this filthy fuckin’ city is a multimedia glitch-art ode to my beloved city of Toronto, blurring the boundaries between lamentation and celebration in a passionate, parodical pastiche. Each entry depicts a unique physical space — exploring iconic landmarks as thoroughly as intimate neighbourhood details — mediated through technological lenses, and grounded in a tradition of Canadian print, video and literary media. Each original photo was shot as found, with no posing or props involved. All images were shot on an iPhone 4S and edited on an iPhone 6.
Intentional enhancement and degradation are both essential to my practice of rendering the vision of memory in tandem with the truth of experience — not to mention various topographies of imagination! To this aim, this filthy fuckin’ city luxuriates in the use of glitch as a means to integrate impressionist elements into an otherwise representational genre. When the editing is complete, each photographic moment has become stratified — layered with historical allusions, personal associations, and a milieu of sensory impressions not otherwise captured by the lens — a pluralist reading of an equally pluralist subject.
An Icon: Layered images of the CN Tower lit up red and white for Canada Day, and my Toronto-inspired haiku suite “T(ri).O.” (published by carte blanche in June 2015).
Curbside Lucite: Overlapping angles of Lucite platform high heels found posed coquettishly by a dumpster in Church-Wellesley Village.
First Edition: Knowledge as revered, as treasured, as cloistered, as lost. Photographs of Ayerego Books, 1031 St. Clair West, Toronto.
Goody-Goody: Authenticity. Gentrification. “Alternative fashion.” High-end boutiques. Consumption. Displacement. Repression. Shot at Osgoode Station.
In Bloom: An early summer stroll through toilet alley, as the bowls are coming into bloom. Shot at Al Sparrow Lane.
Like, Irony: Layers of travelling carnival rides, and a critique of “ironic” bigotry. Shot at Christie Pits Park.
OUTTATIME: Shot near the Royal Ontario Museum, during the 2013 St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Get Schwifty!
RASIQRA REVULVA is a Toronto-based writer, multi-media artist, editor, musician and performer. She is a founding member of the synth-punk/electro/glitch/industrial music and visual art collective The Databats. In 2010, she was awarded an honourable mention for the Judith Eve Gewurtz Memorial Award for poetry; in 2014, she was named a runner-up in the First Annual Jane Lumley Prize; and in 2015, she was named a finalist in untethered’s First Poetry Contest; as well as awarded an emerging writers mentorship through Diaspora Dialogues. Her work has most recently been published in the anthology (AFTER)life: Poems and Stories of the Dead, carte blanche, The Pickled Body and The Puritan. Her debut chapbook, Cephalopography, is pending publication by words(on)pages in autumn.
