People Like Us
The Gossip of Colin Campbell
- Publisher
- Oakville Galleries
- Initial publish date
- Apr 2012
- Category
- General
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781894707282
- Publish Date
- Apr 2012
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Description
Pioneering Canadian artist Colin Campbell used video as a flexible and accessible medium for storytelling. Ironic, irreverent and ambiguous, and always attuned to the playful shifting of genders and desires, Campbell's tapes chart how identity is performed and circulated in the social world. The characters he created and inhabited—and those he coaxed out of his collaborators—confide secrets and craft elaborate and compelling mythologies around themselves. This feedback loop opened up his art practice to those of his closest kin—among them John Greyson, Lisa Steele, George Hawken, Johanna Householder, Tanya Mars, Rodney Werden, Margaret Moores and Almerinda Travassos –—as well as to his many students and protégés, forging community in the developing Toronto art scene in the seventies and eighties. The exhibition People Like Us: The Gossip of Colin Campbell surveyed the artist's illustrious video career from early tapes like True/False (1972) to his final work, Que Sera Sera (2001), and was the first major exhibition of his work since his death in 2001. The full-colour, bilingual exhibition catalogue features essays by exhibition curator Jon Davies and artist John Greyson, which provide new, insightful scholarship on Campbell's life and work.
About the authors
Jon Davies is a writer and curator based in Toronto. His writing has appeared in C Magazine, Canadian Art, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Animation Journal, Cinema Scope, Xtra! and many other publications. He has also contributed book chapters on filmmaker Todd Haynes and artists Candice Breitz, Luis Jacob, Ryan Trecartin, and Daniel Barrow. He has curated numerous screenings for the artists` film and video exhibitor Pleasure Dome, and for various venues in Toronto from Gallery TPW and Vtape to the Images Festival and Inside Out, as well as internationally. He most recently curated the traveling retrospective `People Like Us: The Gossip of Colin Campbell` for the Oakville Galleries, Ontario. He is currently Assistant Curator of Public Programs at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.
