Who's TUFF:

Our 2008 Guest Judge - choosing the top 3 films of 2008

The slim, boyishly cute member of the zany Canadian comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall, MARK MCKINNEY created the memorable Chicken Lady, Darrill the Excellent Guy, and the utterly misanthropic Headcrusher. McKinney went on to write and perform on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" (from 1995-97) and to play numerous roles in "The Kids in the Hall BRAIN CANDY" (1996).

Winner of 8 Gemini Awards, 1 Genie, and 2 awards from the Writers Guild of Canada, among others, McKinney has appeared in numerous Canadian films including Dog Park, New Waterford Girl, and Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World. His television appearances include Street Legal, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Twitch City, Corner Gas, and Slings and Arrows. In 2005 he took a recurring role in CTV's Robson Arms, and in 2006 he was invited to write for, and appear in, the series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

McKinney is currently touring North America (through June 5th) with Kids in the Hall – the first major tour in six years for this critically acclaimed comedy troupe.

Our Guest Jurors - selecting the films for TUFF 2008

Writer, critic, educator, curator and artist, Toronto-based RICHARD FUNG is best known for his work in video, which includes My Mother's Place, Sea in the Blood and Islands. Through eloquent narratives his videos have variously examined the politics of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Often invoking personal experience and cultural history in his work, Fung has explored the impact of discrimination, history, and memory on identity. Born in Trinidad, Fung is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design where he is currently Associate Professor in the Faculty of Art. His essays have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and he is the co-author (with Monika Kin Gagnon) of 13: Conversations on Art and Cultural Race Politics. His work has been featured in exhibitions and festivals worldwide and can be found in public collections and universities in Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the UK, the U.S. and elsewhere. A recipient of many awards, including grants from the Ontario Film Development Corporation and the Canada Council, Fung received the Bell Canada Award in Video Art in 2000.

JUDY GLADSTONE has been the Executive Director of CTV's Bravo!FACT (Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent) since 1997. Bravo!FACT (www.bravofact.com) was established in 1995 by the national cable arts channel Bravo!. The foundation is the largest funder of shorts and videos in Canada. Thirteen million dollars have been awarded in grants for the production of over 1,200 shorts across the country. The shorts are broadcast in Canada in a half-hour show in prime-time on Bravo! and A-Channels (and - for the past year - on CityTV Toronto), and are often honoured at local, national and international film festivals. Ms. Gladstone curates screenings across Canada and abroad, and is often invited to speak at film, television and new media events. From 1993 to 1995, Ms. Gladstone was Coordinator of the CIDA-funded Canada Fund for Dialogue and Development, providing grants enabling Israelis and Palestinians, Jordanians and Egyptians, to work together on cultural and other projects. As Cultural Attaché at the Canadian Embassy in Tel Aviv from 1991-1993, Ms. Gladstone was in the wonderful position of presenting the best of the Canadian cultural scene to a foreign audience. Born in Montréal, Ms. Gladstone’s university education includes a B.A. (from Laval Université, Québec City, Québec), and two graduate degrees (from the Sorbonne, France and the University of Haifa, Israel).

MICHELLE JACQUES is a Toronto-based curator and writer. She is currently an Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where her curatorial projects have included Luis Jacob: Habitat (2005-2006); Jennifer Steinkamp: Loom (2005); Present Tense: Kori Newkirk (2005); and Video Primer, a year-long series of consecutive and thematic video programs (2001-2002). From 2002-2004, she directed the programming initiatives of the Centre for Art Tapes, a Halifax-based artist-run centre that supports the production and presentation of media art. Jacques’s recent writings include “Afrofuturism and Canadian Art History meet in The Final Frontier,” an examination of a new work by Camille Turner (Women’s Art Resource Centre, 2007); “Some Thoughts on Speech Bubbles,” in Pro Forma: language/text/visual art, volume 3 (YYZ Books, 2007); and “Dialogues: Inhabiting Culture at a Time of Rapid De-Publicization,” co-authored with Janna Graham and Anthony Kiendl for the 30th anniversary issue of Fuse magazine.

