“Wrik Mead, Toronto’s prolific poet-priest of pervert pixilation, has accumulated a unique body of more than twenty animated miniature narratives: queer fantasies, parables, dreams, and even documentaries.”* His films are psycho-dramatic by inclination, first person narratives of desire and accommodation. They’re a mix of painstaking pixilation, fairy-tale allegory and queer-identity and are preoccupied with the materiality and the tactility of film itself. In 1997, Toronto based PleasureDome presented a retrospective of his films that later went on to travel across Canada. In 2006, the CFMDC released a DVD compilation of his work with a study guide as part of the Artists’ Spotlight Series. Recently, he was included in the book The Sharpest Point: animation at the end of cinema and the OMSKBOOK, which was published by the London based artist collective OMSK.
Wrik graduated from the Ontario College of Art with honours in 1988 majoring in photography. He was part of the artist collective HomoGenius and following their first exhibition at Mercer Union in 1990 they produced several self-published books. He recently returned to his studies in 2004 and received his MA Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London (UK). He currently lives and works in Toronto and teaches in the Integrated Media and Photography Departments at OCAD University.
You can watch some of his films HERE
Gravity 3 minutes 1987
When you wake up and you have so much to do that you just want to go back to bed. The illusion created by shooting the entire film in reverse emphasizes the entire cycle of life.
