These artists make videos that are sincere, funny and totally Canadian. Why aren't they ever shown together?

It all began with an underground video.

Way back when, somewhere between Y2K and the dawn of YouTube, Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau were living in Montreal. The duo have long been involved in the city's indie scene. They're the co-founders of the noise-rock band AIDS Wolf, and for years they ran Séripop, a graphic-design operation which created posters for countless local acts including their own. So it was sometime in the early aughts, while making the rounds at a local zine fair, when Lum and Desranleau got their paws on a DVD by the artist and animator Amy Lockhart.

The video was as DIY as it gets: a surreal suburban adventure starring a thrift-store drag queen with a Fubar hairdo, Miss Edmonton Teenburger 1983.

"Every single person who was into weird art, I would boot up the TV and the DVD and I'd be like, 'No, you have to see these shorts,'" says Lum, recalling the youthful customs of the pre-Facebook era. "I've been sharing that video with friends and peers for years — years before artists could host videos on their own websites — and it really felt like transmitting secret ancient knowledge," she laughs. 

Like fans of any cult movie, or meme for that matter, the artists would swap Miss Edmonton Teenburger quotes with their pals and laugh over references to Ketchup chips. But this wasn't some found-footage gem, this was art — art of a sort that didn't get much play at the galleries they knew.

"You would go to a lot of artist-run centres in the early aughts and everything was very, very serious. Like, you could not be funny or campy," says Lum. It's not that Canadian artists didn't have a long history of being funny; she and Desranleau grew up admiring General Idea. But, she says: "It does feel like [Lockhart] kind of helped build a space for this kind of work."

Earlier this fall, Lum and Desranleau unveiled a gallery exhibition that is all about that "kind of work" — prop-filled, theatrical, and sometimes bizarrely funny performance art. Its title? We Made This Mostly at Home with Stuff We Already Had in Our Apartment: Prop Performance and Camp in Contemporary Canadian Video Art. 

The show, which is appearing in Edmonton at the University of Alberta's FAB Gallery, gathers work by some of the most compelling artists in the country — finalists for the Sobey Art Award and Turner Prize among them — serious talents whose work is, generally speaking, not afraid to be silly.

Save for an installation by Beth Frey (the Canadian artist responsible for the AI abominations of Instagram's mesmerizing Sentient Muppet Factory), the exhibition is entirely focused on video. It's work with a homemade and often absurdly comic sensibility, where the inanimate "stuff" on screen is as expressive as the live performers. 

The show's complete runtime is roughly two and a half hours, but the curators have divided the program across four de facto screening rooms. Visitors can sit and watch short compilations of the selected works: videos that have been grouped by "esthetic resemblance," says Desranleau. The unicorns, wizards and mean-girl princesses of Miss Edmonton Teenburger 1983 in: You're Eternal screen alongside Maya Ben David's fandom critique Anthro Plane: Air Canada Gal and Bridget Moser's A Plant Growing Where A Plant Should Not Be Growing. 

The latter piece, created during the 2020 lockdowns, gave the exhibition its title. It's a line from the video credits — a phrase the curators liked because it captures a sense of homespun intimacy that's shared by all the works. Also, adds Desranleau: "it's super funny."

Moser herself was pleasantly surprised when she heard her video had inspired the name of the show. When she first learned about Lum and Desranleau's plans for the exhibition — and saw the group of artists they were assembling — she knew she'd fit right in. "I identify strongly with so many of the artists in the show, and many of them have had ideas that I'm very jealous of," she says. 

What do they all have in common? It's hard to pin down, Moser says, but she suggests it could have something to do with a similar attitude and approach to making art.

These artists are all funny, she says, but they don't work like comedians, where getting a laugh means mission accomplished. Instead, she says: "it's a balance between a sense of humour — having a comedic sensibility — and then also being really sincere in what you're trying to communicate. … And maybe it's that balance of sincerity and comedy that I feel very at home in."

Moser recognizes that dual quality in the videos of Séamus Gallagher, whose 2019 piece, Thinking of You Thinking of Me, is also in the show — and it's present in Lum and Desranleau's art practice, as well.

Over the last decade, the duo has increasingly moved into performance that's often captured on video — works where they employ a cast of performers and sculptural props. "The kind of campy element," says Desranleau, "is an esthetic we are really interested in and we're familiar with. For instance, some of our latest videos turn into operas or, like, musicals." 

The duo has exhibited at the Esker Foundation in Calgary, the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown and the MAC in Montreal, but according to Lum, they've never appeared in a show exclusively devoted to Canadian artists who work in the same style as them. That was a major motivation for curating the show at FAB Gallery. "We wanted to create a presence for the kind of work that we're interested in — like the work we're making — by putting a spotlight on our peers and friends," says Lum. 

"I think we started talking about it seven years ago," she says, but the duo's recent move to Edmonton, where they're now teaching at the University of Alberta, gave them the chance to finally make it happen. When offered the opportunity to bring their own art to the FAB Gallery, the duo opted to curate a group show instead — and they plan to present an expanded version of the exhibition in future. 

Moser agrees with Lum and Desranleau: you don't typically — if ever — see this many Canadian artists showing video art together. And it's even more unusual to be grouped with so many artists who share a sense of humour and fun. "I feel like usually it's treated like more of a niche. Like, here's the funny artist — and then here are the more serious artists that are in our group exhibition," says Moser. Looking at the list of exhibiting artists, Moser says she can't help but connect the dots between peers. She remembers writing about Lum and Desranleau as an undergrad; she worked with Gallagher while leading a residency at the Banff Centre. "There is a sort of generational continuity there," she says. 

"I think it's really important to bring the work together to kind of understand the broader constellation that all of it is part of," says Moser. "There's a dialog going on in between all of these different practices, but it usually feels like they're just happening individually all over the place."

We Made This Mostly at Home with Stuff We Already Had in Our Apartment: Prop Performance and Camp in Contemporary Canadian Video Art. Curated by Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau. Featuring works by Maya Ben David, Mike Bourschied, Edith Brunette François Lemieux, Océane Buxton & Salesforce Child, Marissa Sean Cruz, Rah Eleh, Erica Eyres, Beth Frey, Séamus Gallagher, Geneviève Matthieu, Lenore Claire Herrem, Marisa Hoicka, Mathieu Lacroix, Amy Lockhart, Elizabeth Milton, Bridget Moser, Sin Wai Kin. To Nov. 2 at FAB Gallery, University of Alberta, Edmonton. www.ualberta.ca