Pleasure Dome: The Broken Shape
Jennet Thomas in Person
Saturday, September 18, 20h pm, $8/5 members + students
CineCycle, 129 Spadina Ave. down the lane, Toronto

Jennet Thomas’s work emerged from the anarchistic, experimental culture of London’s underground film and live art club scene in the 1990’s, where she was a co-founder of the Exploding Cinema Collective. It now screens extensively in international film festivals and galleries. Her work began as hybrid spoken word performance and projections for a live audience, it now combines a variety of filmic languages, ranging from soap opera to experimental and underground filmmaking, from sci-fi to musicals. “I like to explore unexpected processes of sense-making. My narratives are often fractured, absurdist–generated via dream-logic and increasingly experimental methodologies, inspired by odd corners of British culture, driven by the urge to tell.”

“Jennet Thomas is a zealous god-devil, who constructs bizarre narrative worlds in which we can recognize the pull of gravity, the attraction of belief or the logic of causality, but these forces are somehow reconfigured to describe a place that is way off the map of normality, perhaps with one foot in the realm of the paranormal. And yet Thomas suggests the near-feasibility of the absurd by expressing messages from alternative dimensions, bizarre social codes and accounts of recent cultural history through everyday means. Sausages, sporting trophies, lengths of string and packages sent through the post are the tools with which normal looking people conduct their peculiar activities in community halls, supermarket car parks, back gardens and nicely kept living rooms. The bizarre, Thomas seems to suggest, is a close relative of the ordinary.”