Career
An important pioneer of video art in Canada since the early 1970s, [3] Steele has shown internationally at the Venice Biennale (1980), the Kunsthalle Basel, the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the National Gallery of Canada, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), 49th Parallel Videoseries, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Long Beach Museum. She is a founding director of Vtape in Toronto, a national information and distribution service for independent video and a founding publisher and editor of FUSE Magazine .
Early work
Steele's best known early work Birthday Suit – with scars and defects (1974) is a thirteen-minute black and white video tape where she "presents her naked body to the unblinking gaze of the camera". The tape itself is characterized by common practices of early video art, unedited with a static shot. [4] Steele turns the camera on, walks to the end of the room/set and removes her clothing. She approaches the camera and begins to examine the various scars she's accumulated over her life up to that point. The work represents what critic Dot Tuer indicates is "an offering to the technological gaze [which] downplays the representation of the body as a gendered subject," [5] and as film historian Catherine Russell points out, the work is a "counter-image to the emergent critique of the female body in narrative cinema." [4] Steele's description of the work:
On the occasion of my 27th birthday I decided to do a tape that chronicled my passage through time. I have always been clumsy, tripping, dropping, falling with alarming regularity. This tape accepts the extent of the consequences. [6]
Birthday Suit – with scars and defects was included in a notable touring exhibition in 1989–1990 titled Rebel Girls: A Survey of Canadian Feminist Videotapes 1974-1988.
A Very Personal Story (1974) is a videotape which acts as a metaphor to Steele's childhood experience of discovering her mother's dead body at the age of 15. [7] The Globe and Mail described "A Very Personal Story" as an "exquisitely intimate work, recounting the day of her loss." [8]
The Ballad of Dan Peoples (1976) is a videotape in which Steele holds a photograph of an old man while sitting upon a stool. She then narrates stories of her grandfather's rural childhood in his voice, taking on his characteristics and personality. Her grandfather's memories and identity reveal parts of her own identity; the closing credits acknowledge her grandfather's recent move to a home for the aged also speaks to the familial and self-reflective conditions which inspired this work. [9] [10]
In 1976, Steele employed fellow video artist Colin Campbell to create the four-part drama The Scientist Tapes, [11] which overlays cultural anxieties about scientific change with details about their long distance desire for one another. The video series ends with the two characters drifting off into space, finally together. [12]
Between 1974 and 1986, Steele developed character-based micro-dramas, drawing from her experiences working at the Toronto women and children's shelter Interval House. In The Damages (1977), Makin' Strange (1978), Talking Tongues (1982) and The Gloria Tapes, Steele inhabits the characters of Mrs. Pauly, Beatrice Small, and Gloria. [13]
Steele and Tomczak
Since the early 1980s Steele has worked exclusively in collaboration with Kim Tomczak. [14] Their individual and collaborative work was the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1989–90. In 1993, Steele and Tomczak were recognized with two awards: the Bell Canada Award for excellence in the field of Canadian video art and a Toronto Arts Award (the Peter Herndorf Media Arts Award). In 1996, their work The Blood Records: written and annotated, received a world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Their installation work We're Getting Younger All the Time has been installed in several locations in England, in Venice and was at the Centre d'art Contemporain in Basse-Normandie in November 2002. In 2005, Steele and Tomczak won the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. [15] In 2009, Steele and Tomczak were recognized with honorary doctorate degrees from the University of British Columbia (Okanagan) [16] In 2016, Wanda Nanibush, a new curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario referred to Steele as an ongoing significant contributor to the Toronto new media scene. [17] Steele is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. [18]
Kim Ondaatje is a Canadian painter, photographer, and documentary filmmaker.
Colin Campbell (1942–2001) was a Canadian video artist.
Kim Tomczak is a Canadian artist known for his work in performance art, photography and video art. Born in Victoria, British Columbia in 1952, he graduated from the Vancouver School of Art in 1975. Tomczak has collaborated exclusively with his partner Lisa Steele since the early 1980s.
Vtape is a Canadian artist-run centre located in Toronto, Ontario. It is Canada's largest distributor of video art, and the world's largest distributor of Indigenous and First People's film and video. The organization is run as a not for profit and is known for video art distribution, media preservation, exhibition programming, and training programs. Vtape's collection features more than 1000 artists and consists of conceptual art videos, video art installation, performance-based works, and social issue documentaries. All artists distributed by Vtape maintain full ownership of their work, and the organization does not require exclusive distribution rights. This model is seen in other Canadian video art distribution organizations Video In Video Out and Videopool.
"Paul Wong is a Canadian multimedia artist. An award-winning artist, curator, and organizer of public interventions since the mid-1970s, Wong is known for his engagement with issues of race, sex, and death. His work varies from conceptual performances to narratives, meshing video, photography, installation, and performance with Chinese-Canadian cultural perspectives".
