OCTOBER 2023:
WE, THE SELF
14 October - 9 December 2023
Engaging in self-portraiture calls for a permanent state of critical reflection about the effects and affects of displaying one’s own image. It is a complex business, the era of selfies being one of fragmentation, misunderstandings, and the quest for external validation. But the artistic interest in this practice often comes from the search for one’s ego, the essence of their soul, or the revelation of their multiple personas.
In self-portraiture, the self who sees crosses with the self who is seen, creating a third entity that defies classic distinctions between representation and performativity. This hybrid being queers the notion of self and other, complicating distinctions between subject and object, observer and observed, now and then. Materializing a relational understanding of self, queer self-portraiture allows for the multiplicity within an individual to reverberate in their surroundings.
Abdicating the idea of purity both in fantasy and in reality, these five artists unveil versions of their potential selves through photography, painting, and video. Here, the medium is precisely that: an intermediate of false separation between one and several. Sharing traces of their authored existences, these artists generously help us find ourselves with the guidance of their works.
Curated by Renata Azevedo Moreira
Artists: Jay Krakower, Kim Neudorf, Laurence Philomene, Natalie King, Sasha Cousins
JUNE 2023:
the signs appear as in aspic
June 16 - August 13, 2023
Thames Art Gallery
75 William St. N, Chatham ON
Opening Reception: June 16, 8:00 pm- 10:00 pm
Artist Talk: June 23, 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm, Studio One, Cultural Centre
Painting Workshop: June 24, 10:00 am - 2:00 pm, Studio Two, Cultural Centre
In the signs appear as in aspic, horror-adjacent, cinematic imagery is reimagined as transgressive access to queer and trans embodiment through processes of collage and painting. Alluding to the hapless protagonists in the Daphne Du Maurier gothic novel and 1973 film version of ‘Don’t Look Now’, the exhibition’s title refers to a failure to notice warnings of future events as left by more psychically connected past selves. These warnings are “not threatening to those who cannot read the signs,” but for those who can, the signs appear as “in aspic”[1]. Relating this premise to their own work and life, Neudorf asks: What is needed to be known and seen as a queer and trans subject, what conditions of visibility are necessary in that being knownness, and what tools – built out of necessity and survival – have been left in the present by a self (or selves) from the past?
In the construction of paintings that can take months or even years to complete, Neudorf refers to a highly personal archive of references which shift in and out of use: eyes, arms and hands; scenes, practical effects, and ephemera from horror and horror-adjacent films; past and present transmasculine roots as illegibly legible emotional architecture; these cinematic moments, affects, and visual textures instigate new forms, new holes, new language. Neudorf draws on abstraction and the figural as a way to refuse and complicate the expectation of queer and trans subjectivities as fixed or binary, or as a queering of abstraction, a strategy which is “not limiting or universalizing, but excessive in ways that generate runoffs and alternatives to singular or dualistic categories.”[2] Deliberately clashing, obscuring layers adjust and react to emergent material and painterly dynamics. The process of collage as both precursor and underlying space of tension considers the ways in which visual, affective fragments can retain the power of building an account of oneself by using/perverting the limits of available language. Temporarily anchoring the signs in aspic, or psychic life of an internal logic of self, these blurry, unreliable narratives and temporalities gesture towards resistant materialities that are on the threshold of meaning.
[1] Marsha Kinder and Beverle Houston. “Seeing Is Believing: The Exorcist and Don’t Look Now”, Studies in the Horror Film – The Exorcist (Centipede Press: Lakewood, Colorado, 2011), 158.
