Hope Peterson
Directing
Biography
Born in Winnipeg, now living in Toronto, Hope Peterson holds an MFA from Concordia University in Open Media. Hope is a media artist and filmmaker working in experimental, documentary and installation genres. Her artistic practice references the tension of isolation, transition, surveillance, privacy and the pressures of living in a landscape mediated by technology. Her work has exhibited nationally and internationally and is in the collections of the University of Winnipeg and the National Gallery of Canada. Hope is also a cultural worker primarily in artist-run centres, and is an experienced grant writer, adjudicator and mentor.
Known For
A Day in the Life of a Bull-Dyke follows a big boned butch into skirmishes, drag, and the arms of a beautiful recruit. The public and private lives of this "strange animal" are explored with the reverence and glee found in the educational exposés like Reefer Madness and bad-boy films like Rebel without a Cause. However, because this fictionalized lesbian history is a first-person narrative, it is filled with all the joy, pain, and ambivalence each of us experiences while negotiating a marginalized identity.
A Day in the Life of a Bull-Dyke
A fantasy of freedom, a stroll in the park gives rise to an opening up of unstable sexual codes, shifting identities and the empowering game of come and go.
Memorial Park
Threshold Economics is surveillance video by the occupant subject. Tinged with a faint influence of radio noir, this cinematic immersion offers a complex of security peepholes, passing shadows, disembodied voices, the music of steam radiators. Installation at SAW Gallery, Ottawa in group show Take Me To Your Leader/Lead Me To Your Taker, May-July 2011; Single-channel exhibition in group show My Winnipeg, la Maison Rouge, Paris, June-August 2011.
Threshold Economics
Reeling in the filthy lanes of Winnipeg, a malfunctioning but still-observant camera conducts a post-traumatic investigation.