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Vtape
1980–Present

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Location

Canada

Ontario, Canada

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Description

Vtape is a vibrant distribution organization that represents an international collection of contemporary and historical video art, documentaries, and installations. We make this collection accessible to curators and programmers, educators, scholars, and public audiences worldwide. In addition to providing a distribution framework for established and emerging artists, Vtape is committed to sharing video art preservation and exhibition standards, and strives to support hybrid practices in an increasingly complex technical milieu. In addition to single-channel, artist-created and -controlled, non-commercial video art, Vtape represents performance-based works, video art installations, conceptual art videos and new media, as well as social issue documentaries, human-rights-oriented, LGBTQ+, and feminist works. We are particularly committed to increasing awareness of Aboriginal media arts production worldwide. Vtape also specializes in works that experiment with the medium of video and that locate themselves on the edge of the technological avant-garde. Each year Vtape presents exhibitions, publications, and talks, making us a key contributor to the visibility of contemporary and historical media art in Canada. Vtape’s programming focuses primarily on presentations by single artists, selected thematic exhibitions, and the results of our curatorial and research residencies. Talks by artists and curators accompany the programming and further encourage public discussion and interest in the work and the field as a whole. By providing training and learning opportunities for emerging artists and cultural workers, we offer essential experience with contemporary media artworks and historical artists’ practices and critical discourse. We are committed to maintaining financial and organizational balance, to providing a unique facility with contemporary equipment and experienced staff, and to encouraging collaborations and exchanges between artists, exhibitors, institutions, and funding agencies. Vtape provides distribution information to art galleries, museums, educational institutions, film and media arts festivals, broadcasters, diverse community groups, the First Nations community, curators, scholars, students, and the general public. We offer the preview, rental, sale, and licensing of video artworks from our distribution collection for the purposes of exhibition, screening, and institutional and private acquisition.

Vtape. “About Vtape.” Accessed February 4, 2024. https://vtape.org/about-vtape.
Works in catalogue
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    Cream Soda

    film/video, 1975

    A documentary made by Janis Cole and Holly Dale inside a private strip club that acted much the same way as massage parlours in the 1970s in Toronto. The woman working in the club are friends of the filmmakers.

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    Minimum Charge, No Cover

    film/video, 1976

    In Minimum Charge, No Cover the sexual revolution swings on as Cole and Dale introduce us to a transsexual as she takes a bath, a prostitute as she carves roast beef for her son's dinner and a group of black drag queens as they prepare their transformation.

  • P4W: Prison for Women

    film/video, 1981

    A feature length documentary made inside Canada’s only maximum security prison — at the time of production filming in 1980. The prison was closed in 2000.

  • Hookers on Davie

    film/video, 1984

    Janis Cole and Holly Dale made their feature length documentary about sex work in Vancouver where cis women worked with transgender women, transvestites and males in what once once known as the prostitution capitol of Canada. A court injunction and the work of Concerned Residents of the West End (CROWE) moved the hookers out of the area and into more dangerous non-residential neighbourhoods in the summer of 1984.

  • Three Faces of Women

    film/video, 1989

    Rick Castro's outrageous Three Faces of Women looks at the fleeting relationships between today's lesbian drag queen, specifically the interracial one played by legends Bruce La Bruce and Vaginal Creme Davis. "Because you're drag queen lesbians you must be dealing with gender issues as well," observes the Freudian therapist who helps the couple put "the fear of rape" back into their relationship. "I feel the sense of danger immediately," Ms Davis says as La Bruce straps on a rubbery black dildo. "Your dildo is the biggest dildo. It's the blackest dildo. It's the strap onniest dildo," she cooes. In the end, the three are seen lounging in bed, sucking each other's toes as Davis incites them: "Dig it, dig it... dirty bitches." She means it in only the most empowering way.

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    A fun, unique, informative "docu-porn drama" about a woman who became a man, and is now actually a surgically-made hermaphrodite. it includes an intimate view of the night he and Annie Sprinkle tried out his new, surgically constructed penis for the first time. Revealing interviews and explicit medical photographs have to be seen to be believed.

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    Chroniques

    film/video, 1992

    In Chroniques, Mirha-Soleil Ross is well aware that her candid comments are not welcome at your local queer festival.

