Project Description:
Wrik Mead’s film, A Place to Stand, addresses and contrasts the state of LGBTQ rights around the globe in two eras: 1971 (the year that Ontario Place opened) and 2016. Making use of a dizzying array of anti-gay protest footage captured and posted on the internet, Mead’s protagonist bears witness to the fractures, shifts, improvements and resistances that have brought us to this time in LGBTQ history.
Biography:
Wrik Mead has accumulated a unique body of more than forty animated miniature narratives: queer fantasies, parables, dreams and documentaries. His films are psycho-dramatic by inclination, first person narratives of desire and accommodation. They’re a mix of painstaking animation, fairy-tale allegory and queer-identity. 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. He was included in the book The Sharpest Point: animation at the end of cinema. Most recently, he had his first solo show, Draw the Line, at PayneShurvell Gallery in London, UK. Wrik graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1988 with honours and recently returned to his studies in 2004 to receive his MA Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London (UK). He currently lives in Toronto and teaches at OCAD University.