How has video art functioned as a form of gossip in the Toronto art scene, and how might tracing this gossip contribute to a social history of the medium? I am particularly interested in how video was used to catalyze, fabulate and process sexual experimentation and desire in artists’ scenes in the 1970s and into the 1980s. Friends and lovers, tight-knit groups of artists here and elsewhere performed in and helped produce each other’s tapes, attended openings and screenings, and then wrote critically about the works afterward. Video seemed to embody their yearning for self-creation and self-exposure, allowing artists to both reflect their off-screen social scenes and generate new kinds of stylized self-and subcultural representation. Central to my analysis will be the power of talk to conjure something out of nothing.

Jon Davies is a Montreal-born curator and writer who holds a BFA and an MA in film and video studies. He has written for many catalogues and anthologies as well as publications such as Frieze, Canadian Art, C Magazine, Cinema Scope, Criticism, and Fillip, and he co-edited (with Sam Ashby) issue 5 of Little Joe magazine. He has curated numerous exhibitions and screenings, and was Assistant Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto and Associate Curator at Oakville Galleries. As of September, he is a student in the PhD program in Art History at Stanford University.