VTape

When Jimmy leaves his reservation for the lures of city life, he finds himself confronted with a future he could never have imagined.

Ooooo Canada is a 30-minute edited version presenting highlights from the five-hour live webcast on February 13,2010. Ooooo Canada was the first in a series of five site-specific projects presented during the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter games in Vancouver. The broadcast was co-hosted by Skeena Reece and Paul Wong. It is an alternative critique of corporate, mass, pop and nationalist culture in the 21st century. Reece and Wong provide illuminating, personal, political, aboriginal, and comedic perspectives.

Gladys Lou hurls home-made images of herself against a swift torrent of loading files, digital code and the general barrage of representational media imagery saturating daily life online. The features of faces and bodies merge and split apart, ceaselessly. Human identity is caught and fixed in normative binary categories, but the ‘glitch’ strategies of artists can struggle against the system, creating new notions of rhizomatic selfhood.

Rooted in tradition, adoption is a reality that all Inuit families have experienced. In Inuit culture, adopting a child from a relative, friend or acquaintance is a common practice. Marie-Hélène Cousineau, the adoptive mother of Alexandre Apak, lived in Igloolik, a small island southwest of Baffin Island in the Arctic, for many years. This documentary, which she directed in collaboration with Mary Kunuk (an old friend and colleague), explores Inuit family relations through the personal histories of women who have experienced adoption in one way or another. In a parallel thread, the film documents the creation of an intricate felt wall-hanging that depicts key moments from their lives. All skilled seamstresses, these women of Igloolik use fabric to draw, cut, and embroider their personal life stories – an intimate portrait of family ties and a vibrant illustration of the role adoption has always played in Inuit culture

An experimental documentary on the activist interventions at the Fifth International Conference on AIDS in Montreal, in June 1989. While making fun of television news conventions, the tape prioritizes the voices of grassroots AIDS educators and People with AIDS activists from Trinidad, Thailand, South Africa, Australia, the United States, and Canada. Demonstrations and interventions by AIDS activists from Montreal, Toronto, and the United States take centre stage, literally.

Why Are You Making All That Noise? is a story of contemporaries who in 1965 formed the Nihilist Spasm Band. Their story encompasses thirty five years of art and performance. Don Alexander introduces a video style that reflects the band's abandon of the disciplines of time and genre.

Blending Milk and Water: Sex in the New World is a cross-cultural, intergenerational, documentary about the diverse views of sex from twenty-two people. The recollections, fears and opinions of young people, professionals, healthworkers, educators, artists, community activists, and people living with AIDS are mixed.

So Are You is a 25 minute videotape about the difficulties of assuming ones self-identity. Identity is shaped and informed by the dominant culture, often producing stereotypes that are reinforced by the media. Through such structures racist behaviour is learned and condoned. So Are You uses unconventional structures and casting to criticize stereotypes. The eighteen cast members include Natives, Asians, Blacks and Whites. Paul Wong continues to explore the idea of self-identity by investigating gender boundaries through the inclusion of a set of identical male twins and two female impersonators who portray twins and two female impersonators who portray twins in the cast. The video uses recognizable television and cinematic framing devices to highlight the idea of the construction and dissemination of stereotypes through the broadcast news, cinema verite, interviews, etc. Comprised of short scenes, So Are You is faced paced and entertaining.

The video tape, Agora, focuses on the market place (as a microcosm of the larger society) seen through the eyes of a young, gay man suffering from both the neurosis described above, and the oppressive circumstances of small town life in the American Midwest. The tape opens with an idyllic representation of the Midwest and shifts into an expressive exploration of experiences within the narrow confines of a Midwestern moral code. The melodrama follows five main characters who find themselves together in a small motel; Crab, an agoraphobe, is employed as a clerk in the motel and lives at home with his family; Swallow, a recently escaped con and his lover, Jack; Katch, a woman dishonorably discharged from the military and her lover, Joy. The market place is a central focus for all the main charaters; as a place of potential employment, a site of crisis in representation, the public arena where the status quo is policed and, ultimately, a closed barrier whereby the "norm" is protected.