DEIRDRE LOGUE’s film, video and installation work focuses on self-presentational discourse, the body as material, confessional autobiography and the passage of ‘real’ time. Deirdre's projects include Enlightened Nonsense, a series of 10 short performance films about repetition, her 12 channel self-portrait Why Always Instead of Just Sometimes, and Rough Count, when, during the simple act of counting a bag of confetti - piece by piece - memory thresholds are found and failures amass. Deirdre's work addresses how it is that women organize their images and identities for mass consumption, and how this reflects or distracts from our knowledge of the individual. Solo exhibitions of her work have taken place at YYZ Artist Outlet, Neutral Ground, the 2006 Images Festival – where she won both Best Installation and Best of the Festival – the Berlin International Film Festival, Beyond/In Western New York, Ottawa’s Video Art Biennial, Art Star and at Articule in Montreal. She was a founding member of Media City in Windsor, the Executive Director of the Images Festival from 1995-1999, the Executive Director of the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre from 2001-2006, is currently the Development Director at Vtape and lives and works in Toronto, Ontario.

BRENDA LONGFELLOW is an award winning filmmaker whose work has been screened at festivals around the world. Her most recent film, TINA IN MEXICO, a portrait of photographer Tina Modotti, won The Golden Rose at the Montreux Film and Television Festival and Best Cultural Documentary at the Havana Film among others. Awarded the Canadian Genie for Best Documentary Short in 1998 for SHADOW MAKER, a portrait of poet Gwendolyn MacEwen, Longfellow has also produced and directed: BALKAN JOURNEY (1996); OUR MARILYN (1988 co-winner of Grand Prix at Oberhausen) and GERDA (1992). She has recently completed a documentary on the social impacts of climate change called Weather Report. Longfellow teaches in the Department of Film and Video at York University and has written extensively on Canadian cinema.

ROBERT OUELLETTE’s theoretical work on the intersection of city design, information technologies, and sustainability have, for example, influenced the development of Toronto’s Entertainment District. He is a recipient of a City of Toronto Urban Design Award for his John Street Media Corridor project. As a writer on architecture and urban design his work was nominated for a National Newspaper Award. Ouellette was an invited respondent at the “Sustainable Cities” conference at the United Nations in New York. Also in New York, he advocated the use of collaborative online technologies to repurpose Governors Island into an international centre for urban sustainability—a project he argued that would be the 21st Century’s metaphorical equivalent to the Manhattan Project. He writes the blog Readingtoronto.com with contributors like Margaret Atwood, Corey Doctorow, Anne Michaels, Amy Lavender-Harris, Piers Handling, and other Toronto cultural producers.

JASON ST-LAURENT is an artist and curator based in Toronto. He studied fine arts at the Université de Moncton and the University of Toronto.
He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States, South Africa and Finland, notably at the Western Front in Vancouver, VertexList in New York City, the South African National Gallery Annex and MUU MediaBase in Helsinki. As a curator, he has presented more than 50 projects in Canada, South Africa, Mexico, Finland and Estonia, including SCATALOGUE: 30 Years of Crap in Contemporary Art at Galerie SAW Gallery, Voices in Transit at the Cape Town Central Train Station in South Africa and Videogram International Media Art Exchange. Jason St-Laurent is a founding member of the art and design collective CODE RÉGIONAL and curator of the biennial ELECTRIC FIELDS: Electronic Music and Media Forum. Jason St-Laurent is currently the Director of Programming for INSIDE OUT: Toronto Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival.

TUFF Producers

Art for Commuters
Art for Commuters (A4C) is dedicated to assisting contemporary artists by offering them an opportunity to show in the public spaces frequented by urban travelers. We are equally dedicated to engaging a general, urban populace with contemporary art by initiating outstanding, thought-provoking projects that address the unique qualities of these public spaces.

