Lisa Steele + Kim Tomczak

Short Life, Long Nights, Keep Dreaming:
Recent Photo and Video Works

The exhibition runs from November 13 to December 13, 2008
The gallery is open from Tuesday to Saturday from noon to 5:00 p.m.

Opening on Saturday, November 15 at 3 p.m., in the presence of the artists

The work of Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak examines the relationship of the body, intimate and public, towards occidental contemporary society. Through the years, the artists have developed a new genre of documentary, aiming at counteracting the statistical data generally collected about diverse social phenomenona by adopting a more sensitive approach, never normative, of the individual facing life in society. By favouring an approach that sets forth rather than holds back, engaged but without prefabricated answers, the artists inscribe a history of individuality within the larger history of collectivity.

The works presented in this exhibition pursue this research by studying, with teenagers, the conflicts and sometimes the disconnections, between personal choices and social life. … bump in the night is composed of large scale photographs showing adolescents photographed from the back, to whom the artists asked a series of questions, focusing more on the adolescents’ fears than on their ambitions – describe a recent nightmare, a striking event that happened at school, reveal what scares them the most. Their responses, inscribed on the image itself, are disturbing and reveal a deep malaise as well as an exceptional solitude.

To this extremely moving work are added three video works, Free Speech, Practicing Death and Falling Up, which demonstrate the very personal nature of the artists’ approach as well as the commitment of their social commentary. The first video combines scenes from the natural world with political slogans as the two others, more poetic, probe the modern state of the social body by evoking love, faith and death.

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak have worked exclusively in collaboration since 1983, producing videotapes, performances and photo/text works. Their work has been exhibited in numerous venues and major festivals, across Canada and abroad. In 1996, their work The Blood Records: written and annotated, received a world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They received numerous grants and awards, including the Bell Canada Award in Video Art, the Peter Herndorff Award for Media Arts through the Toronto Arts Awards, and in 2005, The Governor General’s Award for lifetime achievement in Visual and Media Arts. They are co-founders of Vtape, a Toronto Media Arts centre, and they teach at the University of Toronto, where Lisa Steele is the Associate Chair of the Department of Art. In 2007-2008, they were invited guests at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. Recent projects include two large commissions for public art in Toronto, one of which consists in 31 short portraits of Torontonians for the large outdoor advertising board at Toronto Life Square.

Dazibao thanks the artists for their generous collaboration, as well as its members for their support. Dazibao receives financial assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Conseil des arts de Montréal. Dazibao is a member of the Regroupement des centres d’artistes autogérés du Québec.