When the video camera first appeared on the market, artists hailed the newly available equipment as the new pencil, the better canvas, the best eye of all. The medium was exciting and revolutionary: low-cost and low-tech; “everybody” was curious as galleries and museums hastened to program new video works in festivals and exhibitions. However, little aesthetic or critical material was available on either artists or issues: it was generally assumed that artists’ video was just some kind of wannabe television — its concerns and achievements, and its relationship to the visual arts generally were too often undervalued. But video artists continued to explore and advance in the medium and works produced in the seventies are strikingly different from those of today.
Videotexts is an invaluable collection of essays — a comprehensive guide to Canadian video artists and their works. The essays focus on important individual tapes and artists and on the development of narrative forms: to construct meaning and confirm memory. Revised and updated, they offer a “present-tense” assessment of key works from the last twenty-five years, and of artists’ ideas and processes as they were unfolding. Everyone interested in video and contemporary art and culture will want to read them.

La Torontoise Peggy Gale est une auteure et conservatrice indépendante dont les écrits sur l'art contemporain, principalement la vidéo, sont devenus des références dans le milieu de l'art. Elle a publié des textes dans les ouvrages Video by Artists (1976, 1986), Mirror Machine : Video and Identity (1995) et Lectures obliques (1999), sans compter les nombreux catalogues de musées auxquels elle a collaboré et son recueil d'essais Videotexts paru en 1995. En plus de collaborer à des expositions. Peggy Gale en a organisé de nombreuses, dont Videoscape (Musée des beaux-arts de l'Ontario, 1974-1975), la XIVe Biennale internationalle de São Paulo (1977). Electronic Landscapes (Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, 1989), la première Biennale de l'image en mouvement (Madrid, 1990) et Tout le temps/Every Time (la Biennale de Montréal, 2000). En 2006, Peggy Gale a obtenu le Prix du Gouverneur général en arts visuels et en arts médiatiques.

Peggy Gale's profile page