(Originally published in: Globe and Mail newspaper, Dec. 26, 1991)

It's the morning after, in a photocopying room deep inside one of the Toronto Dominion Centre's soaring towers. Robin, an office temp who operates a Xerox machine and is also the beleaguered heroine of Colin Campbell's 1979 videotape Modern Love, muses about her wild night in the company of La Monte Del Monte, all-around sleazoid and cad (played by David Buchan). "All those little machines and instruments," she wonders aloud to herself. "And I always thought a French tickler was some kind of bilingual joke."

Then Robin, who is acted by the artist himself, absent-mindedly pulls at her long, dark ponytail and frowns wistfully, like a child more bewildered than unhappy—and, as so often happens during a Colin Campbell screening, a smile goes round the house. I don't think it's a smile at Robin, but at ourselves, and at the pickles into which sex and desire get even the cleverest, coolest people. It may also be something of a nervous smile, inasmuch as the woman here is really a crossed-dressed man playing at being a woman—and few things make men more nervous (and curious and oddly alert) than the spectacle of other men posing as powerless women.

The theatrics of sexuality, the melancholy and ironies of eros—such are Campbell's topics, and the themes so charmingly, strongly treated in the important retrospective now on view until Jan. 5 at The Power Plant. Organized by Bruce Ferguson, a curator associated with the Winnipeg Art Gallery, this series provides an able sampler of Campbell's prolific work in video, and the first chance Toronto audiences have had to see the seminal early work since 1985.

Born in Manitoba 49 years ago, active as an artist, writer and teacher in Toronto since 1973, Campbell has always avoided technical slickness and the gleaming, flawless skin of television imagery. Instead, he has kept close to the style of video in the early 1970s, the formative days of this media art in Canada. The deliberately casual script, the knocked-together sets, the casts simply assembled from among the artist's mates, the snubbing of TV's rapid, clean pacing—such are the elements of the look of Campbell's art, and the source of much of its rough appeal. Despite the recent pressure to turn video into a weapon against the networks, this artist has refused to get onto the neo-avant-garde band-wagon, preferring instead to use his camera to probe the pretensions of ideology, and to satirize the sexual manners and modes of our time.

Campbell ranges widely for objects for his gentle send-ups. He finds love-starved Robin in the blankly middle-class Toronto suburb of Thornhill. He goes to California to find The Woman from Malibu, a matron being driven mad by the real-world demands from which her late husband always protected her. He goes down to Toronto's Cabana Room, a grubby downtown club briefly popular with Queen Street artists and New Wave musicians in the late 1970s, for the rowdy bunch of countercultural types featured in Bad Girls.

And in the delightful 1988 tape Fiddle Faddle, his attention turns, with characteristic irony, and without a whiff of condescension, to the academic feminists so conspicuous in the art world of the late 1980s. Here, Campbell's anti-heroine is a politically incorrect lesbian journalist named Rosa Cosa, who has been dispatched by some obscure journal to cover a conference on semiotics and erotics at the University of Toronto.

Campbell's target here is, of course, not serious feminism or serious political conviction, but rather the stale, static roles into which seriousness (especially about sex) is constantly tempting us. In twenty years, this excellent Toronto artist has been creating an art that wonderfully tempts us in the other direction—toward a kindly acknowledgment of the ambiguous, desiring, self-deluded, almost irrepressibly hopeful creatures we are, toward skepticism about the pseudo-satisfactions of ideology, and hence toward freedom.