Vtape

VIDEO OF THE MONTH:
Our August video was selected by our YWC summer interns, Brody Weaver and Janina Malapitan. Here is what they had to say!

"In better than awful (but still pretty sh*tty), Christine Negus offers a tongue-in-cheek recipe for turning individually experienced trauma into collectively witnessed spectacle. Rather than sulk and process in isolation, invite your loved ones over to watch. Throw a party. Be resilient. Cope. Distract them, and yourself, from the depths of your wounds. ‘This is a very kind act on the part of the victim,’ Negus’ voiceover attests. Enlisting the affects of a tell-your-story confessional culture, better than awful asks viewers to consider the tendencies that enable, promote, and monetize trauma-as-commodity. With characteristic wit, Negus leaves unaddressed what happens next: after everyone has gone home, the freshly traumatized host is left to clean up messes literal, emotional, and metaphorical. As mid-2000s pop-punk musician P!nk might say, ‘this used to be our funhouse / but now it’s full of evil clowns.’ Healing is anything but spectacular." —Brody

"Christine Negus’s better than awful (but still pretty sh*tty) begins with a dusk-darkened sky and a countdown to fireworks. Booms, bursts, and the Boss (‘Born in the USA’ soundtracks this work) provide the summer night setting as a wry voice begins to instruct the viewer on how best to throw a party when something horrifyingly bad is about to happen. Absurdity catalyzes the catharsis achieved by Negus’s work, which focuses on violence and victims’ trauma. The voice identifies treats the victim / party-host should have ready that assuredly make awful things better, like ‘chocolate cake’ and ‘sparklers when available.’ An apotheosis is reached when the voice finally aligns with the image, describing the ideal light show for party guests: a sublime comet that explodes like fireworks into brilliant shrapnel, annihilating us, and all of our traumas, into oblivion. The perfect party, for the witnesses and the victim, for the spectators and the spectated alike." —Janina

🎞️ Now streaming on Vtape.org
🌐 Link in bio

Image credit: better than awful, by Christine Negus (2015)

Vtape Summer Closure, August 17–28
☀️
Vtape will be closed from August 17th to the 28th. During this time, we will check email and phone messages less frequently than usual. We will be back at the office on Monday, August 31st, and will respond to any inquiries received while we were closed as quickly as possible.

LOST TAPE—NEWLY RESTORED + AVAILABLE AT VTAPE 📼 📼

The brilliant English sound artist, composer, and video artist Stuart Marshall (1949-1993) was one of the first media artists to take on AIDS as a central subject matter. Marshall was a co-founder of London Video Arts, and part of a generation of video artists who made work for broadcast or community television as well as for gallery and festival screenings: at the time, BBC Channel 4 frequently featured challenging work by independent artists, and in North America, community-access cable offered broadcast opportunities for artists. After his death from AIDS-related complications in 1993, Marshall’s video Kaposi’s Sarcoma (A Plague and its Symptoms) (1983) was thought to be lost. Although it was produced for SAW Gallery’s 1983 International Festival of Video Art, and both London Video Arts (now LUX) and Vtape distributed Marshall’s work, this title was not on our shelves and was nowhere to be seen for decades. In 2024, however, PhD researcher Conal McStravick located a copy at SAW Gallery in Ottawa. SAW loaned the tape to Conal, who brought it to Vtape, where Kim Tomczak and Dustin Lawrence worked on recovering and digitizing it. McStravick believes that Kaposi’s Sarcoma may be the first AIDS activist video ever produced, and we are proud to say that it is once again available for public presentation, educational use, etc., through both Vtape and LUX Distribution (UK).

Part of Vtape’s mission is to preserve and make accessible historical video and audio works like this one. Follow the link in bio to read more about this video.

Image credit: Kaposi’s Sarcoma (A Plague and its Symptoms) (1983), by Stuart Marshall

We are proud to announce two participants for this year's Curatorial Incubator v.20: Lost Histories, Found Futures—Luísa Cruz and Kourtney Jackson!

Vtape would like to thank our 2026 Curatorial Incubator jury, Danica Pinteric and Heather Canlas-Rigg, for carefully and thoughtfully considering the eighteen excellent proposals we received for the current Incubator cycle. Making these decisions is always difficult!

For more information about Luísa and Kourtney's projects, please visit our website. And look out for the Curatorial Incubator screenings in fall 2026!

Luísa Cruz
Kourtney
dan
_______heather

VIDEO OF THE MONTH:
Concrete Shape (2023) by Jesi Jordan

"Jordan’s hallucinatory transformations of the self function as assertions of the body as land. Her hand-drawn animation style finds a natural counterpart in the volcanic woodlands, where morphing figures reappear here, earthen: hydrophilic or ossified. Each clay body’s resting place a kind of altar, water is the animating force that pours from one or***ce to another, one vessel to another, sustaining all life forms." —Claudia Edwards

Concrete Shape is a site-specific film created and performed by Jesi Jordan at the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City. The special effects are hand-made using biodegradable materials such as Oaxacan clay, lava rocks, cactus husks, chicken eggs, and water.

🎞️ Now streaming on Vtape.org
🌐 Link in bio

Image Credits: Concrete Shape (2023) by Jesi Jordan

🎥 RUNNING
🗓️ Exhibition dates: June 2–20, 2026
⏱️ Visiting hours: Tue–Sat, 12pm–5pm
📍Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space, 4th floor, 401 Richmond St. West

In Zachery Cameron Longboy’s quietly powerful recent work Running, a spoken “poem for my captor” accompanies Longboy’s exquisite, minimally animated line drawings. Seeming to emerge from a liminal state somewhere between dream and memory, Running draws us fully into the image-world that was introduced in the joyous video Guardian of Sleep (2022). This video will be running continuously in the Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space during the imaginNATIVE Festival and continuing until June 20th.

