(Originally published in: Xtra Feb 16, 2001)

Fast approaching his 59th birthday, video artist and university professor Colin Campbell has spent half of his life creating and revising his videotaped personae. It all began in 1972 with his videotape Sackville, I'm Yours in which Campbell created and portrayed Art Star, an art world cause celebre living and working at the small, isolated Mount Allison University. The videotape became a self-fulfilling prophecy, launching Campbell into international prominence as a video artist, filmmaker, author and academic. Finally, 28 years later in 2000, Campbell created Dishevelled Destiny in which Art Star returns to Sackville to see how his name and fame are holding up.

"One of the nice things about working with video is that you can have yourself as you are today talking to yourself as you were 25 years ago," says Campbell. Campbell, who has always preferred playing and portraying female rather than male characters in his videos, notes that in his late 50s it takes much less make-up and work to transform himself physically into a female on screen that it did as a young man. "A lot of my current work is about aging," says Campbell. "The older you get the more irrelevant your sexuality becomes. If not to you personally then certainly to the outside world. When you are thirty everyone is interested (in your sex life), everyone wants to know. By the time you are in your fifties, no on cares. You are invisible."

Campbell explains his fascination with female characters quite simply and directly. "Female characters are more fluid and adapt more readily to the situation. there is something static about male characters." Campbell's characters are also fluid across time, like Art Star in 1972 versus Art Star in 2000. he continually revises and updates the lives of his characters in soap opera fashion.

One example is the series of tapes about the sisters Robin, Colleena and Mildred. In 1976, Campbell created his piece The Woman From Malibu. At the end of that series Mildred disappears into the desert and apparently dies. But in a later tape, Deja Vu, Campbell has Mildred's sister, Colleena, in the south of France reminiscing about Mildred only to find out she may not be dead at all. In his latest work Que Sera Sera, Colleena goes to Italy in search of Mildred. in each of the installments footage form the previous works is reused and reinterpreted. The Available Light Screening Collective in Ottawa is giving us the chance to decide for ourselves when it screens a selection of Campbell's tapes in early March.