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Hot art, fierce leotards and diva beats meet community activism in Flawless: A Beyoncé Inspired Art Show and Fundraiser taking place April 18 at Studio East. Flawless is one of a series of celebrity-themed art shows aimed at promoting creative accessibility and inclusivity. Local and international artists from all walks of life submitted paintings, short stories, drag, mixed media, video, drawing, bedazzling, dancing and sculpture to the show. Submissions of any size, medium, or skill level were considered, as long as content related to pop goddess Beyoncé.

But Flawless is more than a celebration of Ms. Knowles’ beauty and abilities; two of it’s main aims are to raise funds for the Positive Women’s Network, Canada’s longest-running HIV organization for women, and to support artists. All proceeds from ticket sales will go directly to the PNV, and featured artists will keep 100% of their commissions.

Sad Mag sat down with Christina Chant, the bubbly mastermind behind Saturday’s bootylicious event, to chat art, nursing and, of course, Beyoncé.

Sad Mag: Why did you first start doing art shows?

Christina Chant: It’s been almost four years, which is crazy to me. In the summer of 2011, my best friend and I—it was our third time going to Burning Man—wanted to plan something fun for a theme camp. A friend had joked about putting on a “Steven Seagallery”: an art gallery dedicated to Steven Seagal. We asked him for permission to use the idea and he said, “You do it, go for it. Just make sure it’s great.”

So we put on a couple art parties on at our house with friends who were going to Burning Man, just to come together and make art. When I came home [from the festival], I had all this art left over. I have friends who are artists and I asked one of them whether she any idea of galleries that would be interested in hosting this. She said, “Yes,” and I said, “That’s hilarious,” and laughed for, like, half an hour. She helped me put on our first gallery, which was at the Toast Collective in October of 2011. We had a great turnout and also made some money. We used that for the next show, “Bill You Murray Me,” which was huge. [From there], it just started rolling.

SM: What was the initial reaction to the shows?

CC: The best part was that lots of people wanted to purchase paintings, and lots of people were just really nice about wanting to be a part of it. We had a lot of first-time submitters, who said, “It’s amazing that you put this on, because it’s less pretentious, and I can actually participate.” [It’s true:] as long as it’s not racist, sexist, misogynistic stuff, we’ll put it in the show. It could be stick people and we wouldn’t care.

SM: I know you also work in nursing. Has your profession helped or hindered your involvement in the art shows?

CC: Well, [as a nurse] you have to be really organized; you’re prioritizing for chaos. You acknowledge that your day is unpredictable and you try to do all the work you can do up front. That way, when chaos does come, you are prepared. I’ve worked as a charge nurse and an educator, and you do more planning work and coordinating with that. I think it’s just helped.

SM: How do you brainstorm the themes for the shows?

CC: Well, for this last one, I was going to the bathroom—I was going pee—and all of a sudden I had this idea for Beyoncé.

SM: Epiphany?

CC: It was, it really was—Epipha-pee!

In the past, though, I’ve just brainstormed with friends. Bill Murray just came up in conversation. And because we’d done a few shows around men, I decided I needed to do something about women. Plus, Beyoncé’s a total boss. It just made a lot of sense.

The key pieces are just ensuring that the person we choose [as a theme] has a bit of nostalgia about them that people can connect to. That they can be funny, but also people clearly have to like the actual subject. It’s that connection—we love pop culture, you can’t avoid it. Our goal of inclusivity is trying to get people from different parts of the community to come out. Again, pop culture is a piece to that. You’re getting people from the suburbs to come in and look at art (which is amazing), but also, they’re getting exposed to different forms of art: drag, performance monologue, music. It just brings out a different crew, which I appreciate.

SM: Your past events have often been free or by donation. Why did you decide to do it differently this time?

CC: Traditionally we haven’t had a door cost; we really wanted to ensure that everyone can attend if they want to. This is the first time we’ve had a door fee, which I chose in part so that we have an honorarium for the performance artists. We thought eight dollars at the lower end of the sliding scale would be affordable to most people, but we still have that caveat that if people can’t afford it, they can email us and we can put them on a list. I know that we could make more money off of it, if we wanted to. But not everything should have to have a price. It’s expensive to live [in Vancouver], for artists especially. If you make the intention to make [something] affordable, it can be.

SM: And the proceeds from this door fee will go directly to the Positive Women’s Network, right? Can you tell me a little about what they do and why you choose to support them?

