The entire staff and board of directors of Vtape would like to acknowledge Deirdre Logue’s enormous contribution to Vtape’s development as an organization. Deirdre recently left her position as Development Director at Vtape to start a PhD program at Queen’s University this fall, and, as usual, will continue to have a very busy artistic life, including hosting the 2025 Independent Imagining Retreat (The Film Farm) at the fabulous home she shares with partner Allyson Mitchell near Trenton, Ontario, where they also continue to run their collaborative Feminist Art Residency activities.
It would be hard to overstate the impact Deirdre has had on the media and visual arts scene in Canada: she was a co-founder of Windsor’s Media City Film Festival; Executive Director of the Images Festival; Executive Director of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre; and was Vtape’s Development Director since 2006. In addition, she has served on several boards of directors, and has acted as a tireless mentor, connector, and advocate for art, artists, and arts organizations for decades. If you haven’t met Deirdre yet, don’t worry, you will!
At Vtape, Deirdre was instrumental in increasing the organization’s funding levels whenever the opportunity arose, and steered a number of major organizational projects, including the creation of the organization’s current website, and leading the funding and project management of the multi-organizational renovation project now known as The Commons @ 401. Deirdre has always kept the organization’s focus on its core values, championing fair compensation for artists and arts workers, and creating a welcoming, collaborative, and inclusive environment for diverse artists, audiences, students, and arts professionals from all backgrounds.
As an artist, Deirdre is one of the most distinctive creators of video installations ever, often bringing many screens into play at once. Her beloved many-channel installations and video series include Enlightened Nonsense (2000), Why Always Instead of Just Sometimes (2005), Rough Count (2006), Id’s Its (2012), and The Opposite of Ignoring Chickens (2022). Her epic collaborations with Allyson Mitchell include the video Hers is Still a Dank Cave: Crawling Towards a Queer Horizon (2016) and the incomparable, unprecedented “large-scale, multimedia, walk-through installation and performance” called Killjoy’s Kastle, presented in several different forms in Toronto (2013), London, UK (2014), Los Angeles (2015), and Philadelphia (2019). (Killjoy’s Kastle is also the subject of a book published by UBC Press, and an upcoming comic memoir.)
Deirdre’s work has been the subject of a major Images Festival artist’s spotlight at A Space Gallery, Gallery 44, and Tangled Art + Disability, in collaboration with Vibrafusion Lab (2017), which coincided with the publication of an Oakville Galleries monograph about her work called Beyond Her Usual Limits: The Film and Video Works of Deirdre Logue, 1997 to 2017. In addition to Killjoy’s Kastle, Deirdre’s collaborations with Allyson Mitchell have included a cat-infested artists’ residency at the AGO, participation in the Tate Modern conference Civil Partnerships? Queer and Feminist Curating, and the exhibition I’m Not Myself At All, at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. They ran the Feminist Art Gallery for ten years from their Parkdale home before decamping for the countryside with their chickens and cats.