Sharon Switzer – Executive Director / Curator
Sharon Switzer was born in Lethbridge, Alberta in 1966. An artist and curator, she has been exhibiting her media art in Canada and the U.S. since the early 1990’s. The first curatorial collective that she formed, Clamorous Intentions, was active in Toronto during the early 1990’s, producing 3 large-scale, multi-media public events in 2 years. Sharon taught new media and visual art in Ontario Universities for 8 years, and is actively involved in the Toronto arts community, presently serving as Vice President of Gallery TPW’s Board of Directors. Her video work is currently traveling to museums across Canada as part of ‘18 Illuminations,’ and a catalogue of her work was just produced by McMaster Museum of Art. Sharon is a Graduate of the CFC Media Lab at the Canadian Film Centre, and is represented by Corkin Gallery in Toronto. Her video work can be seen at www.corkingallery.com and www.sharonswitzer.com. She is presently teaching a course on digital compositing at O.C.A.D, and recently formed the not-for-profit curatorial organization Art for Commuters.

Jean-Paul Kelly – Administrative Assistant & Assistant Curator
Jean-Paul Kelly is an artist based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His practice includes video, drawing, and photo-based work. Kelly's videos examine anticipation, anxiety, and loss in storytelling through a hybrid vernacular of digitally composited animations, onscreen performance, and home movies. His work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals in North America, Japan, and Europe, most recently as part of art-action: rencontres internationales 2006 in Paris, Berlin, and Madrid. Gallery TPW (Toronto) will present a solo exhibition of Kelly's work in the fall of 2008. He is member of the Pleasure Dome experimental film and video programming collective, and curated "Drawn In From Without" as part of Vtape's Curatorial Incubator project in 2007. Kelly received a Masters of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto in 2005, where he is currently an instructor. Jean-Paul Kelly’s video works are distributed through Vtape. www.jeanpaulkelly.com

Lori Newdick – Assistant Artistic Director
Lori Newdick specialized in Philosophy and Contemporary English Literature at the University of Toronto from 1988-89 and graduated with Honours from the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto in 1999, winning the Medal of Excellence in Photography as well as many other awards and scholarships for graduate studies. She graduated from the Master of Fine Art Program at the University of Guelph in 2001, having been awarded several scholarships during her 2-year degree. Newdick’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally since 1999, garnering attention early on in her career with reproductions in Italian Photo in 2000. Museum venues include the Centre for Photography at Woodstock in Woodstock, New York, The Art Gallery of Hamilton, and the Kamloops Art Gallery in Kamloops, B.C. Her work can be found in the collections of the Macdonald Stewart Art Gallery, Guelph, ON, the National Portrait Gallery, Ottawa, ON, the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Photography Collection, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Newdick presently lives and works in Toronto and is represented by Corkin Gallery. www.corkingallery.com

Patricia Griffith – Coordinative Liaise to Onestop Media Group
Patricia Griffith has worked in the film and television industry since graduating from York University in 2001 with a BA in Fine Arts Cultural Studies. Kal Ho Na Ho, a Yash Johar production, was the first feature film Patricia worked on as an office coordinator, followed by several children’s television shows. Patricia has participated in the 48-hour film challenge and the 24-hour film challenge; both are team based film competitions in which she co-wrote the scripts and designed the sets. In 2005 Patricia also shot and edited a short film for Toronto’s Dog Film Festival. Currently Patricia is working for ONESTOP Media Group as a Network Coordinator for various digital out-of-home networks. Part of her role is helping to develop arts related content for the networks, the first of which was assisting in the collaboration between Art for Commuters, ONESTOP and Contact, Toronto’s annual photography festival, to allow photographers to exhibit their work on the TTC network of screens.

ONESTOP Media Group
Onestop Media Group (OMG) is an internationally recognized, award winning, Out-of-Home Digital (OHD) media company. OMG is a world leader in the development, operation, and innovation of OHD networks for the mass transit, retail, hospitality, education and conference industries.