still from watch me sleep, 2023 ©Dayna McLeod
WF Online Series 2024
Focus: Dayna McLeod
23 - 30 May
Welcome to the 4th edition of the WF Online Series. In this past program, we featured a selection of works by Dayna McLeod, a Montreal-based performance and video artist. McLeod's oeuvre explores themes of feminism, queer identity, and sexuality, often employing humor while examining the social and material conditions of the body through mediums such as cabaret, duration, remix, video, and installation practices.
McLeod delves into personal experiences, technology, and identity to explore themes related to self-awareness, surveillance, and the intersection of digital and physical realities. Her recent artistic focus centers on the subjects of sleep and dreams, which were explored through a curated selection of video works in this program. Additionally, she experiments with herself as an AI actor and produces video essays analyzing films and her own performativity. Furthermore, McLeod engages in autoethnography, particularly examining intergenerational queer aging and desire. This program offered an opportunity to delve into McLeod's varied artistic explorations, ranging from personal introspection to broader societal themes.
An audio interview with Dayna accompanied the program. We discussed her background, artistic approach, and themes explored in her work. Dayna reflected on the intersection of art, technology, and social media in contemporary performance, examining the impact of AI on storytelling and performance, highlighting challenges and complexities. She shared insights into her ongoing project involving AI and video essays, viewing her artistic practice as a tool for challenging norms and fostering critical dialogue, often using humor to engage audiences.
The film program
How to Perform Teaching During a Pandemic
by Dayna McLeod
Canada, 2021, 2 mins 48, English
Just trying to do my best as a video and performance artist teaching a university gender studies course during the Covid pandemic while Quebec is in a State of Emergency.
s/mother love/r
by Dayna McLeod
Canada, 2022, 7 mins 17, English
An experimental video essay about the relationship between step mother Frances Parker (played by Audra Lindley) and Cay Rivvers (played by Patricia Charbonneau) as Cay falls for and enters into a passionate relationship with Vivian Bell (played by Helen Shaver) in the lesbian classic, Desert Hearts (1985, directed by Donna Deitch).
Drink Water, from In Dreams
by Dayna McLeod
Canada, 2023, 51 seconds, English
”In Dreams is an installation that explores my dreams and how constructing them through their telling and in digital collage fixes them to media as well as conscious reality, giving them shape and form when they were previously ephemeral, indistinct, cloudy, and sometimes just beyond my grasp. Conceptually, I am interested in collaborating with my subconscious self as sleeping subject, actor, collaborator, and muse because late stage (and late night!) capitalism says get to work, even if you’re sleeping. Sleep specialists and dream scientists note that dreams are lies: we can never accurately represent them in their telling, as they form, shift, morph, and change as we remember and put words to them to describe the affective conditions of their construction and our experience of them—that to remember a dream is to always already remember it incorrectly as we come out of unconsciousness to name the ephemeral. The telling of dreams is always interpretation.”
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Show Spanx and Red Dress
by Dayna McLeod
Canada, 2023, 3 mins 30, English
From the video installation, In Dreams.
DaynAI
by Dayna McLeod
Canada, 2023, 51 seconds, English
DaynAI: An A.I. Introduction.
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DaynAI: This is not Dayna McLeod’s gibber
by Dayna McLeod
Canada, 2023, 1 min 16, English
DaynAI: This is not Dayna McLeod’s voice: An A.I. Explanation.
FoUBARthes: Death of the Author
by Dayna McLeod
Canada, 2024, 3 mins 3, English
Media performance artist Dayna McLeod asked ChatGPT to write an increasingly snarky and heated dialogue between Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault about The Death of the Author, inspired by Barthes’ famous essay. This script is performed by AI actors of the theorists, with Dayna’s AI doppelgänger, DaynAI, acting as host to their debate.
watch me sleep: self-surveillance and middle-aging queer performance anxiety
by Dayna McLeod
Canada, 2023, 4 mins 53, English
”Watch me sleep is a video essay that compares Restless, a video installation comprised of night-vision surveillance footage of my girlfriend and I sleeping, with an excerpt of Under Surveillance: 12hrs at the PHI, a live-feed performance that featured me sleeping alone at the PHI Centre—an arts research and exhibition centre in Montreal—that was live streamed as part of a fifteen-day broadcasting program in February 2021. This video essay puts in conversation different affective moments of sleeping between these projects: one for an installation where I had editing control over footage of my sleeping self and what was eventually shown to an audience, and the other, where I had little to no control over what was shown to the original live streaming audience because I was asleep.”
outside the lines
by Dayna McLeod
Canada, 2021, 2 mins 51, English
A video essay that takes a closer look at the lipstick scene performed by Diane Ladd in Wild at Heart, directed by David Lynch (1990). This work also cites Rebecca Schneider’s book, The Explicit Body in Performance (1997).
WF Online Series includes four curated screening programs per year, each with a unique curatorial proposition featuring productions from Basel, Switzerland, and around the world. Each program is available for one week.
This project is made possible thanks to the financial support of the Mary & Ewald E. Bertschmann-Stiftung and the Division of Cultural Affairs Basel-Stadt.