Upon making a pilgrimage to what was once the late Canadian artist and filmmaker Joyce Wieland’s house in Toronto’s Queen East neighbourhood, Hazel Meyer met its then occupant and owner Jane Rowland. Being a fan of Wieland, Rowland had kept many of Wieland’s old things, including the pink moiré flounce hanging above where Wieland’s bed once was, hand-painted wallpaper trim that circled Wieland’s bedroom, wooden cassette tape racks, and a ton of marble scattered throughout the house and piled high in the basement. Inheriting these objects that were otherwise deemed “invaluable,” and with no archival value, Meyer revisits these items in this work-in-progress that will have its exhibition premiere at Western Front in 2020. For PSi, The Weight of Inheritance will take the form of a participatory choreography of objects.

Hazel Meyer is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, performance, and text to investigate the relationships between movement, sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Container Technologies, her recent collaboration with the Canadian AIDS Society, mobilized the Canadian AIDS Memorial Quilt in its present state of being stored in 22 hockey bags to think through the agency and complexity involved in the act of containing, holding, and storing.

Hazel’s work aims to recover the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of sports and recreation. DEEP HORSE TEXTS her commission for the 2020 Calgary Stampede through Untitled Art Society, and Muscle Panic to have its 9th presentation at La Ferme du Buisson (FR) in Spring 2019, enliven and re-centre the importance of desire, queerness, and sweat between bodies and within these spaces.

She often works collaboratively with her partner, media historian Cait McKinney. Together they explore their shared attachments to queer histories and accessibility politics through research, writing, video and archival interventions. Their most recent project Slumberparty 2018 had its premiere at the BFI’s London International Film Festival (UK). Hazel lives and works between Toronto and Los Angeles.

Presented in partnership with the School of Creative and Performing Arts, University of Calgary, as part of Performance Studies international

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