The six experimental short videos by Canadian and Indigenous artists in Nature Lover
explore nature, desire and the human body
by reimagining our relationship to gender
and identity. The program features: Shelley
Niro’s Niagara, Jorge Lozano’s Two Coupling
Insects Teach Latin, Geoffrey Pugen’s Zenith,
Deirdre Logue’s Pond, Lisa Birke’s Babe in the
Woods Trilogy and Kent Monkman’s Group of
Seven Inches.

Two Coupling Insects Teach Latin, 2014
In this video, we watch the artist Jorge Lozano as he watches a woman, Alexandra Gelis, in a meadow filming two beetles mating. Through this spilt-screen interplay of watching and being watched, Lozano asks a series of questions exposing a structure of naming in western capitalism by using the Latin terms of the plants and other species surrounding the artists in the field. Lozano contemplates, what does nature tell us about ourselves? Why are we here? What is our role? How do we co-habitat with other species? How do
we create new ways of being with nature? Instead of providing us with answers, the audience is asked to acknowledge our relationship to our own natural environment.

Geoffrey Pugen’s Zenith, 2008.
This video takes place during an Utopics workshop, a program designed by Scott Martin, based out of Canada as an online course with a retreat component that is located in Northern Canada. Zenith dramatically illustrates the fluid nature of identity and desire through performance, ritual and ceremony. In this video, the audience is witness to an intimate process of metamorphosis and transformation of self into other as Claudia Wittmann, who today identifies as claude wittmann experiences very real identity research. I suggest, wittmann’s visceral experience of transformation acts as an allegory for his personal life coming-out as transgendered years after the program ended. This video follows wittmann as they progress through the Utopics retreat slowly losing their human identity and morphing into their online animal avatar.

Deirdre Logue’s video Pond, 2011
Pond elicits that sensual feeling of placing your toes in a cool, gentle green-blue pond in heat of summertime. This relaxed, idyllic sensation is instantly met with a state of apprehension as goldfish appear from the depths and chew on pieces of bread attached to the toes of the artist. Positioning her body in simultaneous states of calm and anxiety this work threatens the audience’s comfort by provoking feelings of the unknown, the unnamed, and the strange in relation to the corporeal. I understand this work to be a metaphor for desire and compassion towards the unknown, or bodily difference. What is sexuality if not a somatic relationship between body and other that is charged with pleasure, sensation and often anxiety?

Babe in the Woods Trilogy, 2012
Armed with a sense of humour Lisa Birke tackles the great Canadian landscape in Babe in the Woods Trilogy. Truly awkward in these natural surroundings Birke pushes naked through the wild reeds, ploughs through the heavy snow in bare feet and self-consciously places her naked body next to trees
in the forest. Birke plays with the outmoded idea that the female body is at home in nature and that the female body, like the land, is not something that
can be controlled and dominated.

Group of Seven Inches, 2005
Bringing into play Two Spirit and queer visibility through a parody of the silent film era, the final video in the program, Group of Seven Inches, by Kent Monkman and Gisèle Gordon features the antics of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, Cree artist Kent Monkman’s alter-ego and performance persona. Miss Chief singlehandedly disrupts white systems of colonial power by connecting sex, art and the human body with humour. Her wit and trickery undermines racist and homophobic hierarchies in the canon of Canadian art history by subverting the diaries of two colonial, 19th century “painters of ‘Indians’,” George Catlin and Paul Kane. Miss Chief flips the power dynamic transforming the contemptuous writings on the “romantic savage” into a complete farce.