Dominated by dramatic colours and controlled chaos, Id’s Its is composed of a number of video art installations by Toronto artist Deirdre Logue. Focused on an expanded study of the tension between the interior self and the anticipations of the outside world, Logue’s works lean lightly on Freud’s somewhat archaic concept of the id and heavily on the artist’s physical performances for the camera. Id’s Its explores the richness of our malfunctions, psychic unrest, the power of the abject and our tendencies toward self-destruction. Moving between conscious and unconscious states, and on sanity’s sliding scales, the exhibitionbuilds on Logue’s ongoing engagements with her medium and the public and can be considered one of her most ambitious and polyphonic project to date.

Id’s Its is comprised of experimental self-portraits initially conceptualized during Logue’s summer residency at Open Space, Victoria in 2012. These multi-faceted installations continued her ongoing exploration into the psychological and physiological space of the self in contemporary art. Visitors to the exhibition will encounter an immersive and visually intense terrain. Logue is internationally recognized for her experimental film and video works that engage questions around queer identity, mental health, feminism, and the role of media arts in a broader spectrum of art and society.

Deirdre Logue was born in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada in 1964. She holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from Kent State University. Her performance based film, video and installation works are self-portraits uniquely located between comfort and trauma, self-liberation and self-annihilation. By using domestic objects and spaces to contrary ends, her works capture gesture, duration and the body as both subject and object. Her practice is not production or ‘master narrative’ driven nor is it dependent on the use of tools typically applied in conventional film and video, rather her work is made in a direct move away from an industry model and is expressly personal, emotional and political.

Solo exhibitions of her work have taken place at the Berlin International Film Festival, Oakville Galleries, YYZ Artists’ Outlet (Toronto), the Images Festival (Toronto) – where she won both Best Installation and Best of the Festival – Beyond/In Western New York, Art Star (Ottawa) and articule (Montréal). Group exhibitions include Traumatic Landscapes at the Centre for Art Tapes (Halifax), Achtung Baby at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (Buenos Aires), and The F Word at Western Front (Vancouver). Her work has also been featured at several important international events including Double Vision at the BFI (London), Live Film: Jack Smith!! at Kino Arsenal (Berlin) and CUE as part of the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver. Deirdre has also spent the past 18 years working on behalf of media artists by organizing independent film, video and new media festivals and participating in forums and symposiums on the future of independent artistic practice and film and video distribution. She was a founding member of Media City in Windsor, Executive Director of the Images Festival (1995-1999), Executive Director of the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre (2001-2006), and is currently the Development Director at Vtape.