7 June 2001: Campo Santa Marina, Venice (Italy) 18
July 2001: Absolut LA International Biennial Art Invitational, Los Angeles (United States)

Curated by: Bill Huffman

Artists: Vera Frenkel (Canada) -- Veli Granö (Finland ) -- Gunilla Josephson (Sweden/Canada) -- Gwen MacGregor and Lewis Nicholson (Canada) -- Darlene Naponse (Canada) -- Tanja Ostojic (Belgrade/Ljubljana) -- Lori Paradis (Canada) -- Paolo Ravalico Scerri (Italy) -- Cheryl Rondeau and Heather Topp (Canada ) -- Carl Skelton (Canada/United States) -- Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak (Canada) -- Julie Voyce (Canada ) -- Jay Wilson (Canada)

Supported by:Nenad Andric, Art Gallery of Sudbury, Michael Bellmore Consulting, Cambrian College, The Canada Council for the Arts, Borut Krajnc, Christian Lacroix (Paris), City of Greater Sudbury, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (Canada), Sylvie Ferre, Darlene McIntosh, Metro Magazine, Ministry of Culture (Republic of Serbia), Ontario Arts Council, PLANiT Design Inc., Matthew Rose, Cheryl Rondeau, Comtesse Henri de Saint Pierre, Harald Szeemann, Karl Skierszkan, Jeremy Stigter, Sudbury Community Development Corporation, Venice Biennale of Visual Art

Head Frame Program Details and Artists' Biographical Information

This Is Your Messiah Speaking 1991
Vera Frenkel
9:50min running time, single channel version (Newcastle/London)

A key work in Vera Frenkel's Messiah cycle, and source for her Piccadilly Circus Spectacolor Board animation (Messiah Speaking, Artangel Trust, London ), this videotape traces the collusive bonds between consumerism, fundamentalism and romance. Through distilled texts and compelling images, several intertwining modes of narrative and representation, from handwriting to American Sign Language, reveal the psychic engine of the culture. This work is accessible to the deaf.

Vera Frenkel is one of Canada's leading multidisciplinary artists, known for projects like Messiah Speaking, ... from the Transit Bar (documenta IX) and Body Missing, that explore the forces at work in human migration, the experience of displacement and deracination and the learning and unlearning of cultural memory. Her work was last seen in Venice at the Club Media of the 1997 Biennale. The Body Missing Project, a video-web-photo installation first created at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Linz, has subsequently toured Japan, Europe and North America, and is currently installed at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris en route to the Sigmund Freud Museum, London. She is currently working on The Institute: Or, What We do for Love, a poly-serial video-web narrative on the travails of a large cultural organization. http://www.yorku.ca/BodyMissing

The Path to the Quays House, 2000 - 2001
Veli Granö
10min running time, silent video

"Perhaps the incredible feeling inside me was caused by all the disappointments, abandonment, pain and loss during my earthly life that my belief in happiness was almost non-existent, not to mention love. But due to my visits to Sirius I have found the inner peace and self-confidence, the meaning for my life. My life has, indeed, become happier. And I have found my true self, and was given little Mira as a gift from heaven. ... Despite all the hardships I am grateful for everything I have experienced during my earthly life, as well as to my earthly parents." I traveled a long way to this moment. / The moment when I see myself / -as through a fragile film- / as a bright reflection of something greater. / It is great to be even a speck of dust / amidst the endless world of stars. / To come from there, and there to return. -- PER ARDUA AD ASTRA (through difficulties into the stars) The Path to the House of Quay is filmed journey to wise man Quays house at Sirus. The film reel is 100ft long and duration of this walk is 10 minutes. This text and the film are from Granös latest installation and film project (The Stardweller, 2000-2001) that respects people's strangest desires. It tells the story of a woman who dreams of going to Sirius where her lost child found her home.

Veli Granö was born 1960 in Kajaani, Finland and graduated with a BA in 1986 from the Lahti Design Institute. He works as a visual artist, photographer and filmmaker in Helsinki and his work has been shown extensively in Finland, Europe and the United States. vgrano@uiah.fi

PETIT MAL IN VENICE, 2001
Gunilla Josephson
approx 10min running time, stereo mix sound
Torpor Drifts Through the Rooms of the Palazzio. Lost Moments of Consciousness and Languid Solitude. Exquisite corpses in Decadence -- the Eye, the Face, the Mouth.

