People Like Us: The Gossip of Colin Campbell

What's work without gossip, rumour, story and overheard conversation? Video and performance artist Colin Campbell ventured into his workplace---the "nascent, self-conscious Toronto art community," as exhibition curator Jon Davies puts it---and "showed off how subcultures like these are given form and held together by gossip." A workplace may be its own subculture. At least, it's a place where subcultures intersect. Campbell understood where the states of our lives, our working lives, were going. With their themes of desire, self-performance, social conflict and the slippage of identity and truth, his videos seem to anticipate our contemporary hyper-awareness of our public selves. ?Sean Flinn