Cathy Sisler

Video maker, Performance artist, Musician
female
Born
1957
in
United States
,
US
Lives in
Montreal , QC
Canada
,
Quebec CA
Biography

Video maker, performance artist, musician. US-bred, OCAD- and Concordia-trained Sisler was a prolific, prizewinning video artist working in Montreal throughout the 1990s. Her most recognizable trope was the “spinning woman,” an over-the-top (literally) conceptual role that she herself performed on street corners and other public spaces as recorded in many of her tapes, such as the four-part Aberrant Motion series (1993-1994). In these works, in Julianne Pidduck’s words (2004, 93), “she uses her (lesbian) body as an intervention in the everyday flow of ‘normal’ traffic, pedestrians, thought... imprint[ing] her aberrant body and ideas in the ‘normal movement’ of urban public space... [and] present[ing] unfashionable modes of deviation and risk” in contrast to the hip “outsider-ness” of so much so-called New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s. Twala (1996, 17) moved on to assail the comforts of happiness and coupledom—the only Canadian queer works to append a helpful bibliography?