Victoria Stanton

Victoria Stanton (Montreal, Canada) is a performance artist, video-maker, photographer and writer of fiction, poetry, critical texts, and songs. Her time-based work includes sound on stage, group actions in public spaces, one-on-one encounters to "consult," interview or feed. She is interested in appropriating and disrupting the quotidian, in spontaneous intimacy, in treading vulnerability. Some performance work has been transformed into photo-installation or single-channel video. Performance writing and critical writing has appeared in several publications. Stanton is also the CEO of a bank: the Bank of Victoria. Such a lofty name deserves a big enterprise to match.

Stanton's work has been presented nationally and internationally at events, festivals and venues including La Centrale's Mois de la Performance, Art Qui Fait Boum! Triennial of Emerging Artists, Festival Voix d'Amériques, Galerie B-312's Les jeudi tout ouïe, and on the nationally broadcast television show Des Kiwis et des hommes (Montreal), LIVE: Biennial of Performance Art (Vancouver), Visualeyez (Edmonton), Toronto Free Gallery (Toronto), InterAzione (Sardinia), Vollevox (Brussels), Overload Festival (Melbourne), and Gallery Para Globe (Tokyo). Her videos have appeared at the Cinémathèque Québecoise (Montreal), the 3rd Annual Vancouver Videopoem Festival (Vancouver), VideoLisboa: Video and New Media Festival (Lisbon), the Bild-rausch video festival (Saarbrücken, Germany), as part of the internationally touring Upgrade! P2P Outdoor Art Videos, and at the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair. Her text-sound-song pieces have been broadcast on national radio and featured on a variety of CD compilations: All Points In (Ottawa), Vollevox (Brussels), Going Down Swinging (Melbourne), and Ribsauce (Montreal). Stanton's creative writing and non-fiction has been published in English- and French- language anthologies, journals and cultural/lifestyle magazines such as Matrix Magazine, Ascent Magazine, Canadian Theatre Review, Esse Magazine, The Portable Conundrum (anthology of authors published through conundrum press), Career Suicide (the Moosehead Anthology series), and Short Fuse, the international anthology of fusion poetry. Her first book, Impure, Reinventing the Word – an examination of the practice of spoken word – was published by conundrum press in October, 2001 (co-authored with Vincent Tinguely).

Stanton is currently in a research residency at Artexte (arts documentation centre, Montreal), working on her second book, a co-authored non-fiction work (with Sylvie Tourangeau and Anne Bérubé) exploring the multi-faceted nature of the practice of performance art, specifically within a Canadian/Québecois context. She has also begun a new art-rock performance project called The Capital of Plastic Daffodils.

See http://www.bankofvictoria.com for more info.