Bio
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Deirdre Logue was born in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada in 1964. She holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from Kent State University. Her performance based film, video and installation works are self-portraits uniquely located between comfort and trauma, self-liberation and self-annihilation. By using domestic objects and spaces to contrary ends, her works capture gesture, duration and the body as both subject and object. Her practice is not production or 'master narrative' driven nor is it dependent on the use of tools typically applied in conventional film and video, rather her work is made in a direct move away from an industry model and is expressly personal, emotional and political. Solo exhibitions of her work have taken place at the Berlin International Film Festival, Oakville Galleries, YYZ Artists' Outlet (Toronto), the Images Festival (Toronto) – where she won both Best Installation and Best of the Festival – Beyond/In Western New York, Art Star (Ottawa) and articule (Montréal). Group exhibitions include |
| Traumatic Landscapes at the Centre for Art Tapes (Halifax), Achtung Baby at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (Buenos Aires), and The F Word at Western Front (Vancouver). Her work has also been featured at several important international events including Double Vision at the BFI (London), Live Film: Jack Smith!! at Kino Arsenal (Berlin) and CUE as part of the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver. Deirdre has also spent the past 18 years working on behalf of media artists by organizing independent film, video and new media festivals and participating in forums and symposiums on the future of independent artistic practice and film and video distribution. She was a founding member of Media City in Windsor, Executive Director of the Images Festival (1995-1999), Executive Director of the Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre (2001-2006), and is currently the Development Director at Vtape. | |
Artist Statement
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In 1993, I began concentrating on producing short films and videos that investigate specific themes, production conditions, aesthetics and personal terminologies. I have since made several video installation works and completed 35 short films and videos, of which 22 are located in 2 different projects. The first, entitled Enlightened Nonsense (1997-2000) is a series of 10 short performance films about repetition. Each beginning with a specific action, these hand-processed 16mm films express both the physical manifestation of different states of being and a desire to understand one's complex relationship to our psychological limitations. The second, entitled Why Always Instead of Just Sometimes (2003-2007) is a selection of 12 short films and videos that record accomplishments without impact. They are reflections on aging, breaking down and reparation and describe our need for intimacy and our fears of exposure. They are always, when we really wish they were just sometimes. A third work, Rough Count (2006-ongoing) is a 12-channel work documenting the not-so- |
| simple act of counting a bag of confetti - piece by piece. Dedicated to the infinite and the endless, the presentation of this continuous project is determined by the resources of the artist and the venue at the time of its exhibition. Currently, its fourth incarnation reflects those 14, 047 pieces counted to date. These 3 projects, all defined as self-portraits are to date the best representations of my central interests as an artist. These include the construction of a self-presentational discourse, as it is different from conventional autobiography, the body as material and psychosomatic illness. My work is often located between comfort and trauma, self-liberation and self-annihilation, and by incorporating domestic objects and spaces to contrary ends, my works challenge the thresholds of the everyday. I work under the influence of much conceptual art, performance art and early video (1965-1988) when time was real and tapes were unedited. In almost all of my short films and videos I record a performance for the camera that captures gesture, duration and the body as both subject and object. I place significant emphasis on experimentation, process, and on idea development through exploration. My practice is not production or 'master narrative driven' nor is it dependent on the use of tools typically applied in conventional film or video, rather my work is made in a direct move away from an industry model and is expressly personal, emotional and political. I am active in exploring a broad range of queer, psychoanalytic and feminist theory, avant-garde film, experimentalism, minimalism, video art installation and have looked closely at the work of many conceptual and performance artists. But perhaps more than individual artists, I have been particularly impacted by certain seminal works that continue to resonate for me in my current practice such as Adrian Piper's Catalysis IV (1970-71), Dennis Oppenheim's Reading Position for a Second Degree Burn (1970), Bruce Nauman's Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-68), Bas Jan Ader's Too Sad to Tell You (1970), Yvonne Rainer's No Manifesto (1965), On Kawara's Date Paintings (1966-), Gary Hill's Soundings (1979) and Yoko Ono's Cut Piece (1964). I am also very interested in artists whose work involves architecture and deconstruction such as the sculptural and film works of the late Gordon Matta Clarke, the concept of the Archive as proposed by Walter Benjamin where art and the everyday collide through fragments collected over time and the relationship between the unconscious and repetition as revealed by Lacan. |
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