Having screened Elvira Finnigan's Video Chapbook (2004) in a Women's Studies class about writings woman's lives. I became curious about the debates that this works sparked in students, about narrative conventions and visual metaphors. Finnegan's suite of allegorical poems visualizes such states as feet turning to clay and isolation in a well-like structure. Hers is a practice of intimate video art, based on an accommodation of personal experience with received wisdom. Finnigan’s earlier sculptural installations Matter, about motherhood and mothering, seemed a progression along the way in this taking stock of women's roles. What struck me in Finnigan's recent work was how personal life experience, as mediated by metaphor, could be of use in video.

Curious about recent productions by young female School of Art graduates. I viewed some new acquisitions from the Video Pool library. I was interested in seeing how their art as young women reflected what I knew of their experience of creating (in what seemed to me, and sometimes them) a man's world. Garland Lam’s Morphing From Father (2004) is an elegant visual transformation through media, gender and generation about the close relationships between father and daughter. Divya Mehra’s The Yogi (2005) lampoons the cultural stereotypes about beauty, grace and spirituality that young women of Indian descent must negotiate. Stacey Abramson’s Out of System (2005) is a zany work of self-scrutiny, making other mechanies of internal surveillance and the consequent accommodations visible in the life of a young art student. Heidi Phillips’ Why Are You So Sad (2004) a longer and more serious work, reminded me about how new questions can rearrange our understanding of the formation of Truth, in all its variety. Among the recent acquisitions, pulled by artist and distribution associate Hope Peterson for me to view, was Winter (2005) by Brenna George. She is an artist whose work I knew from her comical sketches in pen and ink. The video - part poem, part painting, part landscape - struck a chord recognition. I watched the rest of George's extensive body of video work. Here was art that responded to the various life stages of womanhood and addressed the specificity of gender, as well as sexual and cultural expectations within the context of relationships, community and ECOLOGY. 

What had happened to ensure that skilled and confident work of women artists, like Finnigan and George, who address the experimental and emotive aspects of living most overtly in their work seems relatively unknown? Is there a post-feminism? Is there a subtle preference for woman's work that seeks the sensational? Or, a penchant for voyeuristic narcissism related to women, and for the non-threatening girly girly ART of prolonged adolescents?

I want to know what happens when girls grow up. 

In Set Forth Hopeful (1997), a charming naked fairy comes to life, chattering admonishments (This is no peep show!) and demanding a dress from her artist maker. She is a vivacious very girl, with sprite-like moods and sparkles, a sweet innocent with a melodic voice. Subject to wisdom from beauty queen contest manual, caught in concrete operations, she engages the world with the optimism of the newborn: set forth hopeful! It is a lovely, enviable sentiment, political in its playful way, yet devoid of the high art PRETENSIONS of any self-styled, freedom-fighter video. This video is a dialogue between the naïf and her artist maker, practiced in the world of dead-end jobs and cruise missiles, sets the vignette in motion. George’s best comic work is economical in length, underpinned by a sweetly wicked sense of mirth. 

Set Forth Hopeful! Is a mantra in face of bodily harm (a pricked finger), a Mc-career (a minimum wage job in the fast food industry), a decrepit apartment (mice infestations), and global challenges (growing militarism). After viewing the diverse videos that Brenna George has made over the past ten years, this hopefulness seems an authentic Georgian premise. George's videos are characterized by a deep appreciation for the natural world and its creatures, a recognition and integration of personal experience veiled and layered through diverse genres and narrative tropes, supported by the confident knowledge that it is the artist’s role to invent and express. 

It delights me that George, or rather the graphic artist in her video, makes pancakes in the kitchen to cheer the flailing spirits/alter ego. Two cups flour… two cups milk…. There are no ironies here related to the deadpan kitchen scene of Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) or Wendy Geller’s Private Residencies (1991) where the cavity of a chicken taunts the viewer pornographicly. Rather, it is a dialogue between artist and creation complete with recipe - a small gesture at repairing the world. Dialogue also propels George's L. Bird (1994), where the artist and the perching baby Cedar Waxwing have a sustained conversation. While the storylines are implausible - a bird conversing or a fairy come to life - emotional sentiments are authentic. The fledgling, like some small-town rubber-neck gossip, makes outrageous accusations regarding the artist’s failure to conform. There is an undercurrent of hilarity in both videos as George plays with characters, voices and themes of social expectations, just beyond the boundaries of the real. 

George has been making videos since 1990, first in Saskatchewan, and since 1996, in Winnipeg through Video Pool. She has thirteen solo productions, eight collaborative works, with a new work premiering next year. She has made autobiographical and documentary - type forays, with Wallpaper (1993), for example, driven by the desire to explore an abandoned Saskatchewan homestead and the absent presence women's agency. It combines realist footage with layers of evocative imagery. In Tripping with the Georges (2001) and A& B, with Athena George (1996) she explores the family narrative through multiple perspectives, using photos, audiotapes and interviews in the former video, and collage and collaboration in the latter. Her videos explore sound, image, timing, character, and digital invention. 

George's storytelling is perhaps oblique. She never lays bare a set of facts that unfold through a systematic articulation of beginning, middle and end with a tidy resolution. Yet possibilities hover by such means. Consider that excavation of myth in Red Riding Hood (1994), made as part of a video collective in which each artist made a work about Little Red Riding Hood. George’s video includes flat drawings that become three-dimensional characters, dialogue that move the logic of the story, ellipses where the viewer is obliged to fill the blanks, novel narrative twists, and literal text messages of words and phrases. The work Open (2002) a travel flick, focuses on George's graphic work. Only lately, there is a certain flattening back out onto the screen, the shifting visual panoramics evident in the psychedelic paisleys of Trippin. Often in a George video there is a movement through two-dimensional media of drawing or writing through to corporeality, scenic depth and development over time. 

George’s narrative style in video comes as part of her intuitive grasp of the kind of stories worth telling. Many of these stores are not stories in the traditional sense, but rather experiences given sound, form and structure. They relate to landmark events in women's lives: coming of age, grappling with cultural and social norms, activating the self, “being” in a relationship, exploring connections of self to family and community, birthing and loss, or revisiting contemporary myth. George’s investments in narrative often include empathetic relationships to the natural world, as in Man Made Structures (1997), which juxtaposed shots of small animals or ecosystems, steady and intimate shots of family members or herself. It is a self that is neither narcissistic nor particularly diaristic because George engages so deeply with an exploration of her formal and technical means. Her work seems a deliberate under-telling - a layering and suggesting with attention to the formal properties of image, rhythm and sound. 

I'm thinking again of Winter, a wonderfully lyrical work about the prairies, about a certain kind of barren landscape, about a melancholia which can engulf and overtake all who have lived through several of these winters, and about loss. The conversations and modernist abstraction help to fill the content. Winter has no equivalent in words. Only in experience, feeling, or what used to be called in more archaic critical language, “emotion.” 

And a little bit of what that fairy in Set Forth Hopeful  chirps “your trust in flat things coming around.” 

Amy Karlinsky teaches and writes in Winnipeg. Her critical essays and reviews have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues and magazines. She looks great in a pumpkin hat.