CC: I’ve worked in HIV, primary care, and mental health and addictions for seven years, and I’ve been on the Positive Women’s Network board for almost two years. The PWN provides support all across BC, through the internet and through an educator who goes across the community to provide education about HIV. They also have retreats; they provide money for the women to fly down and give them money for their childcare. It’s one of the few places where women can go to be open about their HIV status without dealing with stigma. Especially in rural communities, it’s just not safe to disclose your HIV status, and even in an urban centre, stigma is one of the most persistent things that has followed over the trajectory of HIV. So even though people can live very healthy lives and are not a risk to the community, because of the way our justice system is organized, it’s still very much a crime to have HIV.

So, [PWN] is great. They have a drop-in, a food bank day, and they help with general support and advocacy in the community. They do amazing, amazing work.

SM: What’s been the biggest challenge you faced while organizing Flawless?

CC: At the beginning for this show we weren’t getting enough submissions, which was scary for me. It’s hard not to compare to past shows; in the past we’ve had a lot of submissions up front. At this point we’re very comfortable with how many submissions we have, but it has actually been the lowest amount ever. I think people are afraid to ruin Beyoncé’s face, and she’s hard for people to be satirical about her. There’s a great Saturday Night Live sketch about it called the “Bagency.” You can’t criticize Beyoncé or you’ll be locked up and put away. She can’t be touched—she’s worshipped.

SM: What kind of submissions have you received?

CC: We got some really, really awesome stuff. When we weren’t getting enough submissions, I was hashtagging the “Beyhive” and other Beyoncé-type things on Instagram and Twitter, so we were able to get international contacts. We have submissions from Spain, South Africa, London, LA, Halifax, Toronto, Israel. A lot of them are younger people, so instead of them having to pay a lot for shipping, we’re going to be projecting their submissions.

SM: Okay, one last question: What’s your favourite Beyoncé song?

CC: I love listening to “Grown Woman,” but it’s a very close one to “Crazy in Love.” It’s just so fun to listen to “Grown Woman” while you’re at home, chillin’, or even cleaning. I think it’s great. ‘Cause I’m just like, “Yeah, I am a grown woman…so empowered!”

Flawless takes place Saturday, April 18 from 7 pm – 2 am at Studio East.
Tickets are available online or at the door.

Vivek Shraya is a musician, writer, artist, and performer based in Toronto. His books and music have influenced the queer community and continue to provide an accessible outlet for youth around the country. Sad Mag’s Helen Wong interviewed Shraya about his music, writing and creative process.

Helen Wong: How do you transition between songwriting and writing for literature? Do you see these as entirely separate media or as extensions of one another?

Vivek Shraya: I tend to view them as separate formats. Songwriting has many limitations that writing for literature doesn’t have. In a pop song format, for instance, there is generally only three to four minutes to convey a feeling or idea. Writing involves an empty screen where anything and everything is possible. This is intimidating. However, they align in how they both involve hunting for the right words to express a specific sentiment.

HW: There is a certain poetry and lyricism present in your prose. Do you treat your books like songs?

VS: One of my editors for God Loves Hair told me that the first draft lacked the musicality inherent in my songwriting. This feedback has stayed with me and since then, (and without contradicting my last answer) I try to pull from my entire writing toolkit, including songwriting techniques, in any kind of writing.

When I wrote She of the Mountains, I would often hum out phrases, which would help me construct sentences or ideas.

HW: In an interview that you did with Scott Dagostino, he stated that ‘if you don’t see the book you need, write it!’ Does this carry weight for you?

VS: Absolutely. All three of my books have been ultimately motivated by wanting to write the kinds of books that would have made a difference and made me feel less alone in my youth.

HW: Is it hard to be self-reflexive? How has Leslie Feinberg’s books influenced you and your choice to write semi-autobiographical novels?

VS: During the creative process, being self-reflexive is what comes naturally to me. I pull from my own experiences. Where self-reflexivity becomes challenging is when the art itself is released, when people know (or think they know) aspects of yourself that I didn’t directly communicate to them. I also worry that self-reflexivity has become a bit of a crutch for me, because I am so comfortable with it. This is why I am excited about pushing outside this comfort zone and exploring fiction further.

Stone Butch Blues was the first LGBT book I read and it impressed upon me the power of personal narrative. I connected to so many of the experiences in the book and simultaneously thought about the differences between my experiences and that of the protagonist. What could a book that detailed those differences—having immigrant parents and growing up in a Hindu household—look like? The only way I could answer this question was to write God Loves Hair.