Gunilla Josephson is a Swedish-born artist with a BA in Social Sciences from Stockholm University and an MFA from the College of Art and Design in Stockholm. She lives in Toronto and exhibits extensively in Canada and Europe. Josephson recently received the Festival Prize of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany, for her video HELLO INGMAR. In October 2001 she will exhibit her most recent video installation HEDDAISMUS at Gallery Leena Kuumola in Helsinki, Finland. Josephson's work is distributed through V tape in Toronto, Canada and she is represented by Leena Kuumola in Helsinki. gunilla@sympatico.ca

7 pm (the trailer) 2000-2001
Gwen MacGregor and Lewis Nicholson
3min version (original running time 365min)

7 pm is a yearlong project (for now) that systematically documents one minute of MacGregor’s and Nicholson’s life at 7pm. Every night five minutes of video are shot of whatever they are doing. One continuous minute is chosen as part of the final tape. Currently there is a 3-hour version (six months) being exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Head Frame will feature a three-minute trailer of 7 pm.


Lewis Nicholson is a graphic designer and artist who moved to Toronto from London, England, seven years ago. Since then, apart from a brief stint with Bruce Mau, he has been working as an independent designer for mainly culturally based clients and recently, more specifically, for artists and art institutions designing catalogues and support materials. He has collaborated on several artworks including 7pm, currently on view at the Art Galley of Ontario. lewgwen@interlog.com

Gwen MacGregor is a Toronto-based visual artist. She has made a substantial body of site-specific installation work that is multi-disciplinary in its approach, incorporating video, performance photography and sculptural objects. She has exhibited her work extensively in Canada as well as London, England, Prague, Czech Republic and Mexico City. She currently has a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario curated by Jessica Bradley. gwengwen@interlog.com

And Your Love Will Make it Better, 2001
Gwen MacGregor and Jay Wilson
approx 6min running time
And Your Love Will Make it Better, 2001 is a collaborative audio/video and competitive experiment that is part courier race, part surveillance contract and part sonic whisper. The subjects tail and chase, revealing themselves in the act through image and subconscious rumblings. This fast-paced spontaneous urban drama results from undefined parameters and the willingness to rub two ideas up against each other to see what (did) happen(s).


Gwen MacGregor is a Toronto-based visual artist. She has made a substantial body of site-specific installation work that is multi-disciplinary in its approach, incorporating video, performance photography and sculptural objects. She has exhibited her work extensively in Canada as well as London, England, Prague, Czech Republic and Mexico City. She currently has a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario curated by Jessica Bradley. gwengwen@interlog.com

Jay Wilson is a multi-disciplinary artist, designer and ex-zookeeper. He is the president of the Board of Directors of Mercer Union, Centre for Contemporary Art in Toronto. Jay is involved in the Enemy Project with collaborator Derek Sullivan and will be part of Officina America, curated by Renato Barilli, in Bologna, 2002. walnut2@sympatico.ca

Someone's Stealing Energy, 2001
A short unnatural film by Darlene Naponse
2min running time
This short film is challenging the realms of energy sources within the quadrants of people, like the one's standing beside you and yourself. There are people in the world that are battling the 'debauched-passengers' in this world. These are the people who steal your energy. This experimental short, visits the unnatural world of choice and consequence in a journey with hope to find more energy. Visuals and music help portray the story, of a man with no name, who takes what is left from inside himself and contacts the worlds under him. The 'debauched-passengers' is a metaphysical story of technological gods and goddesses, transformed in your house. What happens when a technological breakdown confuses the 'debauched-passengers' and all sub-terrestrial life forms join together. A sarcastic, unnatural film in the sense of it's non-sci-fi movement, and it's fantastical array of new ideas.

