[News/People/Arts] [Canada] Elisha Lim's Sissy 2012 calendar
Stephanie Stevens
Elisha Lim's Sissy 2012 calendar
MONTREAL / Benefit to save Montreal's Ste-Emilie Skillshare space for
queer artists
Richard Burnett / National / Friday, November 25, 2011
Comic artist Elisha Lim first gained international acclaim with the
2010 book 100 Butches
<http://www.amazon.ca/100-Butches-1-Elisha-Lim/dp/1593501684> , and
then notoriety when Lim refused to be referred to as “she” in
interviews. “On a personal level I really believe that there are
people who don’t fall in [the gender categories of] men and women,”
says Lim, who prefers the pronoun “they... There are more than ‘he’
and ‘she’ in this world and if there were six genders, I’d be Number
Five.”
[Photo; <http://bit.ly/tdt6HS> "There are more than 'he' and 'she' in
this world and if there were six genders, I'd be Number Five," says
Elisha Lim.]
Lim is talking politics on the eve of the Montreal launch of the
follow-up to 100 Butches – Lim’s Sissy 2012 calendar which will be
launched at a November 26 Montreal benefit to save that city’s
volunteer-run Ste-Emilie Skillshare space for queer artists.
Ste-Emilie owes more than $3,500 in bills, including $2,300 for rent
and $1,300 for hydro.
“We’re a community art space run primarily by and for queer and trans
people and people of colour,” says Ste-Emilie organizer Walker Oliver.
“We aim to provide community members with accessible art resources and
programming and to promote artistic expression and self-representation
within marginalized communities.”
Skillshare has a paper and fabric silkscreen studio, a black and white
darkroom, sewing machines, and its Ste-Em gallery space that hosts
workshops, meetings, vernissages and parties.
To help pay the bills, Montreal’s queer hip hop collective Rough
Diamond is hosting the Nov 26 Calling all Sissies benefit dance party
at the Ste Emilie Skillshare where Lim will launch the 2012 Sissy
calendar. The artwork picks up where 100 Butches left off, with models
from London, Berlin, Montreal and Toronto. When I ask about it, Lim
replies, “I’ll tell you a public secret: The whole first half of my
art career was all tracing. I used the computer. I put paper up
against the screen and just traced photographs of people because I’d
never been to art school and didn’t consider myself to be an artist at
the time. I had no confidence.”
[Image <http://bit.ly/sy6AhT> ]
In fact, Lim did not want to be a comic artist as a kid and came into
it by accident. “I was 25 and engaged to a man when I went to see a
fortune teller [in 2004] and she changed my life,” says Lim, now 33.
“At the time I was trying to become a [newspaper] reporter and a
musician as well. And the fortune teller told me, ‘You have to quit
because they’re both going to flop.’ But she said that art would make
me famous. She also told me I wasn’t going to marry this guy I was
with. She wasn’t wrong.”
The rest, as they say, is history. But that back story is why
Montreal-based Lim is so keen on this fundraising benefit for the
Ste-Emilie Skillshare.
“Some thing needs to be done outside of art school, in a space where
people can be creative, muck things up with their hands, play with
paint and get themselves dirty without being in an art-school
setting,” Lim says. “It’s like me tracing the screen until I figured
it out.”
Calling All Sissies
November 26 at Montreal’s Ste Emilie Skillshare (3942 Ste Emilie,
Metro Place St Henri)
Calendar launch and catwalk at 8pm
Dance party begins at 10 pm
Admission: $5 PWYC
www.steemilieskillshare.org <http://www.steemilieskillshare.org/>
©2011 Pink Triangle Press
http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/Elisha_Lims_Sissy_2012_calendar-11148.aspx