Jacob Korczynski's research project for Performance in Residence departs from a close reading of Lucy Lippard's novel I See/You Mean (1979). Korczynski situates I See/You Mean in the context of a feminist aesthetic that he connects to contemporaneous practices in experimental film and more specifically the exploration of the subjective camera eye in Babette Mangolte’s film The Camera: Je or La Camera: I (1977). He proposes his research as simultaneously engaging the image as text and the texture of the image.

Lucy Lippard’s experimental novel I See/You Mean was in development for over a decade prior to its publication and is a unique part of the oeuvre of this well known American critic and curator. The publication “charts the changing currents between two men and two women. A collage of overheard dialogue, sexual encounters, astrology, the I Ching, Tarot, palmistry, the book is also a document of the author’s burgeoning feminist consciousness.”

Korczynski's research begins with an execution of an instruction submitted in 1969 by Lucy Lippard to David Askevold’s Projects Class at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. Lippard’s instruction was an exercise in image making that would inform her writing process for I See/You Mean. Korczynski's research will be shaped by feminist film and literary theory, the tension between self-portraiture and autobiography, and in dialogue with Lucy Lippard and Babette Mangolte.

Biographies
Lucy R. Lippard is a writer and activist, and the author of over twenty books, mostly on contemporary art and culture. Lippard is well known for her activist and feminist work. She worked with artists’ groups such as the Artworkers’ Coalition and Ad Hoc Women Artists, and was a founding member of Printed Matter and the feminist collective and journal Heresies. Even prior to her 'belated radicalisation', as she once described her involvement with activist groups from 1968 onwards, her writing accommodated a further understanding of works of art that considers both the properties of the work itself and the context in which it is created and operates, from an engaged perspective rather than a removed one. For the past twenty years she has been living and working in rural Galisteo, New Mexico.

Babette Mangolte is an experimental filmmaker living in New York City. In 1964 she became one of the first women to be accepted into the École Nationale de Photographie et de Cinématographie, but she soon found herself stifled by the Paris art scene of the seventies and moved to New York, where she has lived and worked since 1970. Extremely active in New York’s downtown scene, she has photographed performances by artists and dancers including Marina Abramović, Trisha Brown and Philip Glass. Mangolte worked as director of photography with Chantal Akerman and Yvonne Rainer before she began making her own films (the first, in 1975). She has also worked with Richard Foreman, Robert Rauschenberg, Michael Snow and Robert Whitman. Her experimental, non-narrative films have been screened in festivals around the world, and several retrospectives have been organised around her work.

Jacob Korczynski is an independent curator based in Toronto. A recent participant in the de Appel Curatorial Programme, he has curated projects for the Dunlop Art Gallery, SAW Gallery, Gallery TPW and the Dutch Art Institute amongst others, and his writing has appeared in The Shadowfiles, Prefix Photo, C Magazine and Fillip. A former member of the Pleasure Dome collective, he was also the co-curator of Print Generation and From Instructions, the 22nd and 23rd editions of the Images Festival. Currently, he is preparing the exhibition Surface Tension for Oakville Galleries and is developing a text (in collaboration with Oliver Husain) for The Power Plant publication Jimmy Robert: Draw the Line.