Local Hero Programme

With a moving-image practice spanning 30 years and a stalwart, ongoing dedication to the molding of young artist minds at OCAD University, Toronto-based media artist Wrik Mead is truly a local hero. His distinct short-form works combine an animator’s patience with the reflexivity of the DIY psychodrama, producing brilliant first-person narratives of desire, difference and accommodation. Mead’s intelligent, sensitive parables are an intoxicating, visceral mix of painstaking pixillation, fairy-tale allegory and queer-identity. – Christine Lucy Latimer, Pleasure Dome Local Hero Programme includes the following titles: What Isabelle Wants (1987, super 8/16mm blowup, 3 minutes) Warm (1992, super 8/16mm blowup, 5 minutes) Closet Case (1995, super 8/16mm blowup, 3.5 minutes) Frostbite (1996, super 8/16mm/video, 16mm blowup,12 minutes) Guise (1997, 16mm on digital video, 10 minutes) Manipulator (2002, 16mm on digital video, 4 minutes) grotesque (2002, 16mm on digital video, 7.5 minutes) Filth (2004, 16mm on digital video, 4.5 minutes) bare (2008, digital video, 3 minutes) prick (2008, digital video, 3 minutes) winter’s end (2010, digital video, 7.5 minutes) summer 1975 (2014, digital video, 10 minutes)