HW: There is a theme of “queering,” of creating strange normative ways of being, that I find present in She of the Mountains, especially in the sentence structure, formation of sentences, the fusion of language and image and the placement of words within the pages. All these aspects serve to deconstruct normative perceptions and patterns of what a book should be. Does your book act as a microcosm for a larger platform? How do these ideas relate to your work on a larger scale?

VS: Earlier in my career, I always played by the rules. I didn’t call myself a musician because I didn’t play instruments. I often heard I over-sang, and so I explored restraint in my songwriting. As I have grown, it’s been upsetting to realize how many of these rules are racialized.

Who has defined this idea that a real musician is someone who plays instruments, versus someone who makes music? Was I truly over-singing or was it that my style didn’t conform to Western expectations? Many of the reviews of She of the Mountains have referred to it as “experimental.” Who defines what a traditional novel should look like?

While I wouldn’t say the book is a microcosm for a larger platform (outside of wanting to challenge biphobia), I am in a place in my art practice where I am committed to exploring what feels instinctual to me instead of conforming to what has been prescribed.

HW: In a book review by Quill and Quire, they state that ‘what [Vivek] achieves with She of the Mountains is so new, we don’t have the proper words to articulate its success’. How do you express an idea or emotion that exists outside the construct of language? What do you do to carve out your own place within these systems?

VS: The truth is, I was terrified that no one would connect to She of the Mountains, especially after receiving feedback that the book was alienating. Also, when you observe what is popular or what connects, the message is seldom that difference is valued.

Thankfully, the response has been very positive and this has been a crucial reminder to not underestimate readers and to always stay true. The latter hasn’t always translated to success for me, but it has meant that I always have the knowledge that I was honest.

Carving space is a work in progress. My immigrant parents have been often told to make nice, be grateful, don’t push and be quiet. These ideas were then imposed upon me but the hope is that with each piece of art I produce, I am pushing back.

HW: In an interview with Mote Magazine you state that you conceive your music starting with a visual idea or abstracted image. How do you make these abstracted visual images concrete? Do you feel constricted by language?

VS: Writing is an abstract process that I would describe as churning out formless ideas into the physical realm. For example when I was working on She of the Mountains, I thought I had finished the mythology section, but I kept imagining Ganesh in a forest. I even heard the words: “Go into the forest.” All I can do as a writer is listen. I ended up writing a section that begins with Ganesh being haunted by an image of the forest, as a way to realize the idea, and in the end, this section became a significant part of the story.

Language, particularly English, does feel constrictive. I grew up singing Hindu prayers where each word invoked so much emotion. This is likely part of why I am an interdisciplinary artist, to have room to express myself outside just words.

HW: How do you link all your practices in media from music, film, literature, and art? How do you propel this interdisciplinary dialogue?

VS: The desire to link practices comes from wanting to challenge myself and to see how an idea can be further developed outside the central medium I have chosen for it. I also have a short attention span and am often trying to think about how to capture an audience. So, in book readings, I incorporate projected images, movement and song, and for a recent installation, Your Cloud, I released a cover of the Tori Amos song the project was named after.

I also propel this interdisciplinary dialogue by collaborating with other artists, to see how they too might be able to develop an idea. The illustrations that Juliana Neufeld (God Loves Hair) and Raymond Biesinger (She of the Mountains) came up with not only enhance the text, but also provide alternate perspectives and entry points for the reader.

HW: I like the idea of recontextualizing tradition, it is present in your novels and music. How do you manage to merge your background with the various art practices you partake in? Does it influence your sound?

My background is present at all times. I can’t separate it and I’m not actively working to separate. Earlier in my career I attempted to separate my background—my Indianness, my queerness, my femmeness—from my work, especially in my music. But this process was exhausting and ultimately dishonest. I am who I am at all times, and perhaps even more so when I am creating. Art is constantly pushing me to be my truest self, and this often means me pushing against traditional formats, to see what else might be possible.

There were three experts and then there was me, on the fringe. We huddled in chill February air around a clutch of worksheets made for ranking denim; a scale from 1 to 5, which referred to a host of measures I’d neither heard of before nor would have considered valuable had it crossed my mind. Lined up along the sidewalk, backs to the brick, stood seventeen bold humans, in seventeen pairs of admirably worn-in jeans. It was our job, experts plus me, to judge.

