Shawna Dempsey on Performance Art, Identity, and Lesbian Park Rangers

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Art-O-Log. Today I'm chatting with Shauna Dempsey, a Manitoba artist working in a variety of mediums. She and collaborator Lori Milan have created pieces such as we're Talking Vulva, a five-minute film featuring giant female genitalia, on lesbian national parks and services, a multimedia project in which uniformed rangers protect the fragile lesbian ecosystem. Dempsey and Milan are also known for performance installations that engage the public, such as Grocery Store, a functioning grocery store in the Exchange District in Winnipeg, and Wild Ride, a carnival midway on Toronto's Bay Street during the financial crisis. Their work has been featured in women's centres in Sri Lanka and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. They have also published books and curated exhibitions at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Dempsey is also co-executive director of MAUA, mentoring artists for women's art in Winnipeg. Shana, welcome to the Art-O-Log.

Hi Madison, Nice to meet you.

You too.

How would you describe your practice? I would say that Lori and I are performance artists, because everything we do and have done is very rooted in the body and expressing through the body, and obviously a lot of our work has been literally performance art, either out in the real world or on stages. But our video work is also very embodied for the most part, and even our installation work and the books we've published. I don't know, there's either a sense of the body in space or the voice of the body. Anyway, that's how we boil it down. We're performance artists, but we do a lot of other things as well.

Can you tell me more about Lori and how you decided to work together as artists?

Yeah, we met when, I guess, Lori was 20 and I would have been 22. We were both working in theater in Toronto as technicians and we both had our own art practices. So we started working together for money for other people. We became friends and I started stealing her ideas and then we became lovers and then it was problematic me stealing her ideas and there's a long history of artists stealing the ideas of their muses right, or there being a silent, invisible other who never gets credited and we really didn't want to do that. So pretty early on we insisted that we were both credited as creators and we got a lot of pushback from that. Oh, it's Sean and MC and her girlfriend, or Sean wants her girlfriend to be paid. But it is a true partnership and, somewhat ironically, after we split up, people took that partnership more seriously.

And when did you personally know that you wanted to be an artist?

know that you wanted to be an artist. When I was little, like maybe four, I used to dress up with a big, broad brimmed hat and a cape and I was Miss Shauna from New York, a famous artist. I was always in a rush, just stopped by oh, I have to go. Maybe I always knew. I knew, lori.

I know Lori would say she always knew as well how does your collaboration process differ from a solo artist practice?

Oh my gosh, there's so much talking, which is very lesbian too. Yeah, it's interesting. I ran into somebody at Safeway a couple of days ago and she said Somebody at Safeway a couple of days ago and she said whose story is the video at the CMHR that's playing right now, the Fruit Machine, a space opera, and it's like well, it's Laurie's whole movies and Laurie's voice. But I wrote the text, but then Laurie rewrote the text and then, as we were editing, we rewrote the text again.

Like it's a lot of back and forth, a ton of back and forth. First we have to find an idea, and for us it almost always begins with some sort of image, often a costume image, or it's always a visual image and then if it compels us in some way often ways we don't even understand then it's what could we say with this image? So we put together the image with something that's bothering us and then we create a third thing, a sideways way in to both the image and what's bothering us, to create the piece. It's pretty slow. We take quite a while to do that and we've slowed down in recent years because I've also got a job now, but it's a lot of talking and agreement and sometimes we disagree and then we have to convince each other. But in some ways that process, that articulation of the idea and why and how, makes us more solid going into the creation phase.

Yeah, as a performance artist, I'm really interested in what role you think performance plays in the art world today and how has it changed since you started making these pieces in the 90s.

Oh, that's a big question. Of course, I'm incredibly opinionated about performance art, done a disservice to the art form and to subsequent generations of performance artists by not focusing on technique, the realm of performance art. People have said, oh, it can't be taught, it's free form, it's separate from all the other performing art forms. I say no. There are tools within other art forms, both performative and sculptural, that help us better articulate our ideas. And why not use all of the tools available to us? Why not use architecture and opera and ballet and land-based sculpture? And there's a wealth of knowledge there and there's a history there. But by positioning performance art as somewhat ahistorical or so avant-garde, it can't be critically discussed. In many ways it's been difficult for the form to advance and a lot of people hate performance art and I think it's because it takes up their time. But there also hasn't been a lot of rigor in the field.

