence is light on sentimentality and nostalgic yearnings. This is not to say that the videos lack sincerity. They are unabashedly gawky in their temporal restructuring, creating new potentialities and providing an empathic portal into an anachronistic coming of age.

The Program

Alison S.M. Kobayashi, DO GOOD, 2009, 10:38.

Olivia Simpson, Miley, 2013, 6:18.

Ann Hirsch, Introduction to me dancing 2, 2008, 2:41.

Molly Soda, Meet me @ the mall, 2014, 2:54.

Jesi the Elder, Smooth Muscle, 2009, 00:59.

Ann Hirsch, Letters to an Internet Whore, 2008, 4:29.

Christine Negus, Stillborns, 2010, 1:55.

Zakary Sandler and Joshua Sandler, Untitled (edited performance 3), 2007, 7:00.

Leslie Peters, 100 Prince Charles Drive, 2005, 11:00.

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Amber Christensen currently pursing a Master of Arts in Cinema and Media Studies at York University in Toronto. She holds a Masters in Library and Information Studies and her current research engages with feminist archival practices in relation to the study of feminist and queer cultural production.  Christensen has curated programs for the Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative, the Regional Support Network, and is a current member of the Pleasure Dome Curatorial Collective.