Bio

Wrik Mead has emerged over the years as one of Canada’s most distinctive experimental filmmakers. His films are psycho-dramatic by inclination, first-person narratives of desire and accommodation. They are a mix of painstaking pixilation, fairy-tale allegory and queer identity, and are preoccupied with the materiality and tactility of film itself. Mead’s fantasy narratives offer provocative, ugly/beautiful, often unsettling explorations of desire and longing, isolation and confinement, ritual and transformation. In 1997, a retrospective of his work was presented at the Images Festival of Independent Film & Video in Toronto then travelled across Canada. Mead’s films have screened around the globe; recently his work was part of a major touring program of Canadian experimental film in Italy.

“For the past ten years, Toronto artist Wrik Mead has been making experimental films of great intelligence, depth and beauty.” - Scott McLeod

“His singular and poetic exploration of national, psychological and sexual identities is unique even in avant-garde circles.” - Tom McSorly, Canadian Film Instititute

“This is imagery so rough and gritty that it cannot possibly be called beautiful. And yet it is.” - Barbara Goslawski, Take One Magazine