Wet Sounds Series: The Powers

Artist Talk by The Powers

Friday, November 1, 2024
Doors open 7pm | Conversation 7:30 – 9pm | Reception to follow
Musagetes, 6 Dublin Street South, Guelph

On Friday, November 1, The Powers, an electronic experimental performance collaboration, will present a public talk on their work as the first artists in the quarterly series Wet Sounds: feminist + queer music practices and the polycrisis, launched by Musagetes in Guelph.

The Powers (Emily Pelstring, Katherine Kline, and Jessica Mensch) as scholars and artists examine the occult and spirituality as places that are “legitimate forms of experience” through music, performance, and video work. Their performance pulls in the audience, playing on ritual and female archetypes including the witch, the crone, and the hag. They explore places of taboo within dominant ways of knowing—in this case, of the occult, magic, paganism, and mediumship. But what does examining them and their exile from the mainstream offer to us in this time of upheaval, and what does untangling resistance to this teach us about other invisibilized practices? The Powers work with improvisation and play, creating a ritual space in their performances including reverence, humour, and live participatory experiences.

The Powers public talk is a free event—please register on Eventbrite. Masks will be available; we encourage guests to stay home if you’re not feeling well. Please reduce the use of scented products (e.g. perfume, cologne) for this event.

The Powers will also play on October 31 as part of the local indie series what now.

Wet Sounds: feminist + queer music practices and the polycrisis
Public talk and performance series

Wet Sounds is a quarterly arts series that presents conversations and performances centring the intersections of feminist and queer musicians’ academic work, artistic practice, and collaborations in the polycrisis. This series will examine notions of grief, ritual, queerness, pleasure, land, embodiment, colonialisms, and sound. Wet Sounds will ask how artists see their practice as impacted by or responding to the interconnected crises unfolding around us—climate chaos, genocide, fascism, an erosion of democracy, and multiple sites of oppression and resistance.

The Powers are Emily Pelstring, Katherine Kline and Jessica Mensch. Jessica writes, “We are at once a band, an artistic collaboration, and a research-creation group committed to weaving alternate realities through video, music, story-telling, dance, and ritualistic performance. The Powers create a speculative reality that is absurd, irreverent and terrifying, inhabited by animal kin and monstrous creatures, haunted by other-dimensional entities, and erupting with the repressed archetypes of classical myth. In this world, The Powers foster dynamic relationships with all sorts of beings—earthly, embodied, and otherwise. They invoke a pantheon of characters and deities, and include them in feminist reconfigurations of hetero-patriarchal myths. They draw inspiration from mythological trinities of sisters such as the Graeae, the Gorgons, and the Fates, and recast these icons in reclaimative, chaotic media events.”

Emily Pelstring is an artist and filmmaker, and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Her work across media installation, experimental film, and performance situates the moving image and sound in relation to overlapping concepts drawn from science, magical traditions, and religious texts.

Katherine Kline is a psychotherapist and PhD candidate in Communication Studies, Concordia. Her research examines intersections of psyche and materiality, through a study of spiritual mediumship and dendrophilia. She presently lives on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen peoples, now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.

Jessica Mensch’s work straddles painting, video, music, stage design, and installation, inviting contemplation between these spheres of production and the position of women within them. Mensch received her MFA from Hunter College in 2019 and currently teaches in the Art Department at St. FX University in Nova Scotia.

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