[2] Lancaster, Lex Morgan. Dragging Away – Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art (Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 2022), 13.
exhibition text by Laurence Pilon
AUGUST 2022:
Works on Paper on Fridges, Harkawik, New York
Opening Friday, Aug 12, 6-9pm
Participants: Tara Atefi, Karl Haendel, Lina McGinn, Betty Bailey, Trulee Hall, Kian McKeown, Stefania Batoeva, Nschotschi Haslinger, Ted Mineo, Michael Berryhill, Alexa Hawksworth, Kim Neudorf, Isabel Cavenecia, Mónica Heller, Marina Pinsky, Monika Chlebek, Delphine Hennelly, Max Popov, Plum Cloutman, Mary Herbert, Matt Reiner, Penny Davenport, Dmitri Hertz, Owen Rival, Abigail Deville, Sebastián Hidalgo, Rachel Rosheger, Francesca Dolor, Miles Huston, Samantha Roth, Julia Dzwonkoski, Johannes Högbom, Sóla Saar, Kayla Ephros, Enzo Iwase, Leonel Salguero, Loren Erdrich, Jack Jubb, Isa Schieche, J. A. Feng, Bayan Kiwan, Emma Rose Schwartz, Justin Fitzpatrick, Victoria Kosheleva, Mikołaj Sobczak, Jacques Fleichemuller, Robert Kraiss, Tsai-Ling Tseng, Ella Rose Flood, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Corina Dorrego Urdaneta, Joey Frank, Kate Levant, Jacques Louis Vidal, Marlene Frontera, David X. Levine, Erica Vincenzi, Daisuke Fukunaga, Santiago Licata, Katarina Janečková Walshe, Pippa Garner, Yimiao Liu, Kalina Winters, Nicholas Grafia, Tala Madani, Emily Rose Wright, Joe Greer, Wolfgang Matuschek, Shai Yehezkelli
More info on the exhibition and participating artists
Harkawik
30 Orchard St
New York, NY
JANUARY 2022:
Pandemic Gardens - Resilience Through Nature, Embassy Cultural House Virtual Exhibition
Organized by Rachel A. MacGillivray and Ron Benner with the assistance of JoAnna Weil, Jamelie Hassan and Olivia Mossuto
Participants: Jessie Amery, Ron Benner, Anthea Black, Carole Conde/Karl Beveridge, Stephen Cruise, Patricia Deadman, Holly English, Marnie Fleming, Mireya Folch-Serra, Richelle Forsey, Fatima Garzan, Rebecca Gimmi, Jamelie Hassan, Fern Helfand, Lisa Hirmer, SF Ho, Martyn Judson, Iraboty Kazi, Christina Kingsbury, Yam Lau, Michelle Corrine Liu, Miriam Love, Martha MacGillivray, Rachel Anne MacGillivray, Josh Mazza, Asher Mobeen, Catherine Morrisey, Olivia Mossuto, Kim Neudorf, Justine Richardson, Jennifer Rudder, Judith Rodger, Jayce Salloum, Roland Schubert, Sandra Semchuk, Geordie Shepherd, Gabriella Solti, Vera Tamari, Jeff Thomas, Larry Towell, Zainub Verjee, Catherine Villar, Joanna Weil, Stephanie White, Ryan Whyte, Jade Williamson, Winsom Winsom, BH Yael
More info on the exhibition and participating artists
DECEMBER 2021:
I’m a participant in the text Can you swim to the bottom of the ocean by Ella Tetrault & Ella Dawn McGeough, a text on dreams and dreaming woven through with the thoughts and recollections of several Dreamers, available as a pull-out booklet in the Peripheral Review 2020-21 Print Publication.
https://peripheralreview.com/
The Peripheral Review 2020-21 Print Publication can be purchased here
JANUARY 2021:
Distance makes the heart grow weak
January 15 - 28, 2021 in the Artlab Gallery and virtually
Faculty and Staff exhibition at the Artlab Gallery at Western University.
Organized by Dickson Bou and Ruth Skinner.
