Lisa Anita Wegner
is a mid-career filmmaker performer artist who has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. She has partnered with arts organizations such as ArtworxTO, Summerworks, Nuit Blanche, Partners In Art, Long Winter Arts, Rendezvous With Madness, Montreal World Film Festival & Florence Contemporary Gallery in the UK. Wegner’s 2022 Public Art project received support from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, City of Toronto, with private investments from Partners In Art and the National Creation Fund. Over the past twenty five years, Lisa has gained renown for her film, performance, other wordly multi-sensory immersive environments and is a specialist in robust artist and audience accessibility.
Artist Statement
Lisa Anita Wegner (°1916, 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 refer 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 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.