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    Granny's Bedtime Story

    film/video, 1992

    Granny's Bedtime Story is a hardcore S/M lesbian porn. Subverting the pornographic narrative by the use of overlaying a simple family auto-biographic true story. Narrated like Mr. Roger's Neighbourhood but gone bad, bad, bad and pornographic. In Sado/Masochism sexuality, women playing the dominatrix position are characterized by either the School Marm Mistress, Nasty Enema Nurse, Female S.S. Commandant or some rendition of a leather Elviroid. Perhaps a reason for this is the collective familial silence that sees the notion of sadism as a projection displaced outside our family; when in actuality, our first sadistic/masochistic experience is generally at home, and family situated. In Jung's classic female triad of Virgin, matron, Crone, the Crone is somehow desexed, no longer holding erotic power. No doubt Jung took on traditional collective accepted sexual values. In this tape societies sexual taboos are challenged on many levels by the Sadistic Sex lead being played by an alarmingly sexy granny with a cane. Granny's Bedtime Story is a 'homage' to Roger Corman's Bloody Momma in characterization and in style a 'homage' to Jean Luc Godard's Numero Deux on a budget.

  • Gendertroublemakers

    film/video, 1993

    "We are two gender queens, gender outlaws, trans-dykes, gender troublemakers" so begins this intimate portrait of the video makers, two kick-ass radical transgender activists living in Toronto. Jeanne and Xanthra publish Gendertrash, a transgender zine, and give the dish on gay male misogyny and all of its complex articulations in contemporary gay culture.

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    An urban transsexual finds herself in a sticky situation.

  • A group of F-to-Ms pose as queer boys and flaunt it in a gay cruise park to explore the pleasures of fag sex.

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    Dysfunctional

    film/video, 1997

    Hot and tender sex between a man and a pre-op male to female transsexual. Transsexual sexuality with 19th century accordion twist.

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    A conversation with Toronto-based female-to-male transsexual Peter Dunnigan speaking openly about addiction and recovery and yearnings for the support of a community of FTMs.

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    TRANzINFO

    film/video, 1997

    Originally created for a Gay & Lesbian television show, Tranzinfo has been repeatedly broadcast nationally, (Canada). This video has been used as an educational tool and is found in the libraries of York University and the University of Toronto. It has also played theatrically at many of the Canadian Alternative film festivals.

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    Sando to Samantha

    film/video, 1997

    The true story of Sando Willemse, aka Samantha Fox, a black drag queen turned soldier in the South African defence Force. And did she turn soldiers! Sando perfected the art of dikvel - a real thick-skinned queen who never let life's challenges get the better of him. Having survived, thrived and found a place in the army, Sando was tested for HIV without his permission. His HIV+ status was disclosed to his entire squad by the army command and he was summarily discharged from the army. He turned to the road to survive, finding a new home and support from other drag queens working Cape Town's streets. He died of HIV related complications in 1966 aged 22 years. This docu-drama is narrated by Sando and blends interview and drama to provide testimony to his courage and daring.

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    Shadmith Manzo Performance

    film/video, 1998

    Both powerful and poignant, Shadmith Manzo guides us on a journey of fear, strength and determination in the face of being deported.

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    Crossing Borders

    film/video, 1998

    Crossing social, economic, political and philosophical lines, everyone is bound together by a common desire to freely explore and express gender identities by transcending gender norms.

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    The Man From Venus

    film/video, 1999

    The Man From Venus provides a poetic discourse on the power of self-identification and the struggles one goes through to get there.

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    Kore Cara Mia

    film/video, 1999

    An uncensored dream story of two lovers, one of them has AIDS. Visually lush and blurred this is an AIDS sexuality that goes all the way. Kore Cara Mia is based on a story written by Lydia Swartz called What We Do In Bed. the story has been published in Libido Magazine, 1994; NY City Lesbian Health Fair,1995; Women to Women III, 1996 and the Best of Libido, 1997. Many times when I lecture or curate on the subject of women's sexuality, women complain that they would like emotions with their sexual images. Kore Cara Mia tries to be both hyper-emotional and sexual. It's an operatic version of a MTV music video. What We Do In Bed was written and Kore Cara Mia made in an attempt to not only portray the sexiness, but also the emotional atmosphere around using safe sex. I used a cinematic style of chromic saturated images and blurred explicit images to entice and pleasure in particular, the aesthetic of a female gaze. In Roman mythology Kore refers to their rendition of Persephone, the beautiful woman that gets abducted into the underworld and Cara Mia is used in opera with much pounding of the chest, meaning my heart. In any relationship where there is AIDS, death or Hades becomes an overbearing integer, heightening the sexuality. That component was made into a fantastical fantasy of hungry cruel eroticism. Reminiscent of Peggy's Ahwesh's work in taboo confrontations.

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    G-SPrOuT!

    film/video, 2000

    A cyberspace encounter turns into a trans/polysexual vegan-docu-porno featuring urban veggie lovers speaking out on dating, intimacy and sex in a meat-centered culture.

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    SKOUNDX

    film/video, 2000

    A transensual femme catches sight of an FTM on the beach and becomes susceptible to chroma colour fantasies.

