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Emigrating from Kansas City, Missouri to Canada with a group of draft resisters in 1968, Lisa Steele soon became a key figure in the Canadian art scene. An early adherent of video art, which she subsequently supported as a co-founder of the non-profit distributor Vtape and as a teacher at both the Ontario College of Art and Design and the University of Toronto’s Visual Studies Program (from which she just retired this year), Steele has had a profound influence on the development of the field. Comprising roughly a dozen works made between 1974 and 1977, Steele’s early videos centre on the artist’s occasionally scripted but mostly extemporaneous monologues, which are delivered in a single take and with intimate force — an intimacy that is amplified by Steele performing nude, exposing herself both literally and metaphorically.

In A Very Personal Story, Steele recounts the moving story of the death of her mother; Birthday Suit — with scars and defects, a foundational work of feminist art, finds Steele cataloguing the visible traces of her then 27-year-old body’s physical history, a corporeal record of its being in the world. In The Ballad of Dan Peoples, Steele channels the voice and cadence of her recently deceased grandfather in an attempt to create a record of his storytelling mannerisms. Facing South uses her diary of the spring growing cycle to “show a female experience which was analytic in its relation to nature,” countering the masculine habit of mystifying women’s experience by twinning it with the natural world.