Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak have worked in collaboration since 1983, producing videotapes, performances, photographs, films and installations. They are the co-founders of the media arts and distribution centre Vtape and currently teach in the Visual Studies programme at the University of Toronto.

Video Program by Lisa Steele & Kim Tomczak


DESERTED STREETS AT MIDDAY.
UNREST, NOT YET VISIBLE.

A: “In the city, a reflection. In the forest, a sound”
B: “What about the desert?”
A: “You don’t want to go to the desert.”

David Mamet, Spartan, 2004

The post-millennial body is stressed; likewise the spirit. Psychically shot, the chassis just hanging together over the wheezing engine, our ship of state is looking to make it to the next way station. Things will get better. They have to.

Every era has its excesses. Currently we are emitting fear and religion at toxic levels. Even the faint frivolities provided by reality television are beginning to rattle like old bones in last year’s anatomy class. Cold comforts indeed. At least we can laugh. Ha, Ha.

Of course, in Canada, we can blame it all on America. After all they have been drinking at the well of bathos for nigh onto 3 years now, turning the genuine sense of catastrophic loss felt quite universally into a nationalistic wallow that grows rancid as old butter left in the sun. Sharp-smelling and off-putting.

While this blame-it-on-them attitude may be a comforting anodyne, the relief is fleeting. We’re not immune. It’s seeping across the border like mold spores on a damp dog. And then there’s the realpolitik of their current federal election where the only hope for a Baby Bush defeat features John Edwards hawking hope like a futures trader on the commodities floor and John Kerry steaming up the Potomic with his band of merry pranksters (a.k.a. war buddies), all swaddled so tightly in the flag it’s likely suffocating any progressive thought out of the American mind. (Didn’t JK actually protest the Vietnam War?…oh well, whatever…)
We fear. Even in Canada, we fear. America’s handcart may be headed so resolutely towards the Stygian future that we will be powerless to disengage ourselves.

The works in DESERTED STREETS AT MIDDAY…are not so much cohesive and thematic as they are visceral. Visually intense, these 8 tapes speak to the psychological desert that is present at a subcellular level within our current climate. A recent exhibition of Turner, Whistler and Monet at the Art Gallery of Ontario suggested that pollution and industrialization – ever-present in Western Europe during the latter part of the 19th century – exerted a powerful visual effect on these 3 painters. The works exhibited eloquently supported this assertion. In canvas after canvas, murky skies, beautifully rendered by master colorists, attest to the heavy air surrounding each as he set his easel up to paint. The exhibition underlined the importance of locating an artist within her or his environment, in order to interpret the works produced. Artists live in the world, walk the streets, breath the air.

This group of video works rumbles with disoriented energy and seethes with visual violence – never explicit, always embedded, and lying harmless until some key unlocks the meaning. Menace lurks in DESERTED STREETS AT MIDDAY…as each work reveals the unreliable nature of time itself – as only time-based works can. These artists attest to the basic law that all must be risked to achieve a full report. No question is irrelevant.

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak