Much of your work deals with marginalized groups, such as the Acadians in "Please Remember Me" or even more significantly with homosexuals in "I Want You To Need Me" but both relate directly to your own experiences/history, you have also characterized yourself as being doubly-marginalized; Do you see your work as self-portraiture or as therapeutic?

I think that all art is therapeutic for artists, regardless of whether they are dealing with personal issues upfront or not. Not to be romantic about all of this, but I think that artists are trying to find voice by communicating to the public, and when this is successful, it is therapeutic because it is fulfilling. Political art or identity politics are activated only if the public is responding or thinking about the issues you bring up; these ideas are conveyed by a visual language.

I am interested in self-portraiture only if it goes beyond physical representation, and involves psychological aspects of my being. I spend a lot of time thinking of strategies to exteriorize my feelings, thoughts etc. This is evident in I Want You to Need Me and Stand By Your Man.

If I can say anything about art's therapeutic potential, I'll say that as a performance artist, I've come to accept my body and my looks in ways I don't think would have worked if I were dealing with a psychologist or a doctor. My body image has changed a lot for me-I'm no longer afraid of taking my clothes off!

What is interesting about my 'double marginality' is that it is invisible to most who do not know me. So it is important for me to find means to exteriorize this invisible identity, even if it only hints at homosexuality
or Acadianess. Becoming too literal about issues concerning identity only emulates television or cinema, so I carefully leave things out that would strengthen people's misconceptions about Acadians or queers.

Historically, how would you like your work to be classified?

Knowing how difficult it is to be collected as a performance artist, I'm not sure my individual work will be classified at all. Although I am striving to become a studio artist who exhibits in biennials and museums, I doubt very much that my work will be considered if I am not commercially represented. As I do have works in the collections of distributors VTape in Toronto and Lightcone in Paris, I hope that my work will be classified as performative video for researchers and curators. This gives the work a specificity and a differentiation that is so needed. Being labelled a video artist (which is often the case), I wish there were a collecting institution that would specialize in performance and all its derivative stuff: costumes, documentation, photography, video, etc.

On the flip side of that, I am worried that my contemporaries in performance art are developing actions that are geared towards the production of good documentation that can later be sold as objects in their own right. We see this trend with established artists such as Vanessa Beecroft and Matthew Barney, where large photographic prints, derivative of their performances, are sold for astronomical prices. Since museums generally avoid having anything to do with live performances, they now have tangible objects to replace them.

I find part of your work's strength lies in, as you mentioned, not wanting to strengthen people's misconceptions about Acadians or queers. The subtlety of works such as "Ogopogo & Sasquatch" or "The Only Good Way to Hug Another Male in Public" and even the performance piece you mentioned "Voulez-vous coucher avec un Acadien ce soir?" present themselves in contradistinction to some other works by queer artists in the past that tend to be overtly politicized. Do you find that these subtleties have allowed your work to be more accessible by engaging rather than putting off your audience, or do you find it difficult to engage a viewer/participant if they cannot easily dissect work that deals with issues potentially outside their own vocabulary?

I think it is a little bit of both, although it may be more effective to present myself as the Other, and then have a few cues for the public to understand where this otherness is coming from. Certainly in Ogopogo and Sasquatch, I intended it to be more overtly queer, and have my body be in striking contrast to the landscape, wearing high heels on an impossible 'rural' runway!

In a text I wrote for a collaborative project between myself and Johannesburg-based performance artist Steven Cohen called Video Saved My Life, where I talked about the importance of having a videographer present when doing radical work in public spaces, so that the public acts responsibly and can be held accountable for violent reactions. FYI, Steven Cohen became the enfant terrible of the art world when he performed during the Johannesburg gay pride by walking in real, fresh giraffe legs (which he obtained on the black market) holding a large sign saying 'Give us your children. The ones we don't eat we'll fuck', pushing the stereotype way beyond people's tolerance.