This Poem Does Not Help Me at All is a collection of short works that take on multiple forms and shift unpredictably between performative modes, texts, and sounds. Seemingly improvised but in fact carefully scripted, these hybrid works feature bizarre interactions with everyday inanimate objects, abstract body movements, and absurd monologues. Moving between states of criticality, humour, and emotion, the resulting performance is at turns entertaining, sometimes tender and often, bewildering.

Bridget Moser is a performance and video artist whose work is suspended between prop comedy, experimental theatre, performance art, absurd literature, existential anxiety and intuitive dance. She has presented work in venues across Canada, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mercer Union, Gallery TPW, MSVU Art Gallery, Dunlop Art Gallery, PLATFORM Centre, and Western Front. She has presented projects throughout the US and Europe, and has been a resident artist at Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, Italy and guest faculty at The Banff Centre. Her work has been featured in Canadian Art, C Magazine, Visual Arts News, Artribune Italy, and a collaborative artist book published by Mousse Magazine. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Sobey Art Award representing the region of Ontario.

What if we were alive is a group exhibition of video and performance works by Bridget Moser, Steve Roggenbuck, oualie frost, Allison Hrabluik and Salote Tawale. The works in this exhibition variably consider the conundrums, tenderness, triumph, loss and exquisite strangeness of being a human. From the absurdity of life’s everyday rituals and the inherent pathos of hope, to the sincerity of love and the necessary loneliness of life, these works each oscillate between the profoundly idiosyncratic nature of experience and the threads of universality that foreground what it means to be human.

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