Artwork

With Hazel Meyer I create exhibitions, videos, and performances related to queer archives and media histories. Our next project is They, Olympia, a video about the 1990 Vancouver Gay Games. Below are recent and past projects.

The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us (2022)

Produced through VIVO Media Arts Centre and Archive/Counter-Archive, this mail-art project enlivens Vancouver’s histories of porn, feminism, and censorship. More information.

Photograph of a brochure from a 1980s feminist film screening with a photograph of two queer people reading a newspaper about lesbian porn paperclipped to it
Brochure from Visual Evidence screening and workshop series (1987) and photograph of Elaine Miller, Vanessa Kwan, and Prune (2022).

How to Build a Ruin (2020-22)

A performance developed for zoom, during the pandemic lockdowns, that takes up thinking and feeling about ruins in relation to sexuality. When is a ruin ruined and for whom? How can we think about ruins alongside other erotic modalities, like “to be ruined.” To poke at these questions, the performance follows a winding path: from the Spomeniks of the former Yugoslavia, to the moss, rot, and fecundity of Vancouver, a city that is always wet, to speculation about what Minnie Mouse has been doing in Toon Town since Disneyland’s COVID closure. Featuring guest appearances by Meyer’s mother, Cvjetka, and Minnie Mouse. The performance was redeveloped for Emilia-Amalia in 2020, and performed again for Eastern Edge (Nfld) in 2022.

Watch documentation here:

Slumberparty, 2018 (2018)

Slumberparty 2018 is a remake of a 1984 Super 8 film called Slumberparty made by the Positive Pornographers, a mostly queer collective of Toronto-based artists, activists and sex-workers. Slumberparty screened twice in public in 1984 then disappeared until 2016, when the only reel was recovered and digitized. The Positive Pornographers promised each other never to show the film again without everyone’s permission. Using audio-description and obscured editing techniques, Slumberparty 2018 provides access to Slumberparty while preserving the anonymity of its makers. Rethinking what it means to “access” film and video histories, the video draws connections between the feminist “porn wars” of the 1980s, and current feminist debates about the ethics of digitizing sexual imagery in archives.

The video has screened at Glasgow International Art Biennial, SCT- 2018. 62nd BFI London Film Festival, UK- 2018. RetroFlex Queer Films Festival, Eastern Edge, Newfoundland, CA- 2019. Artists’ Moving Image Festival, Tramway & LUX Scotland, SCT- 2019. Porn Film Festival Berlin, DE- 2019. Queer Arts Festival, Vancouver, CA- 2020. Available for rental or purchase through the Canadian Filmmaker’s Distribution Centre.

Screen capture from Slumberparty 2018, Video, Canada, 25:33 mins

Tape Condition: degraded (2016)

An exhibition at Toronto’s ArQuives accompanied by a publication that address the state of porn and other representations of sexuality on VHS tape in queer community archives. Tape condition: degraded put a working digital transfer station situated in a willfully timeless environment to re-create the ArQuives of the 80’s, but with contemporary technologies at play. This aesthetic evokes the contentious history of porn and censorship in Canada and at this archives, but with reference to the present; the CLGA was often raided by Toronto police during the 1980s for housing “illicit” materials, while the pressures of liberalism and “normal” aspirations for LGBTQ politics today challenge the archives’ longstanding commitment to preserving sexual representations.

Read more about the exhibition in Gay Liberation, Sex Dungeons, Gossip, and What We Want in Art by Amy Fung for Canadian Art.

Installation shot of Tape Condition: degraded. Video in foreground is Landscape of Infinities by Aidan Cowling.

The Digital Afterlives of Queer Porn Archives (2016-18)

A series of evolving performance-lectures generated out of Tape Condition: degraded. Presented at Western Front Society, Vancouver, BC (2018), Glasgow International Art Biennial, SCT (2018), Grenfell Art Gallery, Memorial University, Corner Brook, NL (2018), Toronto Reference Library, Toronto ON (2017), Buddies in Bad Times theatre, Toronto, ON (2016).