Lesley Loksi Chan

In the 1990s, Chinese-Canadian artist Lloyd Wong began a video work about his living with HIV. It remained unfinished. Thirty years after his death, filmmaker Lesley Loksi Chan discovers and edits the material.

We all know better than to click on a pop-up ad promising us thousands of dollars. We all know better than to go into debt. We all know better than to take a job that promises easy cash. But we all make mistakes, and Melissa Howell (Katherine Cullen) has somehow found herself at the intersection of broke and desperate. While ignoring calls from a debt-collection agency, she takes a job at as a quasi-telemarketer, selling vacation packages to people who call in thinking they’ve won a cash prize. At job orientation, she meets her gratingly enthusiastic boss Frances (“you can call me Fran”), played by Erika Batdorf, and a happily spacey co-worker, played by Lesley Loksi Chan.

The arrival of a new worker to a jeans factory causes changes to the rhythms of the workplace. This mysterious narrative integrates personal and collective history with fiction. The visuals were created with both found images and original photography reproduced on acetate sheets which were subsequently sewn together and projected onto a wall and video-taped. This mixed-media work is a reflection on the repetitive labour and materiality of textile work and the im/possibilities for resistance to challenging working conditions.

A documentary about maximalist Toronto media artist and sculptor Allyson Mitchell as she preps her Ladies Sasquatch installation – a fake fur creature wonderland. The large-bodied sasquatch ladies are feminist exclamation marks and icons, celebrating their “different bodies,” as the artist explains in a winning voice-over that drives the movie. Thrift store accumulations and found handicrafts are repurposed, blurring ideas of craft and art, high and low. How to turn what is overlooked, discarded and without value, or even feared and despised, and put these bodies at the centre of a new conversation? Mitchell’s work provides a blueprint for how to love our monsters.

A rumination on the Toronto-based artist and video maker Lloyd Wong whose unfinished tapes from the early '90s Chan collages together.