Wrik Mead
Toronto’s prolific poet of pervert pixillation, Goldsmith's (UK)-trained Mead has since 1987 made a unique body of more than twenty miniatures of manic queer narrative fantasies, parables and dreams. Some are frothy fun, such as Cupid (1998), the fable of the adult cupid lurking at a party scene who shoots his arrow at a hunk who throws it back on-target, whereupon the cupid is enveloped in his own snake-like cock and dragged offscreen. Some betray the erotic intensity of the closet romantic, such as Frostbite (1996) in which a lighthouse keeper rescues a frozen dreamboat sailor, bathes him and cares for him and lives happily ever after–not without a gorey moment along the way. Other works are fraught with more painful material such as two later ambitious works combining more conventional narrative and documentary discourses, reflecting on the heaviness of queer history: Fruit Machine (1998) about the postwar RCMP anti-gay purge, and Camp (2000) about the queer Holocaust. Often based on single-frame images in Super 8 and other formats, Mead’s work offers a distinctive vision of the gay body, jerky, acrobatic, impulsive, passionate. Mead has combined his production with teaching at OCAD.