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Flaming Creatures: New Tendencies in Canadian Video

Steve Reinke. Seventeen Descriptions (still) 1996.

Curator Gary Kibbins for Agnes Etherington Art Centre

A program of 17 tapes by American and Canadian artists, the exhibition links contemporary critical poetics to Jack Smith's outrageous film Flaming Creatures, made in 1962. The artists' ability to "flaunt a precarious mode of being" by means of experimental strategies is the theme uniting the six hour-long programs. Kibbins has chosen videos whose resistant politics he describes as "experimental propaganda ... as self-confident as it is insouciant. The cause, generally held, is the right to multiply sexualities, practices and ways of living.... In that, experimental propaganda helps sustain what remains of the utopian dimension of video."

Several of the artists (Joyan Saunders, David Clark, Yudi Sewraj, Steve Reinke and Jan Peacock) have strong connections to Halifax.

Screenings
Tapes were compiled into six separate programs, and could be screened on request in the Project Room adjacent to the mezzanine gallery. The exhibition was accompanied by program notes and an illustrated catalogue written by Gary Kibbins.

Related on the World Wide Web
Groupe Intervention Video
This site provides video excerpts and a catalogue (distributors list) of tapes by independent women artists.

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