WEDNESDAY LUPYPCIW

BIO

Wednesday Lupypciw is from Calgary, Alberta, where she pursues a lo-fi video and performance art practice. To make money she is a part-time maid. She also maintains a concurrent practice in textiles — weaving, machine knitting, embroidery and crochet — but this is done mostly while procrastinating on other, larger projects. The performance art collective LIDS, or the Ladies Invitational Deadbeat Society, a loosely knit group of purposefully lazy womenfolk, is one of those projects, as well as RCMP, the fantastically genderqueer Radical Cooch Maximum Pussy club. She is a Fibre program graduate from the Alberta College of Art + Design, and has shown work in various artist-run spaces throughout Canada including TRUCK Gallery, Stride, Harbourfront, Nuit Blanche Toronto, and EMMEDIA. She has been an artist in residence at the Banff Centre, and has just finished stints in Blairmore, Alberta at the Gushul Studio Residency and the KIAC artist residency in Dawson City, Yukon.

STATEMENT

“The tense area between having a desire and fulfilling it is where I have tried to locate the video Tranzar É Pras Amantes: Sex is for Lovers. In the project I examine the notion of traveling from one’s homeland to somewhere far away as a metaphor for self-realization. Canada and Brazil are my inspirations, but as each place is a sort of home to me, the potential for traveler’s discovery is ironically limited, or cancelled out. The footage in the video is meant to normalize subversive elements of Canadian living for Brazilians, and vice versa; garish nonsensical fashion, queerness, inappropriate emotions, bodily delights and derelict or pretend locations all figure prominently in the “everyday” scenes on tape. North and South American customs are exaggerated and glamourized until each society becomes equally fantastical and full of my own personal symbolism and longing. However, in trying to create bacchanalian excess, I have found that I am still extremely self-conscious. Giving myself permission to live strange tropical lives and engage in uninhibited yearning has only resulted in my questioning of what I really want after all.”