Maryse Larivière

“Orgazing” Book Launch

Nautilus Bookstore

Saturday 23 September 2017 - 5:30-6:30pm

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Please join us at the Nautalis Bookstore 150 Kent Street, on Saturday, September 23 rd at 3pm for the launch of Maryse Larivière’s epistolary novella Orgazing, with a reading by Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay.

By the time we talk face to face again in the city of fog and spasm, feminine sovereignty will be on the table, next to my pen and ashtray. I better rush over, just in case the passage that connects us curtains off. The passage looks like a futuristic set for a Beckett play—an observation the dead playwright would almost certainly reject. Failing in the eyes of a Master can only be a good thing, you might say.

In a matter of hours, I awaken, still slightly sedated, trapped in a cinder-block cell surrounded by my work. “I am here to write and fall into his arms,” I say to myself cautiously. Minutes later, I am on the inner phone with you. “I’m gonna lick French all over you and make your freckly skin iridescent.” You purr. “Wamp wamp wamp,” tremble my feelers.

There is a knock at the door…

Orgazing is an epistolary novella set on the remote Scottish island of Staffa. A woman, held captive in an institution built atop Fingal’s Cave, addresses her beloved about their failed revolution, her attempt to transform writing into telepathic singing, and her effort to develop this mode of communication while incarcerated. Shifting between prose and poetry, word and birdsong, Orgazing explores the limits of body and voice, articulating an unsettled longing for metamorphosis.

Orgazing, along with a new 16 mm film, a suite of sculptural works, and an original sound work by Cosima Friesen, comprises Larivière’s solo project Under the cave of winds, at Untitled Art Society until September 23, 2017.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

MARYSE LARIVIERE is an artist, writer and scholar whose work re-imagines how we engage with the textual, visual and social through bodily and emotional encounters. Her practice crosses art, literature and theory, taking the form of text, performance, sculpture, and collage. Lariviere is the 2016-2017 writer-in- residence at Gallery 44, and has contributed experimental writings to a variety of platforms including C Magazine, Esse Art+Opinions and Organism for Poetic Research.

BENNY NEMEROFSKY RAMSAY is an artist and diarist. In his work you will find bells, bouquets, ceramic vases, enchanted forests, folding screens, gay elders, glitter, gold leaf, hybrid flowers, library books, love letters, imaginary paintings, madrigals, megaphones, mirrors, naked men, sign language, subtitles, and the voices of birds, baritones, boy sopranos, contraltos, countertenors and sirens.