Behind the Lens: Feminist-Inspired Work of Wyn Geleynse Kasia Knap I would like to think of myself as a starting feminist artist. It was only towards the end of the last school year that I started finding my niche in art, and ever since I’ve taken it upon myself to educate myself on the history of feminist art, particularly video. The dominant majority of artists that have sparked my interest or influenced my train of thinking have been female. I never really delved into the realm of male artists who were influenced by the second-wave feminist movement, nor admittedly had I ever considered them. This changed when I met Wyn Geleynse. Wyn Geleynse is well-known in the international art scene. A London-based multimedia artist, his works have been shown in Rotterdam, Paris, Sao Paulo, and in Calgary for the XV Winter Olympics. Regarded as a pioneer in intermedia artistic practices, his film and video projection installation works frequently combine the temporal quality of these mediums with the physicality of subjective memorabilia. It was November during the first snowfall when I met the man behind the glass projections at his studio. Nestled away within a redbrick commercial building amongst the studios of other Londonbased artists, Geleynse’s studio was what you could imagine the workspace of a multimedia artist to be. Having recently returned to drawing, tacked to one of his walls were several gestural drawings in progress; another side of the room played host to a human-sized folder of over a year’s worth of such drawings. Occupying the large desk were two massive computers, the walls surrounding it were covered with a collection of images, including a map of “Maire de Montreal.” A microwave and coffee making station stood not far away. In the centre of the room an assembled 3D model truck sat atop an assembled worktable- one of many toy trucks that were part of a current satirical project Geleynse was working on. His studio space reflected his preference of keeping himself immersed in several different projects at all times, never wishing to restrict himself to one project. After he offered coffee, we began to discuss his practice. I was asked by the editor-in-chief to conduct the interview because Geleynse was mainly known for film and video, mediums I have a keen interest in. Beyond this general correlation of his work and mine, I wasn’t anticipating there to be much else that I could relate to. This changed when I realized I could relate to everything he was trying to say except from a different gender perspective. Second-wave feminism burgeoned a completely new and radical genre within visual representation in the 1970s. Female artists revolted against the established patriarchal systems in place by addressing issues of their sexuality through a writing of the body. Such artists revolutionized the world of video and performance art. They instigated female liberation while simultaneously challenging standardized notions of what constituted a woman, and inadvertently what constituted gender in general. It was during this time that Wyn Geleynse had thrown in the towel with painting and given up on art as a whole. 30
/ pulp / Arts Magazine