Nikki Forrest

female
Born
1964
Biography

Video maker. Born in Scotland, trained at the University of Saskatchewan and Concordia, Forrest has been active in the Montreal experimental video scene since 1989. A staple of queer community festival “local heroes” programmes, her eight or so tapes are mostly ascetic but luminous and personal. Static (1995, 7) was more explicit and narrative than most in its citation of queerbaiting media discourse over oblique everyday images of a dyke couple. Seen first sleeping, then getting dressed, they make their way around grey subdued Montreal in the artist’s characteristic slow motion, and then a quietly poetic but defiant female voice takes over from the hatred, spoken over the scarcely perceptible gesture of two hands grazing each other as the women walk, part of process the voice calls “reconfiguring.”