SKID
Program, P.2041
- Identifier
- P.2041
- Type
- Group exhibitions
- Category
- Visual Arts
- Date
- November 14 – December 13, 2008
- Description
- Melody and the notational hooks of popular music are nowhere to be found in modern Heavy Metal music and its subgenre’s Speed Metal, Death Metal, and Thrash to name a few. Yet like most subcultures in the industrialized world, the Metal scene’s exchange of desire is inextricably linked to a festishization of signifiers that bare witness to group identification. Heavy Metal subculture foregrounds “otherness”, crude social rituals and a devotion to music genres that celebrate guttural vocal stylings, speed riffs and lyrical themes on death, religion and satanic worship. The work of Jo-Anne Balcaen (Montreal), Marlaina Buch (Victoria) and David Poolman (Toronto) riff off symbolic contradictions: Heavy Metal’s facination with death as a sign runs paralell to the subculture’s emphatic celebration of such life affirming rituals as attending concerts, collecting records, growing hair and submitting to various forms of body beautification art. SKID unpacks the paradox of Heavy Metal’s death/ desire axis, confronting the various levels of Metal culture’s symbolic exchange.Artist Talk: November 15, 2pm Free Jo-Anne Balcaen (Montreal), Marlaina Buch (Victoria), David Poolman (Toronto).