Lisa Steele

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Lisa Steele (b. 1947 in Kansas City, Missouri) is a Canadian artist, a pioneer in video art, educator, curator and co-founder of V tape in Toronto. Born in the United States, Steele moved to Canada in 1968 and is now a Canadian citizen. She has collaborated exclusively with her partner Kim Tomczak since the early 1980s.

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[edit] Biography

Lisa Steele was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1947 and immigrated to Canada in 1968. An important pioneer of video art in Canada since the early 1970s, Steele has shown internationally at the Venice Biennale (1980), the Kunsthalle (Basel), the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the National Gallery of Canada, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), 49th Parallel Videoseries, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Long Beach Museum. Her videos are in collections worldwide, including The National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Houston, Texas), Ingrid Oppenheim, Concordia University (Montreal), Newcastle Polytechnic (England), Paulo Cardazzo (Milan), the Canadian Embassy (Tokyo) and the Akademie der Kunst (Berlin). She is a founding director of V tape in Toronto, a national information and distribution service for independent video and a founding publisher and editor of FUSE magazine. Since the early 1980s Steele has worked exclusively in collaboration with Kim Tomczak. Their individual and collaborative work was the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1989-90. In 1993, Steele and Tomczak were recognized with two prestigious awards: the Bell Canada Award for excellence in the field of Canadian video art and a Toronto Arts Award (the Peter Herndorf Media Arts Award). In 1996, their work The Blood Records: written and annotated, received a world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Their installation work We're Getting Younger All the Time has been installed in several locations in England, in Venice and was at the Centre d'art Contemporain in Basse-Normandie in November 2002. In 2005 Steele and Tomczak won the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts.

[edit] Works

[edit] Select Videography

  • Birthday Suit - with scars and defects (1972)
  • A Very Personal Story (1974)
  • The Ballad Of Dan Peoples (1976)
  • The Gloria Tapes (1980)

with Kim Tomczak:

  • Working The Double Shift (1984)
  • Legal Memory (1992)
  • The Blood Records: written and annotated (1997)
  • We're Getting Younger All The Time (2001)
  • Make Love Not War (2003)
  • Practicing Death (2003)
  • Free Speech (2006)

[edit] Bibliography

  • Ardenne, Paul. Lisa Steele, Kim Tomczak: Before I Wake. Paris: Centre culturel canadien, 2003.
  • Ferguson, Bruce. Canada Video: Colin Campbell, Pierre Falardeau/Julien Poulin, General Idea, Tom Sherman, Lisa Steele. Ottawa: The Gallery for the Corporation of National Museums of Canada, 1980.
  • Gale, Peggy and Lisa Steele, eds. Video re/View: The (best) Source Book for Critical Writings on Canadian Artists' Video. Toronto: Art Metropole, 1996.
  • Monk, Philip. 4 hours and 38 minutes: Videotapes by Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1989.
  • Steele, Lisa and Kim Tomczak. The Blood Records: written and annotated. Oakville: Oakville Galleries, 1999.

[edit] External links