Lisa Steele D.Litt. (born 1947) is a

Canadian artist The following is a list of Canadian artists working in visual or plastic media (including 20th-century artists working in video art, performance art, or other types of new media). See other articles for information on Canadian literature, music, ci ...

, a pioneer in

video art Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting ...

, educator,

curator A curator (from la, cura, meaning "to take care") is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the parti ...

and co-founder of

Vtape Vtape is a Canadian artist-run centre located in Toronto, Ontario. It is Canada's largest distributor of video art, and the world's largest distributor of Indigenous and First People's film and video. The organization is run as a not for profit a ...

in Toronto. Born in the United States, Steele moved to Canada in 1968 and is now a Canadian citizen. She has collaborated exclusively with her partner Kim Tomczak since the early 1980s.

Early life

Steele was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1947 and immigrated to Canada in 1968. Her brother James B. Steele is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist located in Philadelphia.

Career

An important pioneer of video art in Canada since the early 1970s, Steele has shown internationally at the

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

(1980), the

Kunsthalle Basel Kunsthalle Basel is a contemporary art gallery in Basel, Switzerland. As Switzerland's oldest and still most active institution for contemporary art, Kunsthalle Basel forms a vital part of Basel's cultural centre and is located next to the city's ...

, the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

(NYC), the

National Gallery of Canada The National Gallery of Canada (french: Musée des beaux-arts du Canada), located in the capital city of Ottawa, Ontario, is Canada's national art museum. The museum's building takes up , with of space used for exhibiting art. It is one of the ...

, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), 49th Parallel Videoseries, the

Vancouver Art Gallery The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) is an art museum in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The museum occupies a adjacent to Robson Square in downtown Vancouver, making it the largest art museum in Western Canada by building size. Designed by Franc ...

and the Long Beach Museum. She is a founding director of Vtape in Toronto, a national information and distribution service for independent video and a founding publisher and editor of '' FUSE Magazine''.

Early work

Steele's best known early work '' Birthday Suit – with scars and defects'' (1974) is a thirteen-minute black and white video tape where she "presents her naked body to the unblinking gaze of the camera". The tape itself is characterized by common practices of early video art, unedited with a static shot.Russell 2002, p. 431 Steele turns the camera on, walks to the end of the room/set and removes her clothing. She approaches the camera and begins to examine the various scars she's accumulated over her life up to that point. The work represents what critic Dot Tuer indicates is "an offering to the technological gaze

hich Ij ( fa, ايج, also Romanized as Īj; also known as Hich and Īch) is a village in Golabar Rural District, in the Central District of Ijrud County, Zanjan Province, Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also ...

downplays the representation of the body as a gendered subject," and as film historian Catherine Russell points out, the work is a "counter-image to the emergent critique of the female body in narrative cinema." Steele's description of the work:

On the occasion of my 27th birthday I decided to do a tape that chronicled my passage through time. I have always been clumsy, tripping, dropping, falling with alarming regularity. This tape accepts the extent of the consequences.

''Birthday Suit – with scars and defects'' was included in a notable touring exhibition in 1989–1990 titled Rebel Girls: A Survey of Canadian Feminist Videotapes 1974-1988. ''A Very Personal Story'' (1974) is a videotape which acts as a metaphor to Steele's childhood experience of discovering her mother's dead body at the age of 15. ''

The Globe and Mail ''The Globe and Mail'' is a Canadian newspaper printed in five cities in western and central Canada. With a weekly readership of approximately 2 million in 2015, it is Canada's most widely read newspaper on weekdays and Saturdays, although it ...

