Toronto Video Artist Colin Campbell Wins Bell Canada Award in Video Art
Ottawa 27 May 1996

The Canada Council and Bell Canada are pleased to announce that the winner of the 1996 Bell Canada Award for outstanding achievement in video art is the prominent video artist Colin Campbell.

Born in 1942 in Reston, Manitoba, Colin Campbell received a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Manitoba in 1966 (Gold Medal) and a Masters of Fine Arts from the Claremont Graduate School in California in 1969. Since 1972, Campbell has produced some fifty videotapes while continuing to work in performance and film. He is a prominent Canadian video artist whose work has been exhibited and screened in numerous museums and galleries in Europe and throughout Canada and the US, and is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He has curated video and performance programs for Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Rio de Janeiro. Very active in the artist-run centre movement in Canada, Colin Campbell was a founding member of Vtape distribution and has been president of its board since 1986. Since 1994, he has also served as a member of the advisory boards of the Northern Visions Images Festival of Independent Film and Video; and the Inside Out collective Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Toronto. Campbell has been teaching since 1978. He has taught script writing for film, and performance and video at the Ontario College of Art from 1986 to 1990. He then became a Senior tutor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Toronto.

Colin Campbell is considered to be one of the pioneers of Canadian video art and one of Canada's most provocative and challenging artists in the postmodern generation. He was one of the first video makers to address the issues of identity and sexual personae. What distinguished him from other artists at a very early stage in his career was his focus on psychological doubts and questions, and the lure and life of the physical facade. From the start, Campbell's work has been ironic, humorous and subversive, using strategies of dissemblance to create a world in which nothing is certain, and appearances are deceptive. In True/False, the artist addresses the camera with a confession, revealing a "self" which the viewer gradually comes to question as the elements of the confession are repetitively affirmed and denied. The artist presents himself as both true and false, present and absent, male and female, and builds a paradox through which he raises questions about identity, subjectivity and truth.

Investigation of his own desire and ambivalence led Campbell to question the limits of gender itself. Cross-sexuality, which pervades the artist's characters, offers an unstable, incomplete, already alienated image whose seriousness is partly mocking. On some of his most well-known projects produced between 1976 and 1980-The Woman From Malibu series, Bad Girls, etc.—he develops a story around the theme of sexual identity which would become crucial to video art in the late 80s and 90s.

Campbell has worked in many different styles-simple narrative, complex non-linear narrative, visual narrative-but content has always been of primary importance. Form is a means rather than an end, and has changed with the surrounding context and developing audience. He tells stories about what he knows—what he knows to be real, and fictitious constructions of that reality. He has moved from solo productions to an increasing complexity of scale (in duration, scripting and messages), and then towards the "big" screen with Skin, a 16mm film produced in 1990 in response to the AIDS pandemic. Campbell's work marks an important contribution to electronic art as it represents an inauguration, an anticipation and a reference point for today's video art.

In 1990, the Winnipeg Art Gallery honoured him with a retrospective which toured to the National Gallery of Canada, the Power Plant and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and in 1995, the Art Gallery of Ontario mounted an exhibition of his early tapes. Colin Campbell has represented Canada at the Venice Biennale (1980), at the biennials in Sao Paolo (1977) and Istanbul (1992) and at OKanada in Berlin (1982) and Dokumenta in Kassel, Germany (1977). He has also published in File and fuse magazines and is currently working on a novel.

(Originally disseminated as a press release from the Canada Council in 1996)