Darlene Naponse is a young Ojibway woman from Atikmegoshing - Whitefish Lake First Nation in Northern Ontario. She writes, directs, produces and thinks a lot about film/video, television and multi-media. She sees herself as a independent video/filmmaker creating 'Rez-Style Filmmaking'. She can be found standing in the edge of the reserve twirling, while looking to the sky, wondering and creating. You can find some of her work on Canadian broadcast stations like APTN (Aboriginal Peoples Television Network) and WTN (Woman's Television Network). Her shorts have also been screened and won prizes in different film/video festivals across Mother Earth. darlene@pineneedleblankets.com

I'll Be Your Angel (video documentation of a performance) Tanja Ostojic, ©2001
(recorded and edited by Cheryl Rondeau)
15min running time

I'll Be Your Angel, a performance created for the 49th Venice Biennale, consists of a four-day performance with Venice Biennale Director Harald Szeemann, as supporting 'actor'. The set is the Biennale and its pavilions, openings, cocktails, dinners, press conferences... As Szeemann's escort and 'angel', I have structured the work using elements of mystery, both personal and public and playing with the glossy gossip of art world whispers. The piece is designed to provoke a questioning of existing power structures. In using Szeemann as 'material', I am accessing his iconic stature. He is a respected and powerful personality with a 'loaded name' who can 'guarantee' a public platform for my fragile questions concerning the re-valorization of human relationships within the art world. A major cultural event, the Venice Biennale is also a global phenomenon. It is a tourist attraction, a place of a grotesque celebration of art as commodity and an intellectual soup...

The video incarnation of I'll Be Your Angel is the result of a surveillance mission conducted from within the walls of the Biennale. In many ways, it is a guerrilla commando event, providing those on the outside a glimpse in. This video document becomes an 'unofficial' component that fluidly snakes in and out of the language and the construct of the art system.

Tanja Ostojic is a performance and inter-media artist born 1972 in Yugoslavia, based in Belgrade. MA: Faculty of Fine Arts, Belgrade and ERBAN, Nantes, France. Exhibitions: 2001: Body and the East Gallery Exit Art, New York; 1999: PS1, New York; DESTE, Athens; ICA, London; Polysonneries Festival, Lyon; 1998: Manifesta 2, Luxembourg. Exhibited unofficially on the Venice Biennale in 1997 and 1999. Ostojic is active in socially and politically engaged art, internet, video, theatre, writing and curating exhibits throughout Europe. tostojic@yubc.net and hottanja@hotmail.com; Looking For A Husband With EU Passport: www.cac.org.mk/capital/ostojic/; Three/Free postcards project: www.galerija.skuc-drustvo.si/ostojic/; text by M. Rose: www.art-themagazine.com/paris3.htm; Remont #2: www.co.yu/artzine

child's play (a look at McLuhan), 2001
Lori Paradis
8:30min running time

"Jobs are finished; role-playing has taken over; the job is a passé entity. The job belonged to the specialist. The kids know that they no longer live in a specialist world; you cannot have a goal today. You cannot say, "I'm going to start here and I'm going to work for the next three years and I'm going to go all that distance." Every kid knows that within three years, everything will have changed -- including himself and the goal."
-- Marshall McLuhan with A.F. Knowles, York University Instructional Services Video, 1971

Lori Paradis is a Sudbury-based artist after the question, an understanding - what is to be we? what is it to be you? what is it to be me?... questions of time, of space - of rhythm. Her work surrounds the chaos within simplicity, to push and shove what's immediate. Her work can also be viewed at Tranz-Tech International Video Art Biennial October 2001 in Toronto - or you can talk to me. rambler321@hotmail.com

Io ti ucciderò (I will kill you), 1999
Paolo Ravalico Scerri video and performance intervention, dimensions vary
In this video installation, I want to speak about the violence that every man lives daily, the violence towards him self. In this video installation you can see a man (I am the actor) slowly coming up from the border of the screen. He picks up a knife, points it at the spectator and then violently throws it away. After this, he undresses and falls down - a victim of himself. Complementing the video component, I also perform as part of the installation - moving through the crowd making eye contact with individuals. Confronting and 'staring them down'.