The reason? Gastown’s dutil. Denim runs a yearly “Fade-In Contest,” in which the moderately cultish world of raw denim celebrates fidelity to the jean.

Fade February 2015_7 — thanks to Jenn Campbell for all photos

If you don’t wash your raw denim jeans for a year, maybe more, then they will be rank and dutil. Denim will rank them. There were actually a total of seven judges, since dutil. runs an online version of the contest as well. But for our in-store purposes, there were just us four, and I’ll happily admit that I was hopelessly outclassed.

These are men of passionate expertise, whose sartorial acumen is second only to their deep understanding of denim production processes: where the cotton is grown, how the cloth is manufactured and under what conditions the prototype is tested. These are men whose business cards reflect their denim-based ideologies: a penchant for durability, weight and style. Matt Townsend, from Nudie Jeans, David Strong from Freenote Cloth, and Jeffrey Lee from Doublewood Project each came, in their own ways, close to proselytizing, so fervent was their belief in their product.

And why not? If blue jeans are the most democratic of wearables, then these hard-working, sophisticated men were making a claim for inclusivity even as they made clear that raw denim is about one thing, and one thing only: that those who wear it be passionate, too. So passionate, in fact, that the prohibition against washing has been elevated to an art.

Perhaps not democracy, then, but pure meritocracy.

winners of dutil. denim's 'fade in' contest — winners of dutil. denim’s ‘fade in’ contest

For the measure of a perfect pair is contrast, which means preserving that dye—never letting it seep out in the wash—in all the right places, and letting the white of the weft come through in others.

The marks of a perfectly worn-in pair of raw denim jeans? Patterns of wear and preserved dye that attest to the patterns of a body in motion. Honey-combing, behind the knees, from the denim bending and crinkling; whiskering, a kind of starbursting out from the top of the thigh and over the front pockets, which is produced by sitting, bending at the waist, picking up that which has fallen, tying your shoes. There is stacking, marks that form when the jeans are too long and bunch along the ankles, and then there is pocket fade, front or back, in the shape (almost exclusively) of an iPhone.

The winners walked away with new jeans, c/o the brand sponsors, and I walked away with a sense that, if one means to live a life of strong and passionate ideals, one could do worse that to take up selvedge denim as a symbol of that intention.

WHAT IS A POINT OF INFLECTION?

A point of inflection is the focal moment of a period of change, the specific instant where the situation shifts from one state to another, from positive to negative, from before to after.

PROJECT OVERVIEW:

The project is called Point of Inflection. It’s a collection of short pieces of writing (150 words or less each by approximately 12 writers) around the idea of the focal moment of change (a “point of inflection”), expressed in any way the writer chooses. Local artists Christoph Prevost, David Phu, and Michael Champion will then create a cinemagraph and accompanying musical composition that interprets that piece. We will showcase the collaboration in a final gallery exhibition where the pieces of writing are displayed next to the cinemagraph that they inspired (likely displayed on a TV). The event would be held as part of an upcoming issue launch for Sad Magazine, and there may be an additional opportunity for your piece of writing to be published in the Movement issue.

nyfw-red-429 — Cinemagraph of NYC Fashion Week

WHAT WE WANT FROM YOU:

LENGTH 150 words or less.

CONTENT Express the concept of the point of inflection however you may interpret it.

DEADLINE Submissions due December 15th.

COLLABORATION Work with us to tweak your piece as needed.

WHAT YOU WILL GET OUT OF IT:

The satisfaction of meeting new people, collaborating on a cool project, and seeing your piece put to video and music.

YOUR NEXT STEP:

If you choose to accept this challenge, please let us know at: stephanie.orford[at]gmail[dot]com

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Christoph, Michael, and David are accomplished artists in a variety of mediums, and all three have worked together in their video production company, Unfamous.

Enjoy some holiday cheer with local Canadian winter time music. Get under the mistletoe and smooch your favourite person (w/ consent), add rum to the soy-nog and pet a purrring kitten. Happy Holidays to you and yours from Lise Monique and your pals at Sad Mag.

And for those looking for an extra special holiday treat, sign up for a 1 year subscription to Sad Mag before December 15th and we’ll send you (or your secret santa) a personalized Holiday Gift card advising them of your generous gift!

Nothing says, Tis the Season, like an entire year of sparkly Sadness from Sad Mag.

