Art Connects | Justin Shoulder presents Phasmahammer

Friday, August 7 | 5:30 PM

REGISTER

Stay home. Stay safe. Stay connected with our series of online gatherings, Art Connects!

Join Justin Shoulder for a lecture-performance illuminating Phasmahammer, an ecology of alter personae in their main body of work based on queered ancestral myths. Shoulder’s artwork and performances use avatar as personae, concentrating specifically on movement language in order to enact new kinds of storytelling drawn from the queer club experience, and communal re-imaginings as a way of crafting and enacting new narratives.

This talk is in conversation with Henry Heng Lu, Curator at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, who in 2019 curated screenings on placemaking, collective identities and kinship in the diasporas, rendered through the lens of futuristic realities.

The event will be moderated by Melissa Lee, Director of Public Programs, and Stephanie Bokenfohr, Public Programs Coordinator.

Questions? Submit them during the Zoom presentation using the Q&A function. You can also engage with your fellow attendees and panelists during the event using the Chat function.

New to Zoom? Learn how to register and attend a webinar here »

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

PHASMAHAMMER is the pseudonym of shape-shifting artist Justin Talplacido Shoulder. Working primarily in performance, sculpture, video and collective events Phasmahammer is an eco-cosmology of alter personas based on queered ancestral myth. Creatures birthed are embodied through hand crafted costumes and prosthesis and animated by their own gestural languages. The artist uses their body and craft as an instrument of metaphysics towards a queer Filipinx futurism. P.H. believes in performance and shared ceremony as communal medicine for difficult times.

P.H. is a founding member of queer artist collective The Glitter Militia (Monsta Gras, Pink Bubble) with partner and key collaborator Matthew Stegh and Club Ate with collaborator Bhenji Ra.  Their works have been presented across Australia and Internationally where they work between gallery, nightclub, theatre and cinema contexts. Recent performance highlights include: La Manutention performance artist in residence at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris 2019, The Prague Quadrennial of Stage Design, 2019, Premiere of theatre work Carrion, Performance Space, Sydney (AUS) + subsequent tour to Artshouse, Melb (AUS), Fusebox Festival, Texas (USA), Museum Macan, Jakarta (IDN), Roskilde (DEN), M+ (HK), Singapore Art Museum (SGD), and Asia Pacfic Triennial 8 GOMA (AUS).

Henry Heng Lu is a curator, writer and artist based in Vancouver and Toronto, Canada. Currently, he is Curator at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. He is a co-founder of Call Again, a mobile initiative/collective committed to creating space for contemporary diasporic artistic practices, within Canada and beyond, through exhibitions, screenings and roundtables. In 2018, he won an Ontario Association of Art Galleries (OAAG) Exhibition of the Year Award for his curatorial project, Far and Near: the Distance(s) between Us at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. His writings have been published by Canadian Art, ArtAsiaPacific, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, C Magazine, Richmond Art Gallery, Koffler Centre of the Arts, PLATFORM Gallery, ArchDaily and Gardiner Museum. He was on the jury for the 2020 Sobey Art Award at the National Gallery of Canada. In 2019, he was a Researcher-in-Residence at the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal Shenzhen, China. Lu holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.