PopSex!

Various Artists

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz work together as artists in film/video, photography, installation, and text. They draw on archives of historical (portrait) photography and historical films, focusing on the history of sexual and gendered discourses and practices, as well as the meaning of visibility since the emergence of modernism. The works explore how the staging of visibility takes on functions of self-empowerment, glamour, and recognition but also of devaluing, pathologizing, and criminalizing. Their works reflect the nearly simultaneous invention of sexuality, sexual perversions, and photography and the relation of these inventions to the colonial economies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

David Folk currently lives in Calgary, Alberta, where he works as a practicing artist and teaches in the Department of Art at the University of Calgary. He received his MFA in Visual Studies from the University of Saskatchewan in 2007. He completed his BFA in Visual Studies and BA in Art History at the University of Calgary in 2002. Prior to pursuing graduate studies, Mr. Folk also worked at the Art Gallery of Calgary (2002-2003) and Gallery 101, Ottawa (2004-2005). 

Rainier Herrn is a researcher at the Institute for the History of Medicine at the University Hospital Charité and the Magnus Hirschfeld Society (Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft) in Berlin. He is the author of numerous publications on the history of gender, sexuality, and medicine. His work focuses on he scientific, social, and cultural history of sexual alterity. His two books Schnittmuster Geschlechts - Transvestismus und Transsexualiät in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft (The Patterns of Gender - Transvestitism and Transexuality in Early Sexual Science, 2005) and the edited volume Männlichkeiten und Moderne - Geschlecht in den Wissenskulturen um 1900 (Masculinity and Modernity - Gender in the Cultures of Knowledge around 1900, 2008) established him as a leading scholar in these fields. He is currently working on the history of psychiatry.
In addition to this scholarship, Mr. Herrn is an active curator of historical and contemporary art exhibitions. Aside from Sex Burns, he also curated Germany - 100 Years of the Gay Movement in Germany, 1897-1997, which toured internationally. This past fall he co-curated an exhibition about the University Research Hospital Charité and its unique place in East Germany. Literally located on the border between East and West Berlin and a symbol of fraught attempts to demonstrate technological progress and modernity, the hospital attracted heightened scrutiny from all sides, including from the East German State Police, the Stasi. 

Jean-René Leblanc is the Head of the Department of Art and professor of digital arts and mixed media at the University of Calgary. He is co-founder of the Sensorium Lab, a cross-disciplinary research group focusing on research that develops systems of interaction to encourage kinesthetic perception and interpretation. He was born in Montréal in 1967, and attended Concordia University, which he left in 1993 with a BA in Studio Arts. He graduated from the University of Windsor in 1996 with an MFA in Multimedia and Photography, and he received his PhD in the study and practice of art from the Université du Québec à Montréal in 2006. Mr. Leblanc's work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Kurtis Lesick is a Calgary-based artist, researcher, and creative content developer whose practice revolves around cultural critique, socio-historical discourse and whatever he can get his hands on to explore these issues. Such values are also heavily imposed upon his roles as Director of the Creative Environment for Emerging Electronic Culture (CE3C.com) and an instructor in Media Arts + Digital Technology at the Alberta College of Art + Design. Kurtis has worked with such leading arts and media organizations as the Banff New Media Institute, the Calgary Arts Development Authority, Canadian Heritage, the National Film Board of Canada, the Union of BC Performers, and others. He has also overseen the development of several large-scale online properties, has written and creative directed the KidScreen award winning "Technosaurs" project, and has developed online and mobile concepts for the National Film Board of Canada and independent producers. 

