When There's Love

This work is an installation featuring three video projections, music and mirror balls. The three projections fill the walls with scrolling text borrowed from love song lyrics. Headphones in the gallery space allow you to hear a male voice sing the same words to an impromptu tune. Mirror balls send fragments of light spinning around the room while The Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody plays on repeat. This work emphasizes fragmentary, repetitious and spatio-temporal experiences of language in order to question the symbolic conventions of romance. By exaggerating and mixing hackneyed symbolic elements, this work extends on some of Nicolas Bourriaud’s theoretical insights into the creative and critical strategies of ‘postproduction’. In particular, it toys with the intersections between popular culture and inter-subjective experiences.

Threshold

In this video, the words of a translated poem fade in and out above an abstract, moving horizon line. The animated words are set to an emotive stock music track. This work examines processes of signification. It emphasizes abstraction and disconnection as fundamental and generative operations in making meaning. Extending on post-structural and deconstructionist ideas, this work questions the signifying processes of translation and metaphor. By emphasizing the abstract qualities of a translated love poem, it questions the sites and mechanisms of signification.

Canadian Crime Control in the New Millennium: The Influence of Neo-conservative U.S. Policies and Practices

An important issue facing Canadians today is crime control and prevention. Research done in the late 1980s and early 1990s by three sociologists shows that Canadian federal criminal justice policies and practices adopted by the Mulroney government from 1984 to 1990 were inconsistent with US ‘law and order’ models in place at that time. However, since the mid‐1990s, Canadian federal and provincial governments have mimicked some US authoritarian and gender‐blind means of curbing crime. The main objective of this paper is to provide some key examples of criminal justice policy transfer from the USA in Canada. At first glance, Canada may appear to be a ‘kinder, gentler nation,’ but not to the extent assumed by many, if not most, outside observers.