Step right up and pull a card to find out your Power in destroying the white-supremacist-capitalist-imperialist-hetero-patriarchy. In this participatory performance, three Crones offer readings of oracle cards based on entities that have haunted their performance and video rituals over the past decade. In this new symbolic order, born of The Powers/Inflatable Deities artistic multiverse, the Squid, Blob, Cake, Brain, Merwitch, and even the Cyst have roles to play in dismantling hierarchical regimes of power. Let The Powers Oracle help us weave new stories, and guide us toward more nurturing structures.
The Powers is at once a band, an artistic collaboration, and a research group committed to weaving alternate realities through video, music, story-telling, dance, and ritualistic performance. The Powers create a speculative reality that is absurd, irreverent and terrifying, inhabited by animal kin and monstrous creatures, haunted by other-dimensional entities, and erupting with the repressed archetypes of classical myth. In this world, The Powers foster dynamic relationships with all sorts of beings--earthly, embodied, and otherwise. They invoke a pantheon of characters and deities, and include them in feminist reconfigurations of hetero-patriarchal myths. They draw inspiration from mythological trinities of sisters such as the Graeae, the Gorgons, and the Fates, and recast these icons in reclaimative, chaotic media events.
The Powers is Katherine Kline, Jessica Mensch, and Emily Pelstring.
Artists:
Katherine Kline
Katherine Kline is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, musician and PhD candidate in Communications Studies, Concordia. Her research explores the borders and intersections between psychic life and material worlds.
Jessica Mensch
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.
Emily Pelstring
Emily Pelstring is an artist and filmmaker, and is faculty in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Her work incorporates craft materials, animation techniques, and visual trickery to explore links among technology, spirituality, and magic. She is a co-organizer of the Witch Institute.