Wednesday Lupypciw is from Calgary, Alberta, were she pursues a video and performance art practice. To make money she is an involved grant writer and part-time maid. She also maintains a concurrent practice in textiles - weaving, machine knitting, embroidery and crochet - but this is done mostly while procrastinating with other, larger projects. The performance art collect LIDS, or Ladies Invitational Deadbeat Society, is one of those projects. She is a Fibre programme graduate of the Alberta College of Art + Design, an auntie, and has shown work in various spaces including The Textile Museum of Canada, The Art Gallery of Alberta, TRUCK Gallery, Stride, Harbourfront, Nuit Blanche Toronto, EMMEDIA and a host of other sketchy but meaningful artist-run initiatives in peoples' homes. Her work was recently featured in the Alberta biennial, and she has been an artist in residence at the Klondike Institute of Arts and Culture (Dawson City, Yukon), the Gushul Studio (Blairmore, Alberta), ad the Banff Centre. Currently, she is working on a new video piece about craft guilds and avoiding applying for graduate studies.

Anthea Black: Her projects in printmaking, collaborative performance, drag video, writing and curating take various forms, but most often feel at home as part of Canadian artist-run culture. Her artist-curatorial project, looking for love in all the wrong places, produces and distros posters and editions by queer artists for public spaces. Black has recently exhibited as part of Gestures of Resistance at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon.

MR. and MRS. KEITH MURRAY: At the 2008 inaugural exhibition of the Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas, Elvis and a band of drag queen flyin' nuns witnessed the holy matrimony of Murray's marriage to him/herself. Murray is a trans-disciplinary mystical pervert (aka artist/writer/curator). (S)he works predominantly with make-up, costume, film, video, new media, sculpture, movement and performance. Mr. and Mrs. Murray is a lover not a fighter.

Mireille Perron's installations have appeared in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, Europe and the United States since 1982. Born in Montréal, Québec, Mireille is the founder of the Laboratory of Feminist Pataphysics, which promotes social and collaborative experiments that masquerade as artworks/events. She has also written and published on a variety of subject related to representation. Recent examples of her work include: The Laboratory of Feminist Pataphysics presents Ateliers of the Near Future, a collaborative exhibition at Stride Gallery, Calgary (2010); Utopic Impulses: Contemporary Ceramics Practice, Ronsdale Press (2008), an anthology co-edited with Ruth Chambers and Amy Gogarty; Medical Tabulae: Visual Arts and Medical Representation, a thematic issue for RACAR (vol. 33, 1-2, 2008) co-edited with Dr. Allister Neher. Mireille lives and works in an old converted dépanneur (grocery store) in Calgary, Alberta, and teaches at the Alberta College of Art + Design.

Heather Stump is a printmaker and mixed media artist from the Manitoulin Island area currently completing a BFA specializing in Print Media at the Alberta College of Art + Design. Heather invited Mireille to be her guest artist for a Print Publishing class, and their collaboration for PopSex! began. After graduating, she may resume her doctoral studies a the European Graduate School in Switzerland - if she doesn't get "itchy feet" that is! She is also looking forward to future collaborative print projects.

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is a Montréal -born artist and diarist. Since 1999, Nemerofsky Ramsay's work has involved video, performance and print works as creative vehicles for examining the singing voice and the hitory of song, the rendering of love and emotion into words, and the impact of popular culture on identity. His work has been exhibited in festivals and galleries across Canada, Europe and East Asia and has won prizes at film and media art festivals in Canada, Germany, Poland and Portugal. His work is part of numerous private collections as well as the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Nemerofsky Ramsay currently divides himself between Berlin and Montréal.

RICHard SMOLinski is a visual and performance artist. His interest in the performative potential of language is evident in the exhibitions EVERYMANnerism (Struts Gallery, Sackville, New Brunswick), and Paradigmadozen (Artcite Inc. Windsor, Ontario), and in the performances Owed tur Northwesterminal Soonadversity (Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois) and Coinagitation (Carrollton, Georgia). He also recently completed the duration performances of Disambiguating, where he drew The Oxford History of Western Art from memory, and Trace "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," where he did indeed "trace" Walter Benjamin's seminal essay. RICHard has received a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and is currently completing is PhD in Art from the University of of Calgary's Department of Art.