
Trinity Square Video presents
Janis Cole
Remember Their
Names
Exhibition: July 4 to
August 8, 2009
Opening: July 4, 2009, 2 to 5pm
Master Class with Janis
Cole: July 18, 3 to 5pm
Sixty-five women
disappeared from the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside between 1978 and
2001. Families and friends appealed to the Vancouver Police for five long years
to investigate, but the investigation moved slowly. Then came the highly
sensationalized discovery that many of the missing women had been murdered.
Canada’s largest serial killing and crime-scene investigation drove the name of
the killer to international notoriety. Lost in the shadow of his name are the
names of his many victims.
Using photographic, audio and video-based documentary artifacts, such as missing
persons’ posters, a broadcast interview and recorded 1-800 tipline calls, Janis
Cole mediates our focus on these events through careful layering, repetition and
augmentation. By working with documents that group the women’s likenesses as
contingent images coded as criminal – specifically, posters that make them seem
‘wanted’ rather than missing – Cole permits the materials that once buried names
and personal identities to resurface as memorials that reassert presence while
indicting those who dared to disregard life. Confronting systematic dismissal
of missing women is long overdue. Remember
Their Names propels the “missing
women” to women who are missed.
Janis Cole is
an award-winning filmmaker, writer and artist. Her feature documentary films
include P4W: Prison for Women (1981),
which earned a Genie Award and Hookers
on Davie (1984), which won a Gold
Plaque at the Chicago International Film Festival. Other awards include the
NFB’s Best Canadian Short Film Award at the Toronto International Film Festival
(1990) and a Toronto Arts Award in Media Art (1994). Her television writing has
earned six Gemini nominations and a Writer’s Guild Top Ten Award. She writes for
several Toronto publications, teaches at the Ontario College of Art & Design and
is completing her Master of Fine Art in Documentary Media at Ryerson University.
To register for Janis Cole’s Master Class on
Narrative Structures in Video Installation, please contact TSV by phone or
email:
programming@trinitysquarevideo.com