Dragu cleans the steps of the Ontario Legislature short weeks after a bloody demonstration. She and her Artist Friends create a walk’n’ roll PARADE from Queen’s Park Legislative Buildings past Art Gallery of Ontario and through the parks and streets of Toronto all the while cleaning cleaning cleaning. See the book and DVD “The Living Art of Margaret Dragu”, edited by Paul Couillard, published by FADO.
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Nuestra Senora del Pan executes durational performance pieces employing time, yeast, sugar, flour, water, oil, fire and sweat. Nuestra Senora del Pan celebrates the peasant and the domestic.
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“Mature but not old; Lady Justice aka Lady J and sometimes just La Dragu is without question the world’s most ubiquitous artist model! Formerly called Justita, and earlier Themis, Dike & Ma’at, she is seen in paintings, sculptures, friezes around the world, & as chachkas on E-Bay.”
The persona of Lady Justice allows me to explore sex and representation, sexuality in time of war, transgressed/transgendered body, public/private obsession with celebrity, symbols/symbolism, fata morgana/simulacrum, & notions of vengeance/bearing witness. It is the act of BEARING WITNESS that is central to my work as Lady Justice.
My alter ego surfaced like a phoenix during the 2006 NAC performance, St. Catharines, Ontario. I spent 3 weeks on-line soliciting participants to go to bed with me (and my cameraperson). We videotaped individuals & couples talking with Lady Justice about sex/intimacy. These were projected during a ritual exhaustion dance whereby Lady Justice’s blindfold fell to reveal a weeping goddess. The weeping Lady Justice holding her Scales & Sword guided a candlelit parade through the dark night time streets of St. Catharines.
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descriptions of five early VERB WOMAN performances beginning with
VERB WOMAN: mending
I believe mending is a form of healing. Repairing a hem can be the first step to mending a broken heart. VERB WOMAN began visiting galleries, clinics and social places in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to sew sagging skirt hems, patch holes in torn sleeves, and replace missing buttons on shirts. For each “mending-aktion”, I sew a button on my own black clothes. An on-going project, my goal is to create a button-covered black suit similar to London Pearlies.