About Us
Pleasure Dome is a year-round film and video exhibition group dedicated to the presentation of experimental film and video. The 2007/2008 Programming Collective is: Andrea Cooper, Jon Davies, Firoza Elavia, Linda Feesey, Brenda Goldstein, Graham Hollings, Oliver Husain, Jean-Paul Kelly, Jacob Korczynski, Erik Martinson, Rachel McRae and Ben Portis. Tom Taylor is the Program Coordinator.
“We were just bored that’s how I think it started, bored with watching the same new avant pictures hitting the screen by fathers we never wanted, mothers we’d spent our lives saying no to. We thought fringe cinema wasn’t the church but serious fun, strange new emulsions for strange new lives, and wanted to lend a stage to all those queer, trans, post-pop underthings that had been waiting all along for a place to shine.
We loved super-8 and when our friends were dying we gave them cameras and then the punks came and made zinekinos and there were performances by people who were fucking with emulsion not because they could but because they had to, because it was the only way to face the next day.
It’s been sixteen years now, and the miles of tape and emulsion keep running past eyes still open for something akin to our capacity for wonder. Welcome to the Pleasure Dome.â€?
– Mike Hoolboom, Co-founder of Pleasure Dome
Pleasure Dome isn’t really a place, it’s a state of exhibitionism. Since 1989, the Pleasure Dome programming collective has been presenting some of the most innovative and challenging work produced by media artists from Canada and abroad. In the course of over two hundred screenings (including feature-length works, solo screenings, mid-career retrospectives, open screenings and thematic programs), Pleasure Dome has emerged as the conduit whereby Toronto audiences can see experimental media that may otherwise have fallen between the cracks of other institutions’ mandates. Pleasure Dome is committed to exhibiting local, national and international work that features shorter length and small format work, as well as non-traditional work that mixes film and video with other media such as performance and installation.
From the likes of Peggy Ahwesh and Linda Feesey in 8mm at the Rex Hotel bar to Marnie Parrell and John Kneller at The Cabana Room, John Porter at The Euclid Theatre, Annie Sprinkle at A Space Gallery, Bruce LaBruce at the Metro Porn Theatre, Matthew Barney at the Bloor Theatre, Mike Hoolboom at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Sadie Benning at the Latvian House, and Frank Moore, George Kuchar, Alex Bag, Rick Prelinger and many, many others, we inhabit any and all spaces which suit our exhibition needs. Most often we screen work at Cinecycle, a 19th-century coach house that can accommodate our variant formats, including regular 8, super 8, 16mm, 35mm, video projection, film performance, and other alternative modes of presentation.
Pleasure Dome is also a publisher of catalogues and zines on fringe film/video culture, involving a community of media artists, programmers, guest curators, co-presenters, critics, academics, and audience members. Some of these publications include recent publications on Barbara Sternberg (Like a dream that vanishes), John Porter (The John Porter Film Activity Book), Wrik Mead (Homo Eroticus: The Films of Wrik Mead) an anthology published in 2000, Lux: A Decade of Artist’s Film and Video, and the 2003 catalogue for the commissioned film/video/cd-rom project A Blueprint for Moving Pictures in the 21st Century.
We fundamentally uphold the rights of freedom of speech, freedom of expression and access to information and therefore totally disagree with the state censorship or prior approval of any work of art in any form, and as such will not comply with the state censorship, prior or otherwise, of videos and films we exhibit. As such we refuse to exhibit in theatres that use unionized projectionists that are required by Ontario law to have a certificate of prior-approval from the Ontario Censor Board. By refusing to submit any of the film/video works that we exhibit we are challenging the legitimacy of the Censor Board itself. In 2004 Ontario Superior Court Justice Russell Juriansz struck down the Ontario Censor Board ability to censor and require prior approval of all film and videos exhibited in the province as it contravenes Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, the current Ontario government has constructed a new law, titled the Film Classification Act, requiring all films and video to be submitted to the censor board for classification. Pleasure Dome continues its policy of not submitting our programming for prior approval by any censoring bodies. As such, when work is exhibited with Pleasure Dome, we are in affect breaking the law and open to prosecution. However, the Censor Board does not want to have any organization challenge the legitimacy of requiring approval since once again the law would be struck down based on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The most the Censor Board could do is to require Pleasure Dome to submit preview copies of artists work to them. We feel that it is important and relevant for all artists exhibiting with us to know our commitment to upholding the rights and freedoms of speech and expression.
In all its modes (curatorial/exhibitionist/critical), Pleasure Dome seeks both to preserve the history of image-making and its surrounding discourse, and to clear a space for those who are still bored with pictures that don’t hit the screen hard enough.
Pleasure Dome does not submit any of its film and video programming for prior approval by any censoring bodies.
Pleasure Dome acknowledges the support of our members, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council.