Paolo Ravalico Scerri was born 1965 in Trieste, Italy. He holds an MA from the University of Bologna, Graduate School for the Humanities - DAMS Thesis: Aspects of video Art. He also hold and undergraduate degree in Fine Arts at the Trieste Art Institute. His work has been included in several solo and group exhibitions across Europe including DEFINIZIONE D’IDENTITA, Il Ponte Project in Rome and SCOPANDO, B&D Studio Contemporanea in Milan. Scerri lives and works in Trieste. scerri@libero.it

STILL BORN, 2001
Cheryl Rondeau and Heather Topp
5:30min running time



Ruminations on reclaiming the bedrock. A short, sensitive survey of one woman's journey.


Cheryl Rondeau is a photographer and visual artist whose work has appeared in a variety of publications. metro@sympatico.ca

Heather Topp is a multi media artist. Born in Montreal, Quebec (Canada), influenced by many summers on the shores of Burnt Church, New Brunswick. Moved to Sudbury, Ontario in 1980.

Prisoners of Information, 2000
Carl Skelton
5min running time
A five-minute video, telling the story of daring escapes from a couple of (mental) black holes, and the subsequent invention and performance characteristics of the Agency Inducer. The Agency Inducer is an example of the video projector's potential as a therapeutic device -- an animated image is projected onto the viewer's chest and belly, in order to perfectly balance their power and responsibility, without rupturing their sense of humor.

Carl Skelton was born in Toronto, educated Canada and France, lives and works in New York and teaches in Brooklyn. carl@ultratopia.com

We're Getting Younger All The Time, 2001
a video installation by Steele+Tomczak
60min running time

When first we cast a shadow, eternity becomes possible. An echo of Plato signals the yearning: if I am here now, then let me be here when next the sun sets, rises, tomorrow, a week from now, next year ... for awhile, a long while, forever (perhaps). If it's not asking too much. We bargain, creating whole cosmic spheres that revolve around our constructed faith. Unbelievers simply fall away, doubting the possibility of ever-lasting life, they exist as outsiders, expelled from the circle.

Steele + Tomczak have worked exclusively in collaboration since 1983, producing videotapes, performances and photo/text works. Legal Memory (1992), their first feature-length work, has been shown in a number of film festivals since its release including: The Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Festival, the Festival Internazionale Cinema Giovani (Turin, Italy), the Toronto Festival of Festivals and broadcast on TVOntario. In 1996, their work THE BLOOD RECORDS: written and annotated, received a world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Their installation work We're Getting Younger All the time is currently on tour in the U.K. Steele teaches at the Ontario College of Art & Design. Steele and Tomczak co-teach in the Visual Studies Department at the University of Toronto and are founders of V tape, a Toronto media arts centre. kimlisa@interlog.com

Gnat Devil, 1998
Julie Voyce
(Buttons courtesy of R.E.D. H.O.T. Productions)

Julie has a colleague who conjures beautiful things. His name is Ed Pien. Ed suggested Hell as a project. Over 200 people were asked about their pet peeves. There is a Patron-Anti-Saint of all pet peeves. It is the Gnat-Devil. Any soul who confided a peeve received a Gnat-Devil button. You can read the book. There is also an option to take a quick trip to Hell and back.

Julie Voyce likes to make prints and drawings and jewelry and paintings and books and knick-knacks and the odd toy. Ms Voyce gets a real thrill doing correspondence art. She lives in a large city and has a deck. The lake is a 20-minute walk away. jvoyce@hotmail.com

Start Singing Somewhere - Realized, 2001
Jay Wilson (from the Wish List Series)
The Wish List Series are sculptures that spell out things I want to do before I die. Lately, I've started to realize my wishes; last year, for example I really camped, but I still have to thank Joni (Mitchell that is). Start Singing Somewhere - Realized consists of me singing the word Somewhere for five minutes. The piece is improvised in any location. It's not as monotonous as it sounds. It is about the joy of singing even if you have insurmountable stage fright. I start with my back to the audience, perhaps down an alley, facing a corner or in a stairwell and for the next five minutes I face my fears.

Jay Wilson is a multi-disciplinary artist, designer and ex-zookeeper. He is the president of the Board of Directors of Mercer Union, Centre for Contemporary Art in Toronto. Jay is involved in the Enemy Project with collaborator Derek Sullivan and will be part of Officina America, curated by Renato Barilli, in Bologna, 2002. walnut2@sympatico.ca