Yeah, I'm thinking about what you said about performance art being avant-garde, and that quote from Clement Greenberg when he's talking about the avant-garde and kitsch, and he says that the avant-garde has to be non-commercial. And I'm thinking as an artist whose work is primarily non-commercial. How do you and how have you supported yourself throughout the years?

Laurie and I were entirely self-supporting artists for 12 years. That was definitely the hardest thing I've ever done. There were times when we were $20,000 in debt to Visa and buying tampons was a struggle. I don't mean to toot my own horn, but we were touring all the time. We were touring five months of the year. We were among the most well-known performance artists in Canada. The most we made in a single year, after expenses, was just shy of $19,000 each.

So supporting oneself as an artist in Canada is very challenging, especially if you don't make anything that's saleable. We managed to survive by having a very multidisciplinary practice, so if we couldn't get funding to make a performance, we'd make a video If we had an opportunity to do an installation project or a book project. Instead, we taught workshops on how to survive as an artist, on performance art, on the use of props. We did a lot of work in universities and we curated as well and we wrote. So we reviewed other people's or mostly I did that kind of work reviewing other people's shows or critical writing chapters for books. I was a columnist in an online magazine for a while. I used to say pretty much anything for $50 and we're there.

To talk a little bit more about your work. One of my favorite pieces that you've made was Lesbian National Parks and Services, and I'd love to hear more about the evolution of this piece, but can you tell me about it?

Right now I'm sitting in my house, which is known as Homo Heaven, and a bunch of us bought it in the 90s, including Lori. Everybody else has since moved out and other people have moved in, but anyway, in the 90s, lori and I were sitting right behind me in front of that window and we were supposed to be doing a performance at the Banff Center for the Arts in the coming months. It was supposed to be a site-specific performance and we had this idea for video projection downtown and it was super academic and we hadn't even started making it because we weren't really into it at all. And Lori said I just want to dress up as a lesbian ranger and drive around and eat donuts. And we both went, and we both went, and we went and bought the base uniforms that same day and started designing the crests and patches. And again, that was the image we had, an image of lesbian forest rangers and a nostalgic and a lot of our work plays with nostalgia Yogi Bear style forest ranger, but labeled lesbian, lesbian, lesbian.

We didn't exactly know what we were going to say yet, but as soon as we put those uniforms on, we inhabited them and we knew we were serving and protecting the lesbian wilds. And then we started doing outreach to recruit. And then we because, of course, as homosexuals we'd been accused of recruitment forever so we thought, okay, let's go with that. And then we started researching the wilds and nature is super queer and gender diverse and it's okay. These lesbian rangers, they've got important things to tell people. This was in the 90s, this was before gay marriage, before our rights were enshrined legally, before queer people could adopt in Manitoba, people were not thinking about the queerness of nature at all at that time.

So we were really forging new ground, but as uniformed officials, which gave us respect, Can you talk a bit more about how creating art as a queer artist has changed, or even as a lesbian artist? How has that changed since you started making work?

It was interesting when we were lesbian rangers. We were never seen out of uniform, which meant when we went to the bank people would say, oh, what's that say on your hat? Or when we went to the post office they'd say what kind of ranger are you? Or we'd get in a cab and the cab driver would want to talk about what are you doing here? What you know? What force do you represent?

It made us be out all of the time and at that time there was really a society-wide assumption of heterosexuality, almost no matter how queer you looked Like. We were very queer-looking women, so that was interesting for us. It made us be out even in situations that would have been uncomfortable or where we would have just glossed over it. And that was the reality of the time, and also because we had many fewer legal rights, a different degree of risk. Now we thought, oh, naively. We thought, okay, we don't have to make queer work anymore, that chapter is done. But I don't know Now it's looking a little wobbly. The future for the rights of all sorts of non-conforming folks, absolutely.

