(Originally published in: Winnipeg Free Press, Dec. 22, 1990)

Winnipeg Art Gallery adjunct curator Bruce Ferguson writes that video creator Colin Campbell is “one of Canada’s best-known but little-seen, artists.” Campbell himself modestly suggests that Ferguson was referring to the rarity of video art screenings beyond one-nighters in small galleries. Some of Campbell’s videos have played internationally, and his work figures in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. On a more local and timely basis, however, he hopes people will see the retrospective of his work at the WAG – not for his ego, for the message in his art.

The centerpiece of the show is Skin, an 18-minute film about women with AIDS. Among other things, it challenges the notion that AIDS is somehow the province only of gay men and intravenous drug users. The actresses in Skin all play white, middle-class heterosexuals.

“It was just extremely urgent that people start talking about this,” the former Manitoban mused recently.

The idea for the movie came last year when he attended an international AIDS conference in Montreal. “It was the first time I’d heard women speaking about AIDS.”

Hearing the women talk about the social, economic and medical devastation galvanized him. “I’d wanted to do a project on AIDS for a long time, and this just seemed to be a territory that had received very little attention in the media, and of course has become one of the very biggest problems in North America. The timing is grimly ironic. For all the years of disease, the danger to women has come under media scrutiny only in the past year or so. The film is extraordinarily timely, and I’m really sorry to say that.”

While he cautions that his works “cover a whole range of themes and topics,” he said his obscuring of sexual roles is a constant.

“The intent of the blurring of gender, and the questions around sexuality and gender, is my concern that gender or sexual preference not be a prioritized agenda, either in my work or in my society. So I try to keep all of those things present, in a kind of equal grounding for the audience to experience.”

While he has played women such as Robin, the photocopy clerk-turned-New Wave waif in the videos Modern Love and Bad Girls, he added, he has kept his own voice. “There’s no real attempt to fool the audience into thinking that here is a woman speaking.”

Although he lives now in Toronto, and teaches at the University of Toronto, Campbell, 48, was born in Reston, Manitoba. He took his first training at the University of Manitoba, where he graduated in 1966, winning a gold medal for his BFA. In 1969 he earned his master’s in fine arts from Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California.

In 1972 he started teaching in the art department at Acadia University in Sackville, N.B. Up to then he was a sculptor. Like some others in that discipline, Campbell began to experiment with video, being inspired by Dennis Oppenheim who, through video, used his own body as a model. “It was just a great breakthrough to work in,” Campbell