Tobaron Waxman

Tobaron Waxman is an interdiscliplnary time based artist, specialising in performance and digital media. He recently completed and MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he also taught Voice in the Performance department. An avid student of Jewish liturgical music, he is a cantorial soloist at Yom Kippur for Kolel in Toronto. He has performed at Links Hall and Gallery2 in Chicago, and in Toronto at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre,The Lab, Cinecycle, and The Music Gallery; shown installation in Toronto at the Liason of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT), Zsa Zsa, and the OCAD Atrium Gallery. His videos have screenned in London, San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis, Madison, Sao Paulo, Porto Allegre, Buenos Aires, and Brasilia.

We are proud to present a video installations by Tobaron Waxman, untitlied self portrait.

untitlied self portrait

(From the artist)

My work embraces embodiment, the medium of performance here is not representational, but experiential. The medium of video captures that moment and stretches it out, savouring it, expanding time. This is a live and urgent experience.

For the purposes of this discussion, I have sought text from Torah that references a conceptual space that is sacred. This is not a location determined by degrees of longitude and latitude, but a four-dimensional moment.

~har hakodesh, place of assembly, the place to which all eyes are raised, the place to which all hearts are turned

~Makom [a name of God meaning “place”]

~Abram and Soreh are told: “Go from your house and from your kindred, and from your mothers house to the place that I will show you.”

~Petach Eynayim (the crossroads, where Tamar waits for Judah, and the “place of open eyes”).

I am interested in Pornography as a medium because embodiment is inescapably required. Somewhere between embodiment and social construct the viewer and the maker and the performers experience a physical change. This is not about costume. Gender is embodied and not merely performed.

The images I am most compelled to make at this time are sexual and sometimes violent. I am fascinated by the complex power dynamics of implied age difference between the subjects. The text chanted is a Davidic psalm, Yedid Nefesh. This text, for the poets physical and passionate expression of yearning for the Place, the Moment, is read by some as an expression of an ecstasy that is particularly homoerotic. I have described the piece as a self-portrait:
I am the man,
I am the boy,
I am the stall.
The piece began as a performance interrogating what others have found in me exotic, simultaneous to an exploration of what fraternal space might mean for me.

For more information, see www.artic.edu/~twaxma/ppages/phome.html