SAD Mag is looking for a new Editor-in-Chief!

SAD Mag (Stories, Art & Design) is a Vancouver-based quarterly magazine covering arts & culture, publishing the photography, designs and writing of some of our greatest local creatives.

Founded in 2009, Sad Mag has published eighteen issues and gained a loyal readership in Vancouver and beyond. We are currently seeking a talented, creative individual to take over the role of Editor-in-Chief. This is a great learning opportunity for an aspiring magazine editor or writer, with a flexible time commitment suitable for a student or person with another job.

The Editor-in-Chief works closely with the Lead Designer and Creative Director to produce each issue of the magazine.

Duties include:

Determining the theme for each issue and planning features, interviews, and short pieces
Recruiting writers and assigning pieces
Reviewing and responding to submissions and pitches
Along with the Creative Director, planning deadlines for submissions, editing and print
Attending community events to promote the work of Sad Mag
Working with the Web Editor(s) to coordinate online promotion of issue content
Editing pieces for style, content, length and grammar
Providing feedback to writers in a timely and professional fashion
Working with copy editors
Attending regular planning and production meetings

Requirements:

Must be based in Vancouver, BC
It goes without saying, but excellent English spelling & grammar are required!
Preferably some experience with print magazines, in a writing or editing capacity
Knowledge of the Vancouver arts & culture scene
Familiarity with Sad Mag is a bonus
The ability to commit for a full print year (3-4 issues) is strongly preferred

Perks & Compensation

The editor-in-chief will receive an honorarium of $300 per issue. You can also expect some other perks & opportunities, including:

Mentorship and support from previous Sad Mag editors
Camaraderie with the truly incredible team of Sad Mag staff
Industry connections
An opportunity to gain experience and skills as an editor
Creative input on an established, exciting young publication
We also throw great parties

Time Commitment:

As the Sad Mag editor-in-chief, you can expect to commit a few hours weekly to email and in-person issue planning. During planning and production, the time commitment is closer to 8-10 hours a week. The majority of work is on your own schedule, coordinating with the Creative Director and Lead Designer as necessary. We would be happy to discuss how each issue is produced with interested applicants!

This position is great for someone with a flexible schedule and an interest in working with writers and on print magazines. Applicants who identify as POC or queer are especially encouraged to apply, as Sad Mag is committed to supporting diversity in the Vancouver publishing industry.

Please apply with a cover letter (in the body of an email is fine) and a portfolio, including a minimum of three written pieces, to Michelle at hello@sadmag.ca. Please include the subject line “Application for Editor-in-Chief”.

The outgoing editor-in-chief will mentor the successful applicant for a full issue production cycle, which will serve as a probation period.

Closing date: January 3rd, 2015.

TEDx Vancouver is here this Saturday October 18^th for your mind-expanding pleasure. Inspired by the infamous TED talks, TEDx is a program of self-organized events that bring together a diverse group of people in the spirit of “ideas worth sharing”. Rest assured that TEDx is not akin to a little brother desperately aspiring to be like his pimple-faced older brother. TEDx Vancouver is in its fifth iteration and is proving to be the largest TEDx to ever hit Vancouver.

The folks at Sad Mag are stoked to hear an incredible line-up of speakers including sexologist Dr. Jessica O’Reilly on the commandments in the New Sex Bible (2014), Victor Chan on coming face to face with the Dali Lama, and Lesley Kim on loosing an eye to Halloween firecrackers. Even though the conference itself is stacked with 12 speakers, TEDx is also dedicated to sharing the stage with 13 different performance groups, including a 30-person Indie Rock choir, The Kingsgate Chorus, hailing from East Vancouver. Please take a look at the soprano section for a gander at Pamela Rounis, Sad Mag’s Lead Designer and the reason our new Suburbia issue will blow your mind.

Considering this line-up, the theme of this year’s TEDx is “Tilt” or the notion of changing perspectives, altering experiences, and launching outside of your comfort zone. To assist the common Vancouverite in this task, the TEDx menu is stacked with exotic exoskeleton-riddled salads where a “bug bar” awaits you. Hopefully this won’t tilt and sway your belly in the bad way. Make sure you take a peek at #TEDvan to see what the buzz is about. Oh! Punny!

Tickets to TEDx are $99 and available here.