Participants: Cody Barteet; Sarah Bassnett; Dickson Bou with Charlie Egleston & Peter Lebel; Matt W. Brown; Andreas Buchwaldt; Brianne Casey; Jérôme Conquy with Kevin Heslop, Sachiko Murakami, Sile Englert & Ruth Douthwright; Ioana Dragomir; Meghan Edmiston; Soheila Esfahani; Sky Glabush; Anahí González; Philip Gurrey; John Hatch; Tricia Johnson; Iraboty Kazi; Shelley Kopp; Anna Madelska; Patrick Mahon; Jennifer Martin; Linda Meloche; David Merritt; Ana Moyer; Dong-Kyoon Nam; Kim Neudorf; Katie Oates; Sasha Opeiko with Martin Stevens; Michelle Paterok; Kirsty Robertson; Geordie Shepherd; Andrew Silk; Ashley Snook; Christine Sprengler; Michelle Wilson with Bridget Koza,Sophie Wu, & Azadeh Odlins; Jessica Woodward
More info on the exhibition and participating artists
Artlab Gallery
JL Visual Arts Centre
Western University, London, ON
OCTOBER 2020:
Hiding in Plain Sight, Embassy Cultural House Virtual Exhibition
Exhibition dates: Opens Oct 20, 2020 and runs virtually
The exhibit focuses on the theme of the book "Hiding in Plain Sight" published in 2020 by St. Louis-based journalist Sarah Kendzior. In her book she describes US President Trump's administration as "a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government." There are many other governments in the world at this time that also fit this description.
Inspired by Sarah Kendzior's provocative writing, the Embassy Cultural House will publish a virtual exhibit organized by Ron Benner.
Participating artists: Jessie Amery, Ron Benner, Andreas Buchwaldt, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Stan Denniston, Michael Fernandes, Mireya Folch Serra, Fatima Garzan, Michelle Gay, Wyn Geleynse, Alberto Gomez and Dot Tuer, Dave Gordon, Freda Guttman, Jamelie Hassan, Fern Helfand, Susanna Heller, S F Ho, Tricia Johnson, George Kubresli, Suzy Lake, Patrick Mahon, Doug Mitchell, Kim Moodie, Catherine Morrisey, Olivia Mossuto, Kim Neudorf, Shelley Niro, June Pak, Doris Purchase, James S. Reaney, Jayce Salloum, Roland Schubert, Jean Spence, Dan and Mary Lou Smoke, Diana Tamblyn, Zainub Verjee, Christine Walde, Paul Walde, Jade Williamson, and Winsom Winsom
More info on the exhibition and participating artists
SEPTEMBER 2020:
totally ruinous / totally ruin us
September 05 - October 17, 2020
Reception: Saturday, September 05 from 1pm - 5pm
solo exhibition
If it turns up in the body scan
dissolve,
to be run through without gore,
we’re talking clairsentience.
Tiny particles from my forehead, throat, heart.
They have bones -
held or cooked together -
of fog, soup, and aspic.
(excerpt from the big E, poem by Kim Neudorf)
Materials
Volume Eleven
PDF
press:
FEMME ART REVIEW interview
My interview with Adi Berardini can be read at Femme Art Review:
totally ruinous/ totally ruin us: In Discussion with Kim Neudorf
Support project space
260b Clarence Street, London, ON
MAY 2019:
Heads
May 3, 2019 to June 27, 2019
Stephen Andrews, Sarah Cale, Colin Dorward, Lili Huston-Herterich, Patrick Howlett, Jay Isaac, Harold Klunder, Mack Ludlow, Katie Lyle, Vanessa Maltese, Kim Moodie, Kim Neudorf, Gordon Peterson, Adam Revington, Janet Werner
Curated by Sky Glabush
McIntosh Gallery
Western University, London, ON
mcintoshgallery.ca
APRIL 2019:
My work will be included in the 15th Annual C Magazine Contemporary Art Auction
April 23, 2019
Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, ON
MARCH 2019:
University of Lethbridge’s Art NOW lecture series presents:
Kim Neudorf
something like
12 pm | March 22, 2019
University Recital Hall
Free admission, everyone welcome!
