The Powers
The Sistership: Fortuna Perplexus
May 12–June 17
In The Powers’ live streamed web series, Sistership TV (2018-2020), we sailed upon a metaphorical vessel to diverse environments, shape-shifting and moving between dimensions, exploring various topics: human-animal communication; the cyborg; telepresence; hysteria; witchcraft; hybrid beings; and panpsychism. For this installation, we translate the archived world of Sistership TV to the setting of a large, soft vessel, the Fortuna Perplexus, which is afloat in a sea of ephemera from the web series.
Fortuna is the Greek goddess of luck and fortune. Perplexus is Latin for entangled, ambiguous, and inscrutable. With this work, we reflect on energetic, economic, and material entanglements, making an experimental mess that we hope can lead to different forms of relation and help us imagine better worlds.
Performers in the included excerpts of Sistership TV are Violet Cutler, Joshua Mensch, Bevin Kelley, Josie Eccleston, Jillian Wakarchuk, Kyah Lloyd, James Irwin, Rue Sakayama, Greta Scheing, and Annelli S. Henriksson. Technical assistance by Hiba Ali, Blank Xu, Neil Cloaca Young, and Erin Corbett. Special thanks to Xander Morro and Pippi Zornoza at the Dirt Palace, Tom Hobson at Bump TV, Rob Houllahan, and Cam Miller at Queen’s University. The full version of Sistership TV includes many other collaborators and guests not included here. For complete information and episodes, visit www.sistership.tv.
This project received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Katherine Kline is a psychotherapist, musician and PhD candidate. Her research is situated between relational psychoanalysis, and materialist ecological theory, exploring unique sites where psychic life and material worlds intersect. These sites include, for example, the work of Wilhelm Reich, dendrophilia, and practices of mediumship. Kline's present collaborations include multimedia performance project The Powers with Emily Pelstring and Jessica Mensch, an ongoing visual/textual collage project with Leyla Majeri, and Wire Mother/Cloth Mother, a sonic exploration of maternal space with Sasha Langford. Kline presently lives and works on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples.
Jessica Mensch's work straddles painting, video, music, stage design and installation, inviting contemplation between these spheres of production and the position of women within them. Mensch received her MFA from Hunter College in 2019 and currently teaches in the Art Department at St.FX University in NS. She has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts and was shortlisted for the RBC Painting Prize. She has participated in national and international residencies and exhibitions. Mensch also works collaboratively with The Powers (artists Emily Pelstring and Katherine Kline) to produce Sistership TV, a web series that explores topics such as telepresence and animal communication. Her other collaborative project is Inflatable Deities.
Emily Pelstring is faculty in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University. Her creative work has been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council. Her work uses surreal and idiosyncratic storytelling to explore links between technology, spirituality, and illusion. Her animations incorporate analog and digital effects processes, and her installations have employed holography, stereography, Pepper’s Ghosts, and projection-mapped video. Emily brings together interests in reclaimative myth-making, speculative futurisms, and camp aesthetics through collaboratively-produced bodies of work with Inflatable Deities and The Powers.
Reception: Friday, May 12, 6–9pm
Performance: Friday, May 12, 10pm at Meteor (138 University Ave W) with special guest AFC
The Powers Spring Tour 2023:
