…. No one interested in the arts could be young in the Toronto of the 60's and 70’s without being aware of the presence in that city of Herman Northrop Frye, the great literary scholar who, in works like The Anatomy of Criticism, The Secular Scripture, and The Great Code traced the role and structure of myths in shaping our lives, and our programmed re-enactment of them; and of the man referred to then as the pop philosopher of media, author of The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, The Medium is the Massage, Herbert Marshall McLuhan, and the gang of noisy accolytes hanging around the old coach-house on Queen's Park Crescent that served as his centre of operations.

Frye and McLuhan, Herman and Herbert, formed the twin poles of intellectual exploration that permeated the life of an otherwise puritan town where in those years you had to sign your name, address and phone number on a pre-printed form before the Ontario Liquor Control Board could be persuaded to sell you a bottle of wine.

Frye's gravitas and McLuhan's love of the verbal trapeze, elephant and flea, lion and unicorn, Henry James and H. G. Wells, -- no longer part of our everyday reality, their antinomic presences nevertheless still haunt the spaces, both literal and figurative, that they respectively inhabited in different corners of the city. Victoria College on the one hand and the Coach House on the other are populated differently now, and a woman can make art, even (or especially) using video and other new media without feeling like an alien intruder into another species’ terrain. At the time, working without elders or exemplars, or any exterior reflection of my concerns, it's perhaps not surprising that I found myself making works centred on the nature of absence.

…. Fast-forward from then to now, and meet the young men I sometimes work with who are in thrall to dreams of cybersex and drawn to delusions of media-based power. I hear them discussing knowledgeably and earnestly the prospect of virtual intimacy with this or that voluptuous celebrity, while others, making gallery art and debating yet another alleged death and re-birth of painting, view me and them with suspicion.

Situated in space and time between these two brotherhoods; the Herman - Herbert force-field on the one hand, with its world of intellectual passion, and the current young men's fantasies of seducing a virtual Marilyn Monroe on the other, with its smart cyber-talk, I was protected by the curious twin invisibilities that accompany being a woman and a Canadian. For such a person, a person off the map, so to say, there were no expectations, and therefore no rules. I found myself working with the kinds of embedded assumptions carried by popular literary formats like the romance or the suspense thriller, finding these useful vehicles of inquiry into the questions that interested me. As you saw in the quick slide survey, I began to make videotapes, situating these inside installations, which I then used as sets within which I shot the next tape, each re-creating the world for the next.

Excerpts from Signs of a Plot: A Text, True Story & Work of Art;

The Secret Life of Conrelia Lumsden: Her Room in Paris. )

The climate I had inhaled before then, in Montréal, included the aura that lingered even two generations later of Rutherford's historic experiments in particle physics at McGill University, my Alma Mater, and the news from up the street at the Montreal Neurological Institute, of Wilder Penfield’s and Donald Hebb’s successes in mapping the precise locus in the brain of where we store those structures we call parts of speech . The biologist Desmond Morris, who later wrote a not so interesting book called The Human Ape, was finishing his rather more rigorous doctoral dissertation, The Biology of Art, in which he reported his field studies on the differences between artist and non-artist chimpanzees, finding in the animal kingdom evidence of what was hitherto assumed to be quintessentially human, and undoing those assumptions.

Other experiments of the day suggested not only that chimps and orangutans could be observed to invent culture but that they knew how to transmit these invented behaviours to other members of their band. The anthropologist Margaret Mead, one of the few women, with Ruth Benedict, whose work was widely known at the time, remained active and effective despite the standard mockeries of male colleagues ( now entering a new posthumous phase, in which all her work is being called into question). Among other things, Mead was doing studies of "handedness", tracing the relationships between open and closed-handed carrying of infants to the larger cultural beliefs in those same societies that seemed to echo or form these behaviours. Michael Polanyi was looking at the human-machine relationship and writing in the magazine "Science" about systems of dual control, and Expo '67 in Montreal marked a national coming of age and an international presence, encouraging the notion that all these frontiers could and would be effortlessly traversed.

Somehow, in the process of mapping borders between human and animal, human and machine, these boundaries were conceptually dissolved and art-making became part of a greater multidirectional continuum than I could have supposed from the artist-as-martyr-hero recruitment myths that had originally drawn me into studio practice ….