"The dream is filled with dance and song lasting into the late
She’s alive, he’s alive, they're alive, I’m alive
I’m alive, she’s alive, he’s alive, we’re alive
Running, running trees go by…"
—Zachery Cameron Longboy

Co-presented by imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival

e-flux Film presents the June 2026 edition of the online series Staff Picks, organized in collaboration with Vtape and featuring three works by Susan Britton: Susan (1976), In the Mood (1976), and What Does Alienated Labour Mean to You? (1976).

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Susan Britton first studied Advertising Art at Red River Community College before transferring to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1975, where she began experimenting with video. After graduating in 1976, she moved to Toronto, made numerous videotapes, and exhibited widely. In 1980, Britton became one of the five original collective members of Vtape, alongside Lisa Steele, Rodney Werden, Clive Robertson, and Colin Campbell.

Britton’s early videos belong to the first generation of Canadian video art and draw on the emerging media conditions of the 1970s with a sharp awareness of performance, advertising, and the circulation of cultural language. Across these works, the artist assumes personae drawn from pop culture, mass media, and everyday fantasy, including the mystic, the vacationer, and the s*x worker. The distance between artist and character remains unstable, producing a mode of performance in which irony, self-presentation, and social critique become difficult to separate.

Made at the dawn of what was already being called the “information age,” Britton’s videos register both the attraction of new media and skepticism toward its commercial and ideological uses. Her characters speak in the language of confession, self-help, advertising, and desire, while the works expose the emptiness of cultural scripts shaped by consumption and media repetition. With their soft lighting, direct address, and ambiguous tone, these videos situate Britton’s own presence as both performer and shadow, examining how images produce identity, labor, s*xuality, and belief.

Watch it at the link in bio.

Images: Susan Britton, In the Mood (stills), 1976. 3 minutes.

VIDEO OF THE MONTH:
A Horse Called Memory (2005) by Jude Bebonkwe Norris

Reverent and silent shots of pinto-coated horses fade into one another while the artist’s voicemail inbox runs out the string. Functioning at once as a portrait of the artist in absentia (each of the callers is looking for and not finding Norris) and a portrait of her Cree community of friends and fellow artists in Edmonton, the video’s disjointed approach to image and sound yields a potent brew of mourning and celebration. Dedicated to Norris’ friend and fellow Indigenous artist Clint Alberta, who had recently died by su***de, A Horse Called Memory also preserves some of his b***y humour. “Indian Affairs calling you,” one message begins, “We’re just taking a survey to see if you’ve had any affairs with Indians lately.” Both revitalizing and obliterating, the piece ends with Norris’ camera turning to look straight at the sun.

This video of the month selection is also meant as a companion to TIFF Lightbox’s screening of Clint Alberta’s Miss 501: A Portrait of Luck (2002), playing on June 21 to celebrate National Indigenous Peoples' Day.

🎞️ Now streaming on Vtape.org
🌐 Link in bio

Image Credits: A Horse Called Memory (2005) by Jude Bebonkwe Norris

Happy International Workers Day from Vtape!

To celebrate May Day, and to put the focus on the pressurized situation in the arts, Vtape is featuring Clive Robertson’s Artists’ Union Rally, March 16, 1985 as our May Video of the Month. This tape is a condensed document of the rally that took place in Toronto in 1985: the Independent Artists’ Union (IAU) responded to cultural funding cuts to the Canada Council and the CBC handed down by the Progressive Conservative Party, in particular Marcel Masse from the Department of Communications. The rally included a march through the streets by over 800 artists and cultural supporters and concluded with speeches and presentations at the St. Lawrence Centre. The IAU was active from 1984 to 1989 with 700 members at its peak, transforming artists’ living conditions through advocacy for a living wage.

With the arts currently under increasing pressure from funding cuts, censorship, right-wing cultural backlash, and techno-cultural fragmentation, we recognize that this is nothing new. We have faced these conditions before and by organizing and working together, have been able to carry on doing the critical and fundamental work of independent art-making.

If you are in Regina, you can still see works by Clive Robertson and other 2025 Governor Generals Award winners, on at the Mackenzie Art Gallery until May 3rd!

🎞️ Now streaming on Vtape.org
🌐 Link in bio

Image Credits: Artists Union Rally, March 16, 1985 (1985) by Clive Robertson

🎥 Celestial Q***r: The Life, Work, and Wonder of James MacSwain
🗓️ Friday May 8, 2026
⏱️ 7:00 pm, Doors at 6:30pm
📍CineCycle (129 Spadina Ave., rear)
🎟️ Tickets $12 in advance / $15 at door

Equal parts art project, history lesson, and whimsy, Celestial Q***r: The Life, Work, and Wonder of James MacSwain offers a portrait of an artist who defied convention for a life lived on his own terms. Directors Eryn Foster and Sue Johnson spent a decade checking in with the witty, erudite MacSwain as he moved about his life in north end Halifax, returned to his tiny rural hometown of Amherst, Nova Scotia—where he grew up, unable to pass for straight, in the 1950s—and discussed his lifelong, wildly inventive art practice. The playful, q***r work is cut out, glued together, and sung into intricate collages, analogue films combining handmade animation with documentary, and provocative exhibitions. Johnson and Foster, who knew MacSwain for decades until his death in 2025, combine myriad formats in the production (including 16mm, Super-8, and digital video) for an intimate patchwork celebration reflective of their subject’s own body of work. Celestial Q***r now stands as an elegy for a man who was defiantly original, internationally renowned, and an icon of artistic integrity. James MacSwain lived how he wanted—unabashed, uncompromising, and unforgettable.

Co-presented by , and

Canadian tour supported by the Canada Council for the Arts & Arts Nova Scotia