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Tanya Mars is a performance and video artist based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Jamelie Hassan is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist, lecturer, writer and independent curator.
Deanna Bowen is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes films, video installations, performances, drawing, sculpture and photography. Her work addresses issues of trauma and memory through an investigation of personal and official histories related to American slavery, migration, the Civil Rights Movement and the Ku Klux Klan. Bowen is a dual citizen of the US and Canada. She lives and works in Montreal.
Rehab Nazzal is a Palestinian-born multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Rebel Girls: A Survey of Canadian Feminist Videotapes 1974–1988 was an exhibition curated by Susan Ditta at the National Gallery of Canada that ran from 14 February 1989 to 21 May 1989 as part of the Video & Film by Artists Series.
Peggy Gale is an independent Canadian curator, writer, and editor. Gale studied Art History and received her Honours Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History from the University of Toronto in 1967. Gale has published extensively on time-based works by contemporary artists in numerous magazines and exhibition catalogues. She was editor of Artists Talk 1969-1977, from The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (2004) and in 2006, she was awarded the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. Gale was the co-curator for Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection in 2012 and later for the Biennale de Montréal 2014, L’avenir , at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Gale is a member of IKT, AICA, The Writers' Union of Canada, and has been a contributing editor of Canadian Art since 1986.
Marusya Bociurkiw is a Canadian born, Ukrainian film-maker, writer, scholar, and activist. She has published six books, including a novel, poetry collection, short story collection, and a memoir. Her narrative and critical writing have been published in a variety of journals and collections. Bociurkiw has also directed and co-directed ten films and videos which have been screened at film festivals on several continents. Her work appears in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the National Archives of Canada, and many university libraries. She founded or co-founded the media organizations Emma Productions, Winds of Change Productions, and The Studio for Media Activism & Critical Thought. She currently lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada where she is an associate professor in the RTA School of Media Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University. She teaches courses on social justice media, activist media production, and gender/race/queer theories of time-based and digital media. She is also Director of The Studio for Media Activism & Critical Thought at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Birthday Suit – with scars and defects (1974) is a thirteen-minute black and white video art tape by Canadian artist Lisa Steele. It is her best known early work and depicts Steele "present[ing] her naked body to the unblinking gaze of the camera".
Single-channel video is a video art work using a single electronic source, presented and exhibited from one playback device. Electronic sources can be any format of video tape, DVDs or computer-generated moving images utilizing the applicable playback device and exhibited using a television monitor, projection or other screen-based device. Historically, video art was limited to unedited video tape footage displayed on a television monitor in a gallery and was conceptually contrasted with both broadcast television and film projections in theatres. As technology advanced, the ability to edit and display video art provided more variations and multi-channel video works became possible as did multi-channel and multi-layered video installations. However, single-channel video works continue to be produced for a variety of aesthetic and conceptual reasons and the term usually now refers to a single image on a monitor or projection, regardless of image source or production.
Lorna Boschman (1955) is a Canadian Queer media artist, film maker, curator, educator, editor, and camera operator working with themes such as sexual identity, body image, social justice, (dis)ability, cancer, abuse, health, and self-advocacy.
Elizabeth Vander Zaag is a Canadian media artist, writer, and entrepreneur who has been working in video and computer arts since the 1970s. She is based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Zainub Verjee DFA LL. D. DFA DFA is a Kenya-born Canadian video artist, curator, writer, arts administrator and public intellectual. She began her career in the Vancouver arts community of the 1970s, which was steeped in interdisciplinary, intermedia, and intercultural practices. Having made her mark as an emerging artist, she shifted the emphasis of her work to curatorial, administrative and policy arenas. Applying the insight, creativity and criticality of an artist, she has brought “institutional critique” into the workings of the institution itself. Deeply engaged with the UK’s British Black Arts, Tactical Video Movement, Third Cinema and the post-Bandung Conference decolonization, Verjee has been embedded in the history of women’s labour in British Columbia. In February 2020 she was awarded the 2020 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts for “outstanding contribution to the arts”. In 2021 she was conferred an honorary doctorate by the OCAD University recognizing her outstanding contribution to arts, racial and gender equity She was elected as a Senior Fellow of the Massey College at University of Toronto in the fall of 2021. Earlier she was appointed as McLaughlin College Fellow at the York University. In 2022 she was conferred Doctor of Fine Arts, honoris causa, by Nova Scotia College of Art and Design NSCAD University, Halifax She was the recipient of the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts given by Simon Fraser University, Burnaby in the Spring Convocation of 2023.Her contribution to the pioneering prison theatre program in Canada and for integral role in the formation of the British Columbia Arts Council was recognized by University of Victoria by conferring her with an honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts in Spring Convocation in 2023.
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