'' described "A Very Personal Story" as an "exquisitely intimate work, recounting the day of her loss." ''The Ballad of Dan Peoples'' (1976) is a videotape in which Steele holds a photograph of an old man while sitting upon a stool. She then narrates stories of her grandfather's rural childhood in his voice, taking on his characteristics and personality. Her grandfather's memories and identity reveal parts of her own identity; the closing credits acknowledge her grandfather's recent move to a home for the aged also speaks to the familial and self-reflective conditions which inspired this work. In 1976, Steele employed fellow video artist

Colin Campbell Colin may refer to: * Colin (given name) * Colin (surname) * ''Colin'' (film), a 2008 Cannes film festival zombie movie * Colin (horse) (1905–1932), thoroughbred racehorse * Colin (humpback whale), a humpback whale calf abandoned north of Sydney, ...

to create the four-part drama ''The Scientist Tapes'', which overlays cultural anxieties about scientific change with details about their long distance desire for one another. The video series ends with the two characters drifting off into space, finally together. Between 1974 and 1986, Steele developed character-based micro-dramas, drawing from her experiences working at the Toronto women and children's shelter Interval House. In ''The Damages'' (1977), ''Makin' Strange'' (1978), ''Talking Tongues'' (1982) and ''The Gloria Tapes'', Steele inhabits the characters of Mrs. Pauly, Beatrice Small, and Gloria.

Steele and Tomczak

Since the early 1980s Steele has worked exclusively in collaboration with Kim Tomczak. Their individual and collaborative work was the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1989–90. In 1993, Steele and Tomczak were recognized with two awards: the Bell Canada Award for excellence in the field of Canadian video art and a Toronto Arts Award (the Peter Herndorf Media Arts Award). In 1996, their work ''The Blood Records: written and annotated'', received a world premiere at the

in New York. Their installation work ''We're Getting Younger All the Time'' has been installed in several locations in England, in Venice and was at the Centre d'art Contemporain in Basse-Normandie in November 2002. In 2005, Steele and Tomczak won the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. In 2009, Steele and Tomczak were recognized with honorary doctorate degrees from the University of British Columbia (Okanagan) In 2016,

Wanda Nanibush Wanda Nanibush (born 1976) is an Anishinaabe curator, artist and educator based in Toronto, Ontario. She is the Curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the author of the 2017 book ''Violence No More: The Rise of Indigenous Wom ...

, a new curator at the

Art Gallery of Ontario The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO; french: Musée des beaux-arts de l'Ontario) is an art museum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The museum is located in the Grange Park neighbourhood of downtown Toronto, on Dundas Street West between McCaul and Bev ...

referred to Steele as an ongoing significant contributor to the Toronto new media scene. Steele is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.

Awards

Steele received the Long Haul Award for lifetime achievement at the Untitled Art Awards reception in Toronto, February, 2005. In 2005, she and Kim Tomczak were jointly awarded a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Permanent collections

Her videos are in collections worldwide, including The

, the

, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Houston, Texas), Ingrid Oppenheim, Concordia University (Montreal), Newcastle Polytechnic (England), Paulo Cardazzo (Milan), the Canadian Embassy (Tokyo) and the Akademie der Kunst (Berlin).

Personal life

Steele is a breast cancer survivor.

Works

Select Videography

* ''Birthday Suit – with scars and defects'' (1974) * ''A Very Personal Story'' (1974) * ''The Ballad Of Dan Peoples'' (1976) * ''The Damages'' (1977) * ''Makin' Strange'' (1978) * ''Talking Tongues''(1982) * ''The Gloria Tapes'' (1980) with Kim Tomczak: * ''Working The Double Shift'' (1984) * ''Legal Memory'' (1992) * ''The Blood Records: written and annotated'' (1997) * ''We're Getting Younger All The Time'' (2001) * ''Make Love Not War'' (2003) * ''Practicing Death'' (2003) * ''Free Speech'' (2006) * ''Speak City'' (2009)

Notes

External links

steeleandtomczak.com
Artists website
Vtape

* *
Video of "I Will Still Make Boring Art" Lecture at University of Toronto
{{DEFAULTSORT:Steele, Lisa 1947 births Living people Canadian video artists Women video artists Canadian art curators Canadian people of American descent 20th-century Canadian women artists Canadian conceptual artists Women conceptual artists Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts winners 21st-century Canadian women artists Canadian contemporary artists Canadian women curators