  • And Then There Were Three

    film/video, 2000

    Portrait of Genetic Girl Paddy's marriages and attractions to TS/TG people.

  • Trans girl Lilith crashes brother Bernie's hopes for a romantic evening alone with his pop star idol, Blisstina Arfuilera.

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    Tremblement de Chair

    film/video, 2001

    A poetic meditation on the beauty, perils and power of sexuality in a transsexual woman's body.

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    Madame Lauraine, a flamboyant brothel madam and entrepreneur, introduces us to some of her staff: four transsexual sex workers who find fulfillment in both their professional and personal lives. Steamy sex scenes are interspersed with witty remarks that weave pedagogy and activism into this work, actively educating on safer-sex practices and respectful etiquette for patrons of sex workers.

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    Proud Lives

    film/video, 2002

    In 2001, transsexual activist, sex worker, and performance artist Mirha-Soleil Ross was elected Grand Marshall for Toronto's annual LGBT Pride Parade. This was done in recognition of her hard work on behalf of the transsexual, transgender, and sex worker communities. Dressed as the Lady of the Beasts, she emerged from the deep urban woods with her pack of coyotes to lead a performance celebrating the actions and victories of the underground Animal Liberation Front and to show support for all the courageous activists who every year risk their freedom to liberate animals from places of abuse and exploitation.

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    On May 1, 2002, transsexual sex worker and performance artist Mirha-Soleil Ross delivered a series of blows in monologue form at anti-prostitution discourses and campaigns, detailing the way they impact, often tragically, on prostitutes' working conditions and lives. This video combines savvy performance documentation with hard-hitting animal rights footage to become a manifesto for the freedom of all beings.

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    Brandee aka Al Lana Lamarre

    film/video, 2007

    Legendary Warwick Hotel Superstar BRANDEE —aka Al Lana Lamarre— passed away during her sleep on April 7th, 2007. She was 80 years old and some dust... A life-long entertainer, BRANDEE was appreciated and loved by family, friends and fans alike. This brief vignette featuring Brandee and her friend Georgie was recorded by Mirha-Soleil Ross and Mark Karbusicky on the December 17th, 2006.

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    AKIN

    film/video, 2012

    With haunting suburban visuals backed by the rich sounds of Toronto based-band Ohbijou, Akin engages a relationship between an Orthodox Jewish mother and her transgender son as they navigate silent secrets of a shared past.

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    A Year In Review

    film/video, 2013

    Honest reflections beautifully filmed about a tough year when things fell apart, connections were missed, love turned to heartache.

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    Just Dandy

    film/video, 2013

    Invited to speak at an Indigenous Revolutionary Meeting, the narrator describes an intimate encounter with an Evil Colonizing Queen which leads to Turtle Island's contraction of an invasive European flora.

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    Jizz Envy

    film/video, 2014

    In this adult-oriented mock fairy tale, female ejaculation and true love mark some of the avenues through which a trans male can find his happy ending.

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    Freak Control

    film/video, 2014

    As society moves forward away from viewing gender dysphoria as a mental illness, what happens when legitimate mental illness is intertwined with transexuality? A layered narrative highlights the multiplicity that comes with wearing many masks in order to survive.

  • SELFIE

    film/video, 2014

    In the video SELFIE the artist uses the pop culture trend of the "seflie" as a milestone of identity around a trans-male narrative. He questions, who are you? What are you doing? Where are you going? Why does it matter? How do you familiarize yourself with your own trajectory?

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    Public P(arts)

    film/video, 2015

    PUBLIC P(ARTS) is an exploration of trans-male being. In the video, a man and his prosthesis have a bath.

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    Don't worry if you are just coming out as a 2 Spirited person, we have just the introductory special for you! New to the 2 Spirit lifestyle? `Want to talk to someone in the Spirit and the Flesh instead of reading The Spirit and the Flesh? We have just the service for you! Call now and for only 19.99 a month you can get instant unlimited telephone access to traditional knowledge and support. We also provide monthly gifts for subscribers, call now and we can hook you up with this beaded whisk! Perfect for DIY spankings and pancakes the morning after your first snag! Don't hesitate, ring those phones!

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    2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com queers and indigenizes traditional dating site advertisements. Using a Butch NDN 'lavalife" lady (performed by director Theo Jean Cuthand), 2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com seduces the viewer into 2 Spirit "snagging and shacking up" with suggestions of nearby pipeline protests to take your date to, and helpful elders who will matchmake you and tell off disrespectful suitors. It's the culturally appropriate website all single 2 Spirit people wish existed. Following up on his video "2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99" this work examines the forces of capitalism through envisioning a "financially unfeasible" service for a small minority community.