Elizabeth Milton Gets Ready for her Auditions this Week

Vancouver artist Elizabeth Milton is getting ready to do a talk-show-centric residency at Western Front this week. I talked to her about it for a brief Canadianart.ca item out today. An excerpt:

Vancouver artist Elizabeth Milton will kick off her own version of Inside the Actors Studio this week as she transforms Western Front’s Grand Luxe concert hall into an ersatz audition space. During the course of this May 9 to June 25 residency at Western Front, Milton and a team of amateur and professional actors (one of which is her mother) will play out scenarios inspired by a variety of phenomena: theatre protocols, job interviews, psychotherapy sessions, celebrity confessionals, reality television, prime-time talk shows and more. Related sets will be constructed too, and these, along with a resulting video, will go on public display at Access Gallery from June 25 to July 31.

“I’ve always been interested in the constructs of theatre and theatricality drawn from pop culture in my work,” says Milton over the phone from Vancouver. Her recent video collaboration with Vancouver actor Tara Travis, The Actor Cries, shows Travis performing different flavours of crying—crying as a soap opera character, as a comedy character, and so on. And her video triptych St. Theresa’s Basement, created with fellow artist Sheila Poznikoff, features amateur actors preparing for their church group’s annual Christmas pageant.

The Actor Cries was shown at Platform's Cabin Fever show in Winnipeg last fall, and St. Theresa's Basement in the group show This is Uncomfortable at Gallery TPW last summer. More info over at Canadianart.ca.

(Project sketch of Elizabeth Milton's Auditions from Canadianart.ca)