DECEMBER 2018:
Sorry, I'm busy
December 22 - January 19, 2019
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 19 from 3 - 5pm
Kotama Bouabane, Susanna Browne, Aryen Hoekstra, Shane Krepakevich, Maryse Larivière, Anna Madelska, Trevor Mahovsky, Kim Neudorf, Jonathan Onyschuk, Jacquelyn Ross, Niloufar Salimi.
Organized by Liza Eurich and Tegan Moore
Sorry, I’m busy is an exhibition that explores the potential for connections in artistic practice and work ethic, through a bringing together of individuals who share the same astrological sign--Capricorn.
Self-controlled, responsible, disciplined, ambitious, loyal, practical, cautious, territorial, shy, touch oriented, meticulous. Someone who applies value to the unseen, the failed, underappreciated, or the difficult to understand.
The impetus for grounding an exhibition in this context, comes from our interest in how astrology is used as an orientation tool, a predictive guide, and as a method for navigating the social. We consider the alternative logic of astrology, its increasing visibility and invocation, a marker of today's precarity.
Support project space
260b Clarence Street, London, Ontario
supportsupport.ca
MAY 2017:
roll and rot
May 25 - June 30, 2017
Opening: May 25, 7-10 pm
Artist Talk: June 10, 2 pm
Using ready-made clichés like textual and collage-based prompts, Neudorf’s paintings and texts strive to defer meaning while generating space for gestural and cognitive gut flora. Theirs is a consideration of the formless where, to cite Yve-Alain Bois, the goal is not a suspension between dualities, but an “alternating rhythm” of absorption and excretion.[1] roll and rot proposes gestures which stretch out the terms of legibility to clear a space for action—action which reconstitutes, transforms and continues to move. These gestures are the starting point of a language that is in excess of meaning, or that which oscillates in a continual re-orientation of the unresolved space between thoughts, physical states, desires, and affects.
The words roll and rot are inspired by artist Jutta Koether’s novel ‘f.’, which explores “what the things are doing that make art”, such as the simultaneous “rot and roll or both” of the “round and rotten” state of an orange.[2] For Neudorf, to understand such gestures of movement and transition might be to reverse-engineer and re-enact them in the present. roll and rot is also informed by Robert Rauschenberg’s 1951 drawing ‘The Dancer,’ which performs via radiating rings and lines of hooks, arrows, and teeth. The drawing’s affect defers representational meaning while gesturing outward in a circuitous process of action and exchange.
swarm, a collaborative text by Neudorf and Liza Eurich, accompanies the exhibition. The text is a conversation loosely based on the word refusal.
[1] Yve-Alain Bois, “Dialectic,” Formless: a user's guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 71.
[2] Jutta Koether, f. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), 15.
DNA Artspace
123 Dundas St, London, Ontario N6A 1E8
www.dnaartspace.com
JANUARY 2017:
Untitled 2010
Stanley Boxer, Jack Bush, Friedel Dzubas, Harold Feist, Marcelle Ferron, Paul Fournier, Jay Isaac, Rita Letendre, Ray Mead, Kim Neudorf, Jules Olitski, Sandy Plotnikoff and Larry Poons
January 6 - February 11, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday January 6, 7-10 pm
Paul Petro Contemporary Art
980 Queen St West, Toronto, Ontario
www.paulpetro.com
NOVEMBER 2016:
of any one of them that is at all
November 4th - November 26th
Thursday - Saturday 12-6, and by appointment
Opening: November 4th, 5-9 pm
Franz Kaka
B1 87 Wade, Toronto, Ontario M6H1P5
www.franzkaka.com
OCTOBER 2016:
mind mouth
Kim Neudorf and Jenine Marsh
October 27 - November 25, 2016
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 27, 7-9 pm
Drawing Workshop: Saturday, November 12th from 1 - 3 PM
Forest City Gallery is proud to present mind mouth, a collaborative exhibition by Jenine Marsh (Toronto, ON) and Kim Neudorf (London, ON).