To segue from that, one gay city from 1997 was shut down by. Can you tell me more about this piece and how it finally became actualized?

Yeah, it was shut down by the company that owns the bus shelter ads. So we created the piece because the mayor in Winnipeg at that time, susan Thompson, refused to declare Gay Pride Day an official day or recognize it in any way anyway. So we thought, huh, okay, we're just going to create a tourism campaign framing Winnipeg as homosexual paradise and we're going to use Winnipeg's tagline at the time, winnipeg one great city, and make it Winnipeg one gay city. So we did a photo shoot and we created the three ads and we were going to pay for the ad space and the company that owned the ad space said no, we won't put it up. And then we took it to the Canadian Advertising Standards Bureau and they said no, it will offend people, so it can't go up. So then we made postcards and we disseminated our tourism campaign that way through postcards. But it was always a shame to us that it never had its. I don't know its intended application.

Now, after Mayor Susan Thompson, we had Mayor Glenn Murray and he was the first gay mayor in North America and times had changed and we knew we could put them up then. But we didn't have the same point of putting them up Like we didn't want, because of course Glenn declared Gay Pride Day every day and we didn't want blowback to be blowback against him. We shelved that project until the School of Art Gallery approached us about finally installing them many years later, decades later. And one of the great things about seeing them finally installed and one of the reasons why we wanted to do the project is because the figures on the posters are almost life-size. So you're standing there waiting for the bus and you're standing beside someone who is labeled as queer in the ad campaign and there's a very human to human relationship there. And it's a lot harder to hate each other when we're in the same space, like when we can look each other in the eye or recognize each other's bodily reality as opposed to just the idea. I think hate is often abstract.

Ground has recently been broken for Thunderhead, the new LGBTQ2 plus monument in Ottawa. Can you tell me what this monument's for?

Yeah, I sure can.

It's an unknown part of Canadian history that Canadian government employees between the 1950s and the 1990s were investigated by the Canadian government to see if they were homosexual and if they were interrogated and often interrogated for days like really interrogation techniques that were abusive and then threatened, fired, demoted or their careers were stalled. So that is a horrible chapter of Canada's past. The folks that suffered under that system many of whom were women in the military and it often targeted women in traditionally male jobs eventually took the government of Canada to court and won a class action lawsuit. In the intervening years, many of the people who had been fired under what was called, or what is now called, the Purge had died, and that money their portion of the settlement was set aside to create a monument about the effect of state-sanctioned homophobia and queerphobia transphobia in Canada. There was a call for this national monument to be built that would both commemorate the harms of the past but also celebrate the queers of the future, and Laurie and I were part of the team that put in the winning design.

What inspired the final form of Thunderhead?

It's really difficult to come up with an icon or an image that represents the entire rainbow coalition, because our identities are very different within the 2SLGBTQIA plus acronym. So we started thinking about okay, what was the feeling of being queer when we were young? What was that like? And Laurie came up with the idea and started drawing the idea of the thundercloud, which is a very prairie thing. Like in the summer you'll have a clear blue sky and then suddenly an epic cloud will seemingly rise out of nowhere and blast down on you with rain. So she was drawing these clouds and the elder who we work with on the project, albert McLeod, said an offering has to be made to start this process. I'm out of town. You white folks do it so to the best of our ability, the rest of our team went to the forks and made an offering in the water of the forks and then sat outside because it was during covid and talked about the project, and lori showed everybody her drawings the thundercloud and they got very excited about it imagistically.

So then the following week we had a meeting with Albert and asked so is there meaning or significance around thunderclouds? And he said yes, that's where the thunderers or the thunderbirds lit, they bring rain and they restore order, they make things right. And we thought, okay, there's our image. We need something abstract enough that we can all gather around but that still embodies that sort of upswell of energy, that groundswell of passion, and that tries to make it right, that renews.

