Lisa Anita Wegner
Lisa is an award-winning artist, performer, and filmmaker, and the creative director of Mighty Brave Productions, through which she has completed over 200 full-scale art projects. After studying theatre at York University, Wegner acted in film, theatre and television projects and ran two self-owned film production companies before she began to explore visual art and performance. It was when she discovered her passion for creating universes and alternate personae that she believes she truly began her artistic career. Her professional art practice began with experiments in post-production photography, and grew to encompass film, video, and live performance, focusing on the use of artifice as a means of exploring truth.
Drawing on her personal history, Wegner set about creating artistic realities that run parallel to and sometimes counter to the traditionally accepted reality, in a process she dubbed Realistic Confabulation. With heavy Dada influences and strong, theatrical Expressionism recalling Weimar-era Berlin, she developed her art practice into a cohesive, immersive experience for her audience, featuring outsize comic and tragic elements.
Wegner’s works range from films to performance-based installations, along with photo and video works that emerge as artifacts of her universes. Her most recent project, Intangible Adorations is featured in the National Creation Fund’s 2023 book, Bold And Adventurous Creation. Her five year commitment to this large-scale project has put her in the public eye as a pre-eminent multi-sensory art specialist renowned by her audience and peers for her worlds which she has given everyone access to explore.
See more about Lisa’s work, life, unusual body and art portfolio.
Artist Statement
Lisa Anita Wegner (°1973, Toronto, Canada) creates performances, installations, films and conceptual artworks. By parodying mass media by exaggerating certain formal aspects inherent to our contemporary society, Wegner makes works that can be seen as self-portraits. Sometimes they appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times, they seem typical by-products of American superabundance and marketing.
Her performances often refers to pop and mass culture. Using written and drawn symbols, a world where light-heartedness rules and where rules are undermined is created. By rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, her works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.
Her works challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a corporate world, she touches various overlapping themes and strategies. Several reoccurring subject matter can be recognized, such as the relation with popular culture and media, working with repetition, provocation and the investigation of the process of expectations.
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