Sheroes

Tell us a bit about your latest or ongoing project. What about Sheroes #9: Dolly Parton? 

First of all, Sheroes is the invention of the extremely generous and multi-talented salonnière, Rea McNamara. It’s a monthly limited-run performance event series that frolics in the aesthetic playground of media fandom such as fan fiction, fan art, fan videos, fan costume play etc. http://fuckyeahsheroes.tumblr.com/tagged/sheroes-9%3A-dolly-parton

Rea had already produced the first two in the series, when she approached me about programming projections of animated gifs. I admit that I was unsure of the project at first, there’s a part of me that cringed at expressions like ‘sheroes’, ‘herstory’ and ‘mythic female’, all that debased coinage from a previous generation of feminists, but she won me over when I saw how she was embracing it with so much smart humour and energy. I think we only invited about six artists for the first gif projections, but they were so enthusiastic after seeing the event documentation that I got the confidence up to invite more gif artists to participate. Eventually Rea just left the GIF aspect of the events in my hands. What we now have is an ever expanding crew of gif makers, (we are up to 29 for Sheroes #9) that includes many well known active net-artists, as well as younger artists, both male and female, from all over the world. Previously, my own taste in exhibitions/events was more towards small tightly focussed curatorials. Inviting serious artists to participate in fan culture has had some surprising results, though no one should be surprised that serious artists want to do their best work no matter what, or that the work gets better and better.