Overview

"Logue's work is a kind of departure for what cannot be rehearsed in life".
(On Enlightened Nonsense, M. Hoolboom)

For the past 20 years, the film and video work of Canadian artist Deirdre Logue has focused on the self as subject. Using 'performance for the camera' as a primary mode of production, her compelling self-portraits investigate what it means to be a queer body in the age of anxiety.

Logue has been prolific and steadfast in her engagement with the moving image and has subsequently produced upwards of 60 short films and videos as well as some of this country's most celebrated video art installations including Enlightened Nonsense (1997-2000), ten hand- processed performance-based works about childhood worries; Why Always Instead of Just Sometimes (2003-2007), twelve works that are reflections on aging, breaking down and reparation; Id's Its (2012), an ambitious suite of thirteen installations exploring the richness of our malfunctions and Euphoria's Hiccups (2013) an intentionally intense, site specific work incorporating upwards of 20 small video screens, still imagery, sound and psychoactive plants; cross-pollinating Logue's tendencies towards obsession and addiction with contemporary thinking on healing, landscape and mindfulness.

Diving deep into the unconscious, Logue's recorded performances are a tangle of fragmentation, doubt, perversion and psychic unrest. Uniquely located on the golden mean between comfort and trauma, excess and deficiency, self-liberation and self-annihilation, her works are at once unruly and uncanny.

Artist Statement

My film, video and installations, all defined as self-portraits, are focused on the construction of a self-presentational discourse, as a departure from conventional autobiography. I am dedicated to understanding the body as a psychosomatic entity and work under the influence of conceptual art, performance art and early video (1965-1988) – an era when time was real and tapes were unedited.

In 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 and have built my practice without the use of tools typically applied in conventional film or video. My work is made in a direct move away from an industry models, and is highly personal. I am active in exploring a broad range of queer, psychoanalytic and feminist theory, and I have looked closely at the work of many conceptual and performance artists. I am very interested in artists who's work involves architecture and deconstruction, the concept of the diaristic – where art and the everyday collide through fragments collected over time, and the relationship between the unconscious and repetition as revealed by Lacan.

Bio

Deirdre Logue holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from Kent State University. Recent solo exhibitions of her award winning film and video work have taken place at Open Space (Victoria), Oakville Galleries, the Images Festival (Toronto), the Berlin International Film Festival, Beyond/In Western New York, YYZ (Toronto), and articule (Montreal).

Logue has contributed over 25 years to working with artist-run organizations dedicated to media arts exhibition and distribution. She was a founding member of Media City, the Executive Director of the Images Festival, Executive Director of the CFMDC, founding member of the Media Arts Network of Ontario (MANO) and is currently the Development Director at Vtape. She is a champion of artist rights and has held numerous positions with organizations such as CARFAC National and the Independent Media Arts Alliance. Logue has been a member of the Independent Imaging Collective (the Film Farm) with Phil Hoffman since 1999 and directs the FAG Feminist Art Gallery with her partner, collaborator and artist Allyson Mitchell.