Victoria Stanton (Montreal, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher/curator/educator working with live action, human interaction, video, film, photo, drawing, and writing. Exploring within diverse media, while the outward results of her practice manifest in various forms, performance is the invariable core of her research. Her time-based work includes performance for stage and for the camera, infiltrating actions in public spaces, and one-on-one encounters in intimate contexts.
Her interest in producing work within and about performative transactions – mounting projects that are predicated on the very act of a prolonged and invested exchange between people – and an attempt to open up a dialogue between the body and the spaces it traverses, has led to a number of works developed in situ/in socius. Whether taking the form of public interventions and infiltrating actions involving meditative moments that subtly impress upon the urban landscape and surrounding architecture, or of relational one-on-one encounters in intimate spaces, or even a combination of both, this insinuation of physical presences into a given context has been her strategy of attempting to produce a transformative moment. Disrupting the quotidian, creating spontaneous intimacy, blurring the line between “real-time” and “art-time,” she is ultimately interested in exploring and revealing a “performative consciousness” – a state of being that underscores the potential performativity of any situation and constantly shifts, even while it shapes, our self-perception and the perception of the space that surrounds us.
Considered a pioneer of transactional practices in Quebec, Stanton has presented exhibitions, performances, interventions, and films/videos in Canada, the U.S., Europe, Australia, Japan, Mexico, and Cuba. Her first book Impure, Reinventing the Word: The Theory, Practice and Oral History of Spoken Word in Montreal (conundrum press, 2001), co-authored with Vincent Tinguely, chronicled a vibrant artistic movement via interviews with over 75 artists. Her second book, The 7th Sense, co-authored with the TouVA collective (Sylvie Tourangeau, Anne Bérubé and Stanton), draws upon a profound exploration of “the performative” in performance art (SAGAMIE édition d’art, 2017). In 2018 Stanton was a recipient of the PRIX POWERHOUSE, a biennial recognition award that celebrates women-identified artists who have reached the mid-stage in their career and contribute in a significant and sustained way to the cultural life of Montreal, and in 2020 she will begin a research-creation PhD in Art Education at Concordia University, exploring “Doing Nothing” as a creative vehicle in artistic process through examining the role of rest/pause/interval in both performance art contexts & everyday spaces like the classroom.
The Sanctimonious Sect of Nothing Is Sacred 