And then the architects brilliant though they are start working on how do we create a thundercloud in space and that's a hard thing to do because architecture uses straight lines mostly. And how do we make this beautiful, big, bulbous form that rises up? And I thought, okay, let's look at the ratio of width to height of a thundercloud. And they realized it was like a mason jar. So they had a mason jar on the desk and they filled it with bubble wrap to express the cloud.

And one of the interns at their office said what if, instead of making the cloud, we make the cylinder that contains the cloud? And then that really was the next leap and led to the idea of a monolithic form, a cylinder out of which clouds are breaking and, of course, the imprint of the cloud. Inside is clad with mirrored tiles, so they're like inside-out mirror balls, so they reflect every identity that goes into that space. We can all see ourselves there, and it also talks about the power of dance culture and club culture and how that was part of our revolution and continues to be Wonderful. I'm so excited. We've had some construction issues and nothing happened last year. Light hasn't been prepared yet, so we're looking at 2026 now.

So you mentioned earlier that you have a job now that's slowed down your collaboration process and you're working at Mentoring Artists for Women's Art. Can you tell me about this organization and what you do there?

Yes, yes, it is a feminist visual arts center dedicated to peer-based education and learning that serves women, non-minority and trans artists at all stages of their careers and helps them achieve their goals, the goals that they set for themselves. So I've been working there since 2008, but I first got involved with MAWA in 1990. And what are you doing there? I am co-executive director, along with Dana Kletke.

Yeah, and what does that involve on a day-to-day basis?

Oh, I write the grants and the newsletter and hire people. I write the grants and the newsletter and hire people, and Dana does the finances and makes sure we're crossing our T's and dot beading circle, making workshops, lectures, field trips it's a real wide range of stuff, yeah great.

How has the landscape for women's art changed since you started working with MAMA in the 1990s?

MAMA was founded in 1984 because women were not equal in the 1990s. Maua was founded in 1984 because women were not equal in the visual arts and the founders of MAUA thought that they could solve that in a couple of years and they thought the way we can do this is through mentorship. So each woman artist doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. There's an old boys club. It's not acknowledged, but men help each other. We're going to help women. Now.

When I tell people that even though there are more Canadian women artists than men artists, but that Canadian women artists earn about 70 cents on every dollar a Canadian male artist earns, folks are shocked. It hasn't moved a lot. There have been gains, there have been changes, definitely in terms of granting and, to some extent, exhibitions, but we continue to live in a patriarchy and visual art is no exception. So women are still expected to do the lion's share of domestic labor for free, of child care for free, of elder care for free, and that impacts our ability to invest in our art careers, impacts our ability to invest in our art careers. It's a society-wide problem and visual arts are a microcosm.

For instance, women artist solo shows happen about as often as men's artist solo shows. That men's artist solo shows show in bigger galleries with bigger budgets, bigger artist fees. Men and women, of course, sell work commercially, but men's work sells for a lot more money. Books are published about artists. I think it's something astounding like only 5% of them are about single women artists. And when you think of how many books you've seen in your lifetime Van Gogh, michelangelo, frank Stella yeah, there's still a lot of gaps.

We need feminist art now more than ever. And what ways do you think that feminist art can create change in society? How can it address these issues of patriarchy in the visual arts?

Feminist art reflects the experience of half or more of the population, so it does provide interesting perspectives or novel perspectives or honest human perspectives reflecting a huge hunk of humanity. It can challenge people because cord feminism is the idea that until we're all free, none of us are free of us are free. So ideally it advocates and it does the work of allyship for all sorts of people who are oppressed under the current system. Hopefully it contributes to positive change and equality period across the board for everybody.

Who are some feminist artists that inspire you as an artist? Who are some feminist?

artists that inspire you as an artist. I really like the video work of Deirdre Logue. There was a feminist performance group in Toronto that disbanded in the 00s the Clichettes, whose work I just loved when I was about 20, I interned with Meredith Monk in New York and she's a performance artist I've always really admired. Oh, there's so many. And artists from other disciplines too really inspire me, like I love the Mark Morris Dance Company and I love Winnipeg's Camerata Nova. I love art that comes in a lot of shapes and sizes.

