How Can We Be Different and the Same?

direct link to video at Vimeo: How Can We Be Different and the Same?

A talk on the maternal body and sexual difference that I recorded in 2004 in Vancouver, and gave at an ARM conference at York University in Toronto in 2006. Recently I found the footage, and began playing with it in Final Cut, adding a number of filters. I am still working on the video, and will add scrolling images over the next week or so.

While I received a true 'dissing' when I presented this paper - a high level feminist maternal theorist arrived about half way through with her husband and spared no words in dismissing my work - and I never finished the degree I had intended to get for this work, I still stand behind every word. This was my last academic paper.

I was criticized for being 'essentialist' - such a, to my mind, pointless North American label whenever anyone tries to openly discuss the difficult and complex issues around the maternal body and motherhood and sexual difference. All I could respond with was that I had chosen to speak of 'an Adam and Eve' because you have to say something, offer an opinion on the reality, its difficulties.

Although I received apologies from the later-comer to my talk, I felt my position really too radical for even an organization focusing on research on motherhood.

So I will embed this on my 'birthdance' page at my website, where my work on the maternal body is.

Many thanks for reading this, and perhaps even watching.



                                          

Ink of Mask

"...nest, crysalis and garment only constitute one moment of a dwelling place..." Gaston Bachelard, 'the poetics of space,' (Beacon, 1966), p.66.

"Ink of Mask," 6" x 6.5", 15.2cm x 16.5cm, India ink, graphite, pen ink, Faber-Castelli watercolour pencils on archival paper, 2010. Photoshop 'flourescent filter' added to photo of a simple doodle sketch to pass the time.

Just a scribble, though it is based on a beautiful photograph somewhere on Facebook (FB's numbering of photos, removing all references to an individual's site does not help one to re-find an image), the original far superior to this ditty, done while my video was rendering.

Later: I purchased some new watercolour pencils today, having misplaced ours when we moved into our apartment 3 1/2 years ago. The image below is the original.


      

                                          

Clips

Working on a video of a talk (that I videotaped in 2004 for a conference), and need to add some visual interest to it. Found some old exposed film, scratched on some of it, scanned, and then laboriously added images of my paintings, drawings, photos, feathering the edges, one at a time as I found them scattered amidst my computer files. It's on a transparent background, which I hope Final Cut Express picks up on even if Blogspot didn't. And I do hope scrolling these interesting framing of images slowly in the video will hold the viewer's attention through the 18 minutes of the talk. This little bit has taken hours to do. The rest of the images will take at least a week to prepare. Click for a larger version.

A few hours later: the .jpg had a white background, so I opened the .psd file. All the layers were there! I saved them all as a 'freeze frame' and added that as a track in my video. It is unbelievable, but the background is, indeed, transparent.

Here's a QT still, not as good as Apple's Grab application, but I seem to have inadvertently deleted the latter.

You can see I am treating the video frame like a canvas - the coloration, the different layers. When I've finished the video, I will show 'before' and 'after' photos, promise.