Wrik Mead

• 2011
• Wrik Mead

Over 2500 hand drawn frames create a rotoscope animation of a figure that continuously climbs and falls from a bust of the artist. As the animated figure moves around the bust he exposes different parts of the artists own skin. The performance is an endless loop as he struggles to reach the top. His victory is short lived though as he stumbles shortly after he reaches the summit. After the fall he simply brushes himself and begins the climb again.

• 2010
• Wrik Mead

The “Manholes” series takes a pan of a single male figure and fragments it into a grid of peepholes. The microscopic mapping of the body is intimate yet clinical. The cascading body parts create a kaleidoscope of changing skin tones. It is difficult to find the point of origin on the subject’s body, though occasionally signifiers make it possible; an eye, a nipple or the toes suddenly orient the viewer.

• 2010
• Wrik Mead

The “Manholes” series takes a pan of a single male figure and fragments it into a grid of peepholes. The microscopic mapping of the body is intimate yet clinical. The cascading body parts create a kaleidoscope of changing skin tones. It is difficult to find the point of origin on the subject’s body, though occasionally signifiers make it possible; an eye, a nipple or the toes suddenly orient the viewer.

• 2010
• Wrik Mead

In “Milkman,” a seated male figure sits staring endlessly ahead, his gaze locked on the viewer. Milk is streaming from his nipple and into a glass that he holds in his left hand. The continuous flow of milk never seems to fill the glass. The sound of the flowing milk creates a human fountain out of this portrait.

• 2010
• Wrik Mead

A wintery sun sets on a scene of loss and mourning. The grieving protagonist plummets capriciously from one state of sadness and confusion to another. Battered by forces malevolent and absurd, mirroring his unpredictable emotional states, he repeatedly falls into an avalanche of ice. Down into a barrage of helping hands, down into a winter forest, down into rooms full of memories, and finally down into the place where he must accept the truth.

• 2008
• Wrik Mead

Two male blow-up dolls become puppets in this short. Not only is one of the men out of air, but both of them are tragically out of synch with one another.

• 2008
• Wrik Mead

Stop-motion animation is used to manipulate a penis whose desire becomes its own demise.

• 2004
• Wrik Mead

The housecall in “Filth” doesn’t go quite as planned when a simple cleaning job becomes a nightmare. A pixilated tale which combines both the action in the film and the action on the film.

• 2002
• Wrik Mead

A devil makes a violent attempt to change himself into a heavenly creature.

• 2002
• Wrik Mead

A master brings out his slave and attempts to control him.

• 2001
• Wrik Mead

A lonely figure walks to a private screening room. What he is getting excited about is not what it may appear.

• 2000
• Wrik Mead

Based on real-life experiences, CAMP recounts the stories of homosexual survivors of the WWII concentration camps.

• 1999
• Wrik Mead

HOOLBOOM is a film that Arts Toronto commissioned local filmmaker Wrik Mead to make based on his impressions of fellow filmmaker Mike Hoolboom.

• 1999
• Wrik Mead

The curtains are drawn, a clown stands in the spotlight, the reception is dismal. Before s/he can even begin to perform, debilitating fear takes over.

• 1998
• Wrik Mead

Cupid gets beaten at his own game.

• 1998
• Wrik Mead

Mixing fact and fiction, this film tells the story of Dr. F.R. Wake and his bizarre creation, which became known as "the fruit machine." In the 1960s, Wake was hired by the Canadian government to devise a series of tests that would expose homosexuals working in the civil service.

• 1997
• Wrik Mead

GUISE is an adult fairy tale for the 90s. Arising from the earth, a body discovers its nakedness. A suit of armour becomes a metaphor for the trappings of identity. Pixilated to produce the effect of a human marionette, accompanied by a good-natured verse. “guise” is by turns dark and humorous.

• 1996
• Wrik Mead

A lonely lighthouse keeper rescues his fantasy: a frostbitten man on the rocks.

• 1995
• Wrik Mead

"In ‘(ab)NORMAL’ the relationship spectrum, from paranoid avoidance to smothering and overwhelming attention, is traced through four pixilated sketches." - Toronto International Film Festival

• 1995
• Wrik Mead

"In this quintessential 'coming out' film, a grinding rhythm leads us through a passage of closed doors, as a man struggles to break free from his literal and social confinement." - Images Festival of Independent Film & Video catalogue, 1995

• 1994
• Wrik Mead

HOMEBELLY combines waking dreams with unsettling fragments of this and that. An icy soundscape is set to a live-action animated drama featuring a sleeping body and a persistant rock.

• 1992
• Wrik Mead

DEVIATE is a short Super 8 film made specifically for the Memorial Project. While friends of Dan Moyen, who died of AIDS in 1990, talk about him, the viewer sees old footage of Dan expressing his feelings on the matter.

• 1992
• Wrik Mead

Animated magazine cutouts of two men having sex lead into appropriated gay porn images, blurred to the point where they become abstract colour and motion.

• 1988
• Wrik Mead

The political emotions of the butcher shop are discussed within the codes of Catholicism. Purging Catholic guilt, sins of the flesh, and flesh eating.

• 1987
• Wrik Mead

Utilizing human pixillation, Isabelle's demand to nurture conjures a variety of sensations... perverse, kitsch, sweet witch voodoo?