When I was at Ryerson, I had studied the third installment of the film Aliens, where the two last remaining members of a male prison colony (read queer community) who fought off the aliens (read AIDS) were a white woman and a black male, the population that will be most affected by HIV infection in the coming years if nothing is done. I probably studied this film with a certain bias and some fertile imagination, but I was quite interested in how movie monsters usually act as metaphors for contemporary fears.

I will likely not perform Monster in the US by fear of getting shot, but I think this project could function safely in Canada and other parts of the world. I'll definitely wear a bulletproof vest under the costume to make sure.

For the Monster project, instead of feeding off people's unbiased fear of homosexuals, I want to instill real fear, and eventually get the audience to think about the construction of fear and its implications on human rights. We see the same demonization of Arabs after 9/11 and so on.

I suppose part of working form within a given minority is that others outside that minority presume that you can speak for the whole of, for example, that non-existent "gay community." Do you feel that producing work that deals with queer issues instantly undermines its effectiveness by allowing it to be filed as "queer art" critically and publicly or do you feel there's a way of subverting these categories, perhaps by working more ambiguously as some of your work does in some of the metaphors you use? I suppose what I'm trying to get at is more general in terms of where you see your own work moving in the future-perhaps further challenging as much of your work already does, the medium in which you work or reference? (I'm thinking of Reveillon in terms of performance or Rubbings in terms commercially oriented production/ documentation or Please Remember Me in terms of pop-music videos)

Of course, the academic and museum worlds are obsessed with categorization to the detriment of some works. I really don't mind being labeled a queer, Acadian artist-it's the pigeon-holing I can't stand. If the exhibition theme is not queer, or Acadian, some curators think that my work will not fit. I think this is evident in Québec, because I am immediately seen as a politicized Acadian who does not share commonalities with Québec's plight (and it's ssoooo the contrary). I did not purposefully develop a practice to fall out of the category 'queer art,' although it's a good observation-it may have been due in part by my resisting any categorization, wanting to develop a practice that is more unique. It is important to say that I don't have a problem identifying as queer or talking about queerness when speaking about my work. Yet I would rather be considered a performance/contemporary artist in most cases.

I think that a big shift will happen in the next decade, some very established artists will want to distance themselves from the plagued art world, choosing to present works outside of galleries and biennials. This has a lot of precedent, but I have a hunch that artists will be very adamant about not working with dealers or curators, who generally misconstrue their works or exploit these works like commodities. A few artists that I've worked with who have been approached often for commercial representation have refused because of bad past experiences. More artists are becoming their own dealers, having complete control over their production. Fatimah Tuggar, who just recently exhibited here, does that, and she loves it-she is making much more money and can make all the decisions!

I see myself moving to a more interdisciplinary practice involving performance, dance, theatre and installation. This may take some time to get to a good place, but I'm convinced that it is a natural progression for me as an artist. As many interdisciplinary works fail as they are often not integrated enough, I think there is a lot of research and development still to be done in that area. I am specifically interested in the potential of interdisciplinary art to engage the public on more levels and to be more experiential.

Is there any particular artist(s) whose work has had an influence on your practice in general? To this point what I understand of your work is derived more from personal experience, popular culture, film culture, queer theory etc.

I would say that the artist that has most influenced my work is David Wojnarowicz from New York, who had quite a multidisciplinary (and personal) Practice-surprisingly, I curated the first retrospective of his film and video work in the Americas, proving that the art world is still uneasy about his work and certainly his political discourse.

Of course, General Idea interested me quite a bit-not so much the art but rather the collective/brotherly relationship they had. Some of their public interventions were also quite remarkable, incl. the Miss General Idea pageant. Other influences are Steve McQueen, Dumb Type, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Rebecca Belmore. General influences are French cinema (Chris Marker, Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont), existentialist writers, outsiders, and others I may be forgetting because of heavy pot smoking.

You would be stunned at how many European and Canadian curators diminish political art by naming it activism, and not contemporary art. As many artists of colour, women and queers make political work, it makes you wonder if these curators positions were not influenced by homophobia, sexism or racism, internalized or not.