The third in Vtape’s series of collaborations with e-flux Staff Picks is devoted to the videos of Susan Britton, and features three works: Susan (1976), In The Mood (1976), and What Does Alienated Labour Mean to You? (1976), available to stream free on the e-flux site for the month of June.

Hailing from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Susan Britton first studied as a designer at Red River Community College before transferring to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1975, interested, as she put it, “to try anything that was new.” One of the original five collective members of Vtape in 1980, Britton’s early work features the artist assuming various personae plucked from pop culture—mystic, vacationer, prostitute—with the gap between artist and persona remaining uncanny and ambiguous. These works participate in and comment on the much-discussed “information age” of the 1970s. Britton’s attraction to new media commingled with skepticism about rapidly advancing commercialization, as her irony counters a mounting insincerity in culture. Hyperliterate in the omnipresent language of advertising, Britton depicts slick characters repeating empty slogans in soft lighting, with her own perspective hanging as an ambiguous and threatening shadow over the frame. Though Britton was prolific and successful in her time as a video artist, Allison Collins, curator of “Suspicious Futures: Selected Video Works of Susan Britton,” notes that by the 1980s, Britton had quietly dropped out of the arts world. After a restoration project undertaken by Vtape in 2009-10, these works have returned to circulation to restore Britton’s position as an essential figure of the first generation of Canadian video artists.