Artist

Tanya Murdoch

Tanya Murdoch is a Canadian video artist and painter living in Toronto with her handsome husband and two strange and beautiful children. Restless from a childhood spent in small coastal towns in BC, she began art school long ago (as a painter) in Victoria, detoured to western Japan, and completed her BFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1993, with a focus on video and performance art. Her work from this period deals playfully and poignantly with issues of identity and role-playing (it was the ‘90s, man.)

Although she had videos in festivals in Canada in 1994/5 (Reel Life Film & Video Festival, Atlantic Film Festival, Evening at the Pleasuredome, Victoria Independent Film & Video Festival) she made the unusual decision to leave the glamourous Canadian Video Art scene and move to Japan, seeking production work while exploring the Tokyo scene. She landed a job editing news for Reuters Tokyo in 1996, and found similar work when she moved to Toronto in 2000. She has produced videos in Tokyo and in Toronto, designed sets and produced a video for a Canadian-Australian-Japanese theatre company, and participated in a number of performance/video events in Tokyo as an artist, curator and collaborator (Celtic Art Festival, Performance 2000 at the Canadian Embassy, Tokyo Rose book launch). Upon moving to Toronto in 2000 she was commissioned to direct a video in which Ontario artists tell the history of CARFAC. Shortly before leaving Japan she received a development grant from the Canada Council for the Arts (April 1999), and in August 2004 received a production grant to produce a documentary on the affects of Aboriginal status on her husband and his family. In her (now part-time) position as a video editor/associate producer she has made a number of short series and hour-long documentaries that have aired on Citytv.

Nowadays she is working in video, painting, pen & ink sketches and comics to make personal, specific stories and portraits of family and friends in an attempt to find broader meaning in small true things.

Artist Code: 408

Videography

Nostalgia

2000, 04:15 minutes, colour, English

Getting Ready

1998, 02:44 minutes, colour

Outlines

1995, 03:00 minutes, colour

I Have To Tell You Something About Myself

1993, 04:30 minutes, colour/B&W, English

Another Victim of Love

1993, 08:00 minutes, colour/B&W, English

Scar

1993, 07:00 minutes, colour/B&W, English