Angela Fama is no stranger to Sad Mag. Her images have been featured in several issues, most notably the (unprecedented) 10-page fashion spread in the Suburbia issue launching this fall. We love her. This love and admiration is not limited to an affection for her work alone–we relish in sitting down with Fama on a semi-monthly basis to hear about her new fixations and the new projects+ideas she is sizzling over.

During our most recent brain-sizzle, she described a photography project that will take her across North America in a pop-up photo studio to capture micro-expressions elicited by subtle questioning about the nature of love. As Fama outlines, “What Is Love will reveal through comparative photography the strength and beauty of vulnerability that can be found within all adults, regardless of age, nationality, income, sexual orientation or gender.”

It’s about community. We’re into that.

With our Movement issue on the horizon for this winter, we want to throw the weight of our summer carb-intake behind a project we believe in, and encourage you to do the same. Want to help an extremely talented local photographer create a body of work that explores a universal human emotion? We thought so. Check out her kickstarter campaign here and stayed tuned for updates on her progress. If you’re independently wealthy and want to be featured in Fama’s book, you can pledge $1500 and receive a 2-hour “What is Love” session for your friends and family. Your face might just end up in a book. Just sayin’.

www.angelafama.com
http://www.wabisabibutterfly.com/

Taken shamelessly from Fama’s project page:

ANSWERS TO A FEW Q’S YOU MIGHT HAVE

Q: WHY SHOULD YOU FUND THIS PROJECT?
A: My Kickstarter goal is researched and set for how much is needed for the motorhome/pop-up studio itself and including funder’s rewards.

The rest of the costs and other expenses (gas, camera, equipment, food, emergency) are covered through hopefully some grant funding and definitely through personal savings I have been building this past year and will continue to build this coming year.

I have to ask YOU, my community, to help me build this project, it cannot happen any other way. The collaboration begins here!

Q: WHY SO LONG A WAIT?
A: I have to prepare. If the funding goal is met, I will purchase a Class-C “pre-loved” Motorhome and create the pop-up studio.

I have PR, marketing and conversations to continue creating with social media, radio stations, magazines, national and local newspapers, locations, events, festivals and volunteers.

Q: WHY MAY?
May is Sexual Assault Awareness month, the perfect date to officially begin this adventure. It is also the beginning of the two months both Joel and I have committed solely to this project.

Q: HOW CAN I LEARN ABOUT THE JOURNEY AS YOU GO?
A: I can be abundantly found on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and/or my blog. Once the project “officially” begins, I will update these daily with stories, thoughts and/or images.

Q: CAN I BE A PART OF IT?
A: Yes of course! Both here on Kickstarter and on www.wabisabibutterfly.com. I will have locations listed with corresponding dates, addresses and times.

??Q: DRIVE ACROSS NORTH AMERICA IN A MOTORHOME?!? EWWW! AREN’T YOU CONCERNED ABOUT THE ECO-FOOTPRINT YOU’LL BE LEAVING BEHIND??
A: YES! ?I intend to DIY the motorhome to be as eco-friendly as a “pre-loved” motorhome can be. In addition to solar paneling for the interior electricity that will recharge my photo gear between locations, I will be looking into rain harvesting, wind energy and composting toilets.

“All I want to do now is run and be in love” is the first thing my movie date says after seeing Mischa Kamp’s Jongens (“Boys”) at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. She certainly has a point: no matter what your gender, age, or sexual orientation, this queer coming-of-age story will transport you back to being fifteen, in love for the first time, and hopelessly confused about it.

Jongens is the story of Steiger (Gijs Blom), a reserved teenager who falls for his teammate Marc (Ko Zandvliet) while training for the national relay racing championships. It quickly becomes clear that the attraction is mutual, and Marc and Steiger grow steadily closer. Not everything is rosy for the young lovers, however, their budding romance complicated by an unruly older brother, an unwanted girlfriend, and Steiger’s uncertainty about his sexual orientation. A couple of extremely ill-timed encounters between the two boys throw everything into question, the romantic tension hitting some all time highs.

Women are largely absent from the film, Steiger’s mother having died in a motorcycle accident a few years prior. Instead, Kamp focuses on a theme of male-to-male love that is rarely explored in cinema. Through his relationship with Marc, Steiger not only learns to understand love romantically, but also from the perspective of a friend, teammate, brother, and son. These platonic subplots add emotional complexity to the film, and are in some ways more moving than the main action.

