Janis Cole
Remember Their Names
Exhibition: July 4 to August 8, 2009
Opening: July 4, 2009, 2 to 5pm
Master Class with Janis Cole: July 18, 3 to 5pm
Sixty-five women disappeared from the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside between 1978 and 2001. Families and friends appealed to the Vancouver Police for five long years to investigate, but the investigation moved slowly. Then came the highly sensationalized discovery that many of the missing women had been murdered.
Canada’s largest serial killing and crime-scene investigation drove the name of the killer to international notoriety. Lost in the shadow of his name are the names of his many victims.
Using photographic, audio and video-based documentary artifacts, such as missing persons’ posters, a broadcast interview and recorded 1-800 tipline calls, Janis Cole mediates our focus on these events through careful layering, repetition and augmentation. By working with documents that group the women’s likenesses as contingent images coded as criminal – specifically, posters that make them seem ‘wanted’ rather than missing – Cole permits the materials that once buried names and personal identities to resurface as memorials that reassert presence while indicting those who dared to disregard life. Confronting systematic dismissal of missing women is long overdue. Remember Their Names propels the “missing women” to women who are missed.
Janis Cole is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and artist. Her feature documentary films include P4W: Prison for Women (1981), which earned a Genie Award and Hookers on Davie (1984), which won a Gold Plaque at the Chicago International Film Festival. Other awards include the NFB’s Best Canadian Short Film Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (1990) and a Toronto Arts Award in Media Art (1994). Her television writing has earned six Gemini nominations and a Writer’s Guild Top Ten Award. She writes for several Toronto publications, teaches at the Ontario College of Art & Design and is completing her Master of Fine Art in Documentary Media at Ryerson University.
Check out a profile of Janis Cole's exhibition on Canada AM.
Read reviews of Remember Their Names from NOW and Metro.
Check out Mike Landry's interview with Janis Cole discussing Remember Their Names
at Thingsofdesire.ca
TSV gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council.