mind mouth
“…liquid words have no relation to the “illegible” scribblings of which modern art has supplied so many variations...for while the latter are like Rorschach tests inducing the viewer to project linguistic meanings onto them and thus to rearticulate them, [liquid words] leave no role to our imagination other than to complete the work of decomposition…” Yve-Alain Bois[1]
“...alteration...bifurcated from within...points in opposite directions simultaneously: both downward, to the decomposition of matter (as in a corpse), and upward, to its transcendence (as in the passage to an altered, sacred state, as for example, a ghost).” Rosalind Krauss[2]
Thhhhhfffeeeeetthh / A great bowing forehead heavy with sleep and stone / CHOP through some liquid wiggling / I just got there / SERIOUSLY NO / same same develop your head / open mind / maps to the mouth / tidy silvery meteorite face sheath / a thinking song to the brain / Snakes taking a nap all up my arms / More future selves? / Lumpy floowr brass body and blossom head are one / Like a hug with the darkness / A direction and action – go! Yes a thought and a thing – go too! / Hairible hay very good / V pkeasant
We have it by the tail-ear-nose. A word-string informed by a ceramic pizza. A word chain like a boa constrictor having eaten a bike-cat-hat-pail-bottle. mind mouth is a co-existence via alien communiqués a la Dreyfuss and potatoes. Where the pointing fingers of zombied limbs twitch. Or where mountainmash meets eyeholes marked as earpaths.
Not a backdrop. More like a layer. Layering in order to build up the flesh of the thing. The whole thing. The fleshy skin layer? All sensitive? Or a backdrop TO NOTHING. A thing in itself. Maybe just a DROP.
To work with the building up. Actual thing happening, becoming, spreading, twisting around right there under the fingers. More a play with the hell MOUTHYness of it. Like a swear or a made up term. Hell as mouth as an opening.
Like talents that are USELESSSss. Send message do neat trick, pause, do you get it do you like it? Send a follow up message trick, pause, watch the watcher, check their face, do you get it? Do you like it? No? Yes? Wag wag dance spin.
Or for making strange and complex emotional things take place in a drawing or an art thing. Like to be able to make something that has a real sense of humor, a real power. Just a beginning idea as a drawing to then fill with stuff in a visible way. Like it isn’t visible until there is something to hold it.
Some kind of search for how to be in the world, something way more compassionate. Awareness of yourself as WITH and not just AS. No need to travel from inside to out, it’s already out. Having to make things up on the go WITH others, against their vibe, their mood, how you are being received, how they are being with you BACK. A big improvement. Decide to believe. “I want to believe” says Mulder.
Something that is on the outside, because you are never in a bubble, it always has to do with SOMETHING. Or someone! Closes the gap, creates a tangible, tacky, textured tangibility between the surfaces of you and...it, getting close and getting your face in its face. Intuiting the next shape to make on this big sheet of shapes and feeling out…!
A direction and action – go! Yes a thought and a thing – go too!
[1] Yve-Alain Bois, “Liquid Words,” Formless: a user's guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997) 129.
[2] Rosalind Krauss, “Olympia,” Formless: a user's guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997) 150.
Forest City Gallery
258 Richmond Street
London, Ontario
N6B 2H7
forestcitygallery.com
JANUARY 2016:
sotto
January 9 - February 20, 2016
Participating artists: Jennifer Carvalho, Jamie Macaulay, Jenine Marsh, Kim Neudorf and Jag Raina
Opening Reception: 9 January, 2016 at 7 pm
sotto brings together work by five artists who employ the language of contemporary painting to explore themes ranging from matter and material to presence and place. The body emerges across these works, not through direct representation, but as a site of understanding and experience, as a mode of seeing, being and becoming in the world.
