Join ONE Archives for a screening and opening reception for the exhibition, “I Almost Ran Over Liza Minnelli Today: Colin Campbell and Lisa Steele in L.A, 1976-77.” The event will begin with a screening of videos by Colin Campbell and Lisa Steele at the West Hollywood City Council Chambers, and continue with a reception at the ONE Gallery, West Hollywood.

In September 1976, video artists Colin Campbell and Lisa Steele packed a small Volkswagen station wagon with their equipment and some clothes and left Toronto for Southern California. Armed with Canada Council for the Arts grants supporting the production of new work, they stayed in a small two-story home/studio in Venice Beach until their money ran out in May 1977. In this new environment, they saw themselves as “anthropologists studying a very strange culture through its everyday media and manifestations.” They were always working and lived frugally: they only ate out once a week and they rationed their wine. Their life revolved around artmaking and each other. They also keenly observed the world outside to source stories and personas (with specific mannerisms, character tics, gestures, and turns of phrase), as well as other cultural detritus, for their work. Processing this material through writing and performance for video, they crafted not only landmark tapes but also put into circulation novel kinship practices, subcultural attitudes and queer styles as well. They pioneered the fusing of performance and narrative modes in video to self-reflexively mine the schism between an “authentic” self and the artifice of a constructed persona, or as Campbell called it, internal versus external fiction.

For more information, please visit: https://www.onearchives.org/screening-and-opening-reception-for-i-almost-ran-over-liza-minnelli-today/

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