For over 20 years, Deirdre Logue has been making intimate self-portraits and performances for the camera that explore excesses of emotion, queer subjectivities and the experience (at times painful) of living within a resilient but imperfect body. Taken as a whole, there has been little deviation from the mean – Logue alone with a camera either performing small, repeated, often strenuous gestures or brief confessionals spoken directly to the viewer. Logue’s newest body of work Double Double, debuting at Gallery 44 for the 30th anniversary of the Images Festival, continues this serial exploration of the artist in front of the camera, examining embodied ways knowing and feelings as both a productive and debilitating force within the body. The six works, shot on location during a residency at the School of Visual arts in Dawson City, occupy these in-between spaces, capturing the body in suspension, balancing its weight on arched feet or outstretched arms. Always on the precipice of holding back or over sharing, between mutual relation and co-dependency, between interior and exterior, between sleeping and awake, between balance and the fall, the series explores space through hyper-embodied awareness, collapsing feeling and knowing, the sensual and intuitive, in a unified way of understanding.
Deirdre Logue is the 2017 Canadian Artist Spotlight at the Images Festival. This exhibition is part of a larger celebration of Logue's practice which includes additional exhibitions in the Gallery 44 vitrines and at Aspace Gallery and Tangled Gallery, as well as a single-channel screening during the Images Festival.
Deirdre Logue holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from Kent State University. Recent solo exhibitions of her award winning film and video work have taken place at Open Space (Victoria), Oakville Galleries, the Images Festival (Toronto), the Berlin International Film Festival, Beyond/In Western New York, YYZ (Toronto), and articule (Montreal).
Logue has contributed over 25 years to working with artist-run organizations dedicated to media arts exhibition and distribution. She was a founding member of Media City, the Executive Director of the Images Festival, Executive Director of the CFMDC, founding member of the Media Arts Network of Ontario (MANO) and is currently the Development Director at Vtape. She is a champion of artist rights and has held numerous positions with organizations such as CARFAC National and the Independent Media Arts Alliance. Logue has been a member of the Independent Imaging Collective (the Film Farm) with Phil Hoffman since 1999 and directs the FAG Feminist Art Gallery with her partner, collaborator and artist Allyson Mitchell.