Yeah, there's an upcoming auction at MoMA this April. Can you tell me more about it?

Yes, it's the 21st annual over-the-top art auction and cupcake party, and artists donated artworks We've got about 180 to auction by silent auction. People can come for free on Friday night, April 11th, to see the art. If you want a bid, buy a $10 ticket and then, Sunday, on April 13th, from 1 o'clock till 5 o'clock, All of the work gets auctioned off in different lots and again by silent auction, fueled by cupcakes which Mao supporters have baked. So they're pretty spectacular. They're really delicious. It's sugar-fueled fun. It's sugar-fueled fun and it features some very senior artists in Winnipeg and some very emerging artists hung side by side. It's an opportunity to get real local art on your walls. Get rid of those posters. That time has come and gone. Time to invest in art. Bidding starts at $60, so it's very affordable.

Yeah, great, and back to you what have been some career highlights for you.

I knew you were going to ask this and I phoned Lori and asked her that and we agreed just surviving as artists and still making art. That's a highlight for us that we're still here, we're still making, we've still got things to say. Our collaboration has weathered a lot and we still are really close and don't want to make work alone. There's times as a performer when you're breathing and the audience is breathing and you're not flubbing and you're just in that moment but you're also watching yourself in that moment. Those are rare, like maybe one out of 10 performances.

Sometimes I've got that feeling and sometimes we've made what I would consider and Laurie would consider good work and we sit back and we look at it and we go yeah, that's pretty good. And sometimes we get to share it with an audience and see an audience respond and that's lovely and I guess maybe finally, sometimes people come up to us and say I saw your video on Much Music when I was a kid in Whitehorse and I didn't know any homosexuals and it meant a lot to me. Or I learned about your practice when I was in university and it changed the way I thought of art and that means a lot to us too.

What have been some harder moments and how did you overcome them?

Poverty- that's been hard. Like here I am sitting in this house, we had to borrow from Laurie's dad to get it at the beginning and at a certain point I was the one in charge of paying him back and at a certain point I just had to stop paying him back because we couldn't do it. I still feel guilt over that. Do it. I still feel guilt over that.

Yeah, it's, there's a precarity about it that wears on you. Yeah, what is some advice that you'd have for someone looking to become an artist?

Do it, even after talking about the hardness. I'd say for sure, do it Like what a wonderful way to live, because you get to go into the studio and think what do I want to say today, what do I want to make today, what catches my eye and my mind and my heart, what's important to me and my mind and my heart, what's important to me? So, yeah, I think it's a wonderful life choice. Yeah, maybe not the best career choice, but you'll get through it. I often tell young artists change your name to something really catchy so people remember you. Nobody's ever done it, but I think it would have Shauna Dempsey and Lorimer Land's a bit of a mouthful, and if we'd been fluffy and squirt, maybe it would have been easier. I don't know. I would also say diversify your practice and make money using all the skills you have.

So I used to write grants for organizations. I used to write grants for other artists, as I said before, curation workshops. I remember one year I gave art tours to women from up north. You're going to have to hustle. I guess that's what I'm saying. It's interesting I've given speeches about the history of radio. Not that I knew anything about radio, but somebody was willing to pay me to do it. So I had to research it so I could do it. So rise to the occasion and you'll learn things. Yeah, what are you?

working on right now? What's making you excited to get to the occasion and you'll learn things. Yeah, what are you working on right now? What's making you excited to get to the studio and create work?

We just finished the Fruit Machine, a space opera, which is a video that is playing at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights until December 2025. And that was a commission, which was great because we got to spend a lot of time really focused on it. So we just finished that. The show opened in January, but still we've been editing, doing little tweaks just to make it a little bit better, and I think we just did the final tweak last week and now we're flailing around figuring out what's next.

Nice, Shawna. Thank you so much for your time today. It's been so amazing to meet you and learn more about your work.

Thanks so much for having me.