Excellently cast and featuring stellar performances by Blom en Zandvliet alike, the film is sweet, lighthearted and engaging. With sun-drenched cinematography, Jongens promises to keep viewers “awing” and “oh no-ing” for the full 78 minutes of hormone-laden emotion.

If you haven’t had a chance to check-out the Queer Film Festival yet, tonight is your last chance! Head to the Vancouver Playhouse for the screening of Girl Trash: All Night Long at 7:00pm, then follow the lantern-lit procession to the Junction for the official Closing Gala party featuring performances by Isolde N Barron and Thanks Jem!

Daryn Wright heads out to Lake Errock, BC to chat with Suburbia Issue artist, Shelley Stefan. Check out Stefan’s up-coming exhibition at Make Creative on Thursday August 28, 2014: Multiplicity of Self, Queer Portraits. Read the full article in Sad Mag’s Suburbia Issue, out in Fall 2014.

Shelley Stefan stokes the fire in her wood stove.

Her small studio is an artist’s dream: heavy wooden doors open up to a tiny room filled with tubes of oil paints, a cushy armchair, and various bric-a-brac—a seventies bear lamp, an American flag. The most striking element of the space, however, are the self-portraits that cover the walls from floor to ceiling. In black charcoal, images of Stefan look back like from a broken mirror—some look angry, some sad, some pensive.

Stefan's studio in Lake Errock, BC. Photo by Daryn Wright — Stefan’s studio in Lake Errock, BC. Photo by Daryn Wright

Stefan, whose work includes “The Lesbian Effigies” (2006) and “B is for Butch” (2010), studied at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and the Maine College of Art, and currently teaches in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of the Fraser Valley. Growing up in Chicago, Stefan has lived in several urban centers but now calls Lake Errock home. The rural setting, far from a stone’s throw from the city, seems at odds with the politics of identity, sexuality, and gender at work in her paintings.

Despite this, Stefan seems at home. Throughout the interview the 40-year-old painter kept the stove, whose masonry she laid herself, well-fed with the firewood she chops and stores just outside.

Shelley Stefan: Right now I’ve got about four series on the go. In the studio here there’s a series of self-portraits—I’m aiming to do hundreds of mirror-based [self-portraiture], kind of old-school, academic, kind of dialing it back to the traditional methods of introspection.

I find there’s something really neat when there’s the human form live, and you surrender a bit of accuracy, but what you get is kind of like raw imperfect humanness that I really like. I’m working with my own face for awhile, just to see if I do this 300 times, am I seeing different elements of myself? Some of them are off, some of them are moody, and some of them look like my ancestors.

They all seem different. They’re all me looking in a mirror at different times. It’s almost embarrassing, and I think that’s the point. I’m at the point in my career where I kind of want to allow myself to be vulnerable.

Sad Mag: Self-portraiture—particularly the kind you’re doing, with a mirror—is rooted in an old art form. There seems to be a connection between this practice and the rural space you reside in. Do you think they’re related in any way?

SS: I think that there’s a part of me that’s very raw and sublime. I think that comes first. I have Italian ancestors who were artists, and that can mean many things but what it means for me is there’s this intense passionate anchor. So having my studio in a rural space like this is a way to ground and isolate that kind of passionate energy in a way that ironically isn’t ego-based. It’s almost like it’s a laboratory and I’m trying to keep the dish clear. So I guess on some level as an artist, my choice of a rural studio feels like the best substrate to tease out the rawest and purest emotion in my work. I’m really influenced by my surroundings.

SM: Through the process, have you learned anything about yourself?

SS: I’m still discovering. Through my works in the past few years I’ve discovered a lot about interiority. When I’ve been working in portraiture, I’ve realized on some level, self-portraiture, if done properly, allows for uncovering different facets.

I feel completely connected to my Italian ancestors when I paint and draw. It’s crazy. There’s something about listening to Italian opera and being in here and being like, “They get me.” When I’m painting and I’m in the middle of it and there’s Italian opera on I’m like, “Those fuckers are crazy and so am I and it’s okay, because you’re human. You’re alive on this planet.”

You can see Stefan’s work up-close and personal at her upcoming solo exhibition at Make (257 East 7^th Ave) on Thursday August 28^th from 7– 10pm featuring Italian-themed beverages and the musical stylings of DJ Ruggedly Handsome.

Shelley Stefan
Multiplicity of Self – Queer Portraits
August 28 to September 22, 2014

OPENING RECEPTION:Thursday August 28, 2014 from 7– 10pm

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