With its relation to vocal emphasis, the word sotto connects these works to the body and its significance in both the production and reception of each work. Through its etymological base 'subtus', meaning 'that which is underneath,' sotto invites us to look further, asking what is at the core of our material, embodied existence, and how we determine our place in the physical and social contexts that we find ourselves. If this sounds a bit abstract then you're paying attention. In these accelerated times, some focus and concentration—with a greater consideration of ourselves and those around us—might be called for.
Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre
Suite 305, 370 King St W
Kingston, ON
modernfuel.org
NOVEMBER 2015:
Para//el Room
November 21 - December 22, 2015
DNA artspace is pleased to present Para//el Room, an exhibition that stems from a celebration of the DNA bookshop, the act of collecting books, and creating a space for research. Adjacent to the gallery, the bookshop is a dedicated area for the dissemination of artists’ publications and texts on contemporary art + theory. For this exhibition the bookshop will extend out into DNA’s main floor gallery. The artists listed have been invited to recommend one book title that has been influential to their art practice. Copies of the books will be displayed for visitors to read and contemplate the archive. From this group of artists, eleven individuals will be exhibiting a work that relates to their book choice. This collection of pieces highlights the important research that runs alongside studio practices. More info and list of participating artists.
On my book choice - Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, by Bruno Schulz:
Bruno Schulz wrote often of states of being in times of "disruption, at the time of...liquidation", when old and familiar routines are in a continual state of death, but "always with reservations" and by dispersing its dying via "installments". In such moments of upheaval, language must be improvised, and daily rituals continually rebuilt, guided by signals and traces of matter having recovered briefly "in some congealed tomato sauce and aspic". Wallpaper, coat linings, stuffed birds, and leftover food tell the "stone dead messages" of a slow articulation, an authenticity that withdraws, re-dispersed by "the frailty of realization." These stories are about articulation which “occurs” across time, always in pieces or by forced improvisation, which closely resembles what happens in my studio.
DNA Artspace
123 Dundas Street W
London, Ontario
dnaartspace.com
OCTOBER 2014:
balloon / portal / starres / fiends
with
Liza Eurich
Paolo Fortin
Mackenzie Ludlow
Jenine Marsh
Jennifer Martin
Curated by Kim Neudorf
October 9 - November 12
Opening Reception: Friday October 17, 7-10pm
DNA Artspace
123 Dundas Street W
London, Ontario
dnaartspace.com
MAY 2014:
Paravent, a group exhibition, May 16-24
curated by Sky Glabush
with
Jen Aitken
Vanessa Maltese
Tegan Moore
Jennifer Sciarrino
Mackenzie Ludlow
Liza Eurich + Kim Neudorf
Opening reception: May 16, noon-5 pm
535 First Street, Suite #8, London, ON
the fold-up, the get-up, the move about, a solo exhibition.
May 1-June 8, 2014
Opening reception: May 1, 6 - 11 pm
Evans Contemporary, Peterborough, ON
evanscontemporary.com
A squashed foam fold-up, sandwich-folds, fibrous, foam-colors pink-green-bluey. It has always been there. Every day it’s in a slightly different state, less sodden, heavier, more insubstantial, sour. John Hurt via Beckett’s ‘Krapp’ shuts off the reel-to-reel, sheltering the machine with an arm arc. The running device or internal motor. A shift, sudden light, apparent and immediate fact of something still there. Like a chair, like a resting face, like a sore molar.
I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to . . . (hesitates) . . .(pause.)…
-Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape
OCTOBER 2013:
The Room and its Inhabitants, a group exhibition. Oct 17-Nov 23, 2013.
Organized by Patrick Howlett
Participating artists: Robert Bordo, Merlin James, Allison Katz, Sandra Meigs, Rebecca Morris, Kim Neudorf, Justin Stephens, Roger White
Opening Thursday, October 17, 7-9 pm
“Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes visible.” –Paul Klee
More info.
Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto, ON
susanhobbs.com