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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Peggy Gale, Governor General's Award winner
Photo: Martin Lipman
I normally don't pay much attention to the Governor General's Awards for art, except to count up the ration of men to women and wonder if I'm being political or petty. But I just realised that Peggy Gale, who I wrote about here, won this year for "outstanding contribution." This is great news! Gale's writing about video art provides essential context, exploring both the conceptual implications and the experimental physical experiences of the technology. She has stayed with the medium intellectually, charting its trajectory from the transgressive, performative beginnings of TV-in-the-hands-of-artists, to the present diffusion into a plethora of moving images online, in the gallery, at the theatre, on DVD, and cell phones. Here is what Sarah Milroy at the Globe had to say:
Gale is being honoured for her pioneering work as a curator and writer. Her exhibition Videoscapes, at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1974, was one of the first in the world to isolate and examine the new phenomenon of video art and was a first step in establishing a canon of Canadian video art. In addition, Gale has served as director of the artist-run centre A Space and, later, of Art Metropole (an important early centre for video distribution in Toronto). Since 1981, she has worked as a freelance curator, editor and writer.