Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay presents two works created in the context of the residency offered yearly by PRIM and Dazibao. In The Burden and Legacy, he creates intense, almost shamanistic, musical performances. The incontestably playful aspect of his work, with its masquerades and masks, works together with an artistic inquiry into the relationship between the ephemeral and the sublime and between music and image, creating a rhetoric for the expression of identity in gay culture.

The Burden is a sound piece with an installation of mirrors, accompanied by an editioned bookwork that takes on, by its folds and colourful passages, the form of a concertina. Conceived for one spectator at a time, The Burden proposes a modern oratorio around the pronoun I, provoking introspection, affirmation of the self and the acceptance of a manifest solitude, initiated from our own reflection in the mirrors and from the relentless repetition of the I.

In the video installation Legacy (a 12 minute 30 second loop), a flâneur wears a mask of mirrors, half medieval and half futurist, wandering through a wooded area - popular gay cruising grounds - evocative of an enchanted forest. Responding to his lament, constructed from film dialogue excerpts, is a series of characters who, like oracles, bring to light the wisdom and knowledge of past generations of gay men. In turn radical and compassionate, these observations suggest a renewal as well as a force inherent to gay identity.

BENNY NEMEROFSKY RAMSAY is a Montreal-born artist, diarist and aspiring bon-vivant. Since 2000 his work has examined the ways in which emotional expression changes shape when mediated by technology and popular culture. Nemerofsky Ramsay's video work has screened in festivals and galleries across Canada, Europe and East Asia and has won prizes at the Hamburg Short Film Festival, the Kasseler Dokumentarfilm-und Videofest and the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (Germany), the Toronto Inside Out Film and Video Festival as well as First Prize at the Globalica Media Arts Biennale (Poland). His work is part of numerous private collections and the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Nemerofsky Ramsay is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto.

This exhibition is part of Dazibao’s artist in residence program, operated jointly with PRIM.

Dazibao thanks the artist for his generous collaboration and its members for their support.

Dazibao receives financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Conseil des arts de Montréal. Dazibao is a member of the Regroupement des centres d’artistes autogérés du Québec.