June 1–30, 2026
e-flux Film is pleased to present the June 2026 edition of the online series Staff Picks, organized in collaboration with Vtape and featuring three works by Susan Britton: Susan (1976), In the Mood (1976), and What Does Alienated Labour Mean to You? (1976).
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Susan Britton first studied Advertising Art at Red River Community College before transferring to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1975, where she began experimenting with video. After graduating in 1976, she moved to Toronto, made numerous videotapes, and exhibited widely. In 1980, Britton became one of the five original collective members of Vtape, alongside Lisa Steele, Rodney Werden, Clive Robertson, and Colin Campbell.
Britton’s early videos belong to the first generation of Canadian video art and draw on the emerging media conditions of the 1970s with a sharp awareness of performance, advertising, and the circulation of cultural language. Across these works, the artist assumes personae drawn from pop culture, mass media, and everyday fantasy, including the mystic, the vacationer, and the sex worker. The distance between artist and character remains unstable, producing a mode of performance in which irony, self-presentation, and social critique become difficult to separate.
Made at the dawn of what was already being called the “information age,” Britton’s videos register both the attraction of new media and skepticism toward its commercial and ideological uses. Her characters speak in the language of confession, self-help, advertising, and desire, while the works expose the emptiness of cultural scripts shaped by consumption and media repetition. With their soft lighting, direct address, and ambiguous tone, these videos situate Britton’s own presence as both performer and shadow, examining how images produce identity, labor, sexuality, and belief.
Although Britton was prolific and widely exhibited during her time as a video artist, she withdrew from the arts world in the 1980s. A restoration project undertaken by Vtape in 2009–10 returned her early works to circulation, allowing renewed attention to an artist whose videos remain essential to the history of Canadian media art and to broader accounts of feminist, performative, and critical approaches to early video.
Videos
Susan (1976, 10:30 minutes)
A young woman walks the streets of Halifax, and speaks of her love of the gardens, her family, and life as a prostitute.
In the Mood (1976, 3 minutes)
The artist lounges on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean, the stars are almost close enough to touch. Relaxing in luxury, she confesses, “There comes a time in every life to move beyond compromise.”
What Does Alienated Labour Mean to You? (1976, 10:20 minutes)
A reading of Buddhist mystical thought, regarding oneness, emptiness and reality in juxtaposition with fashion advertising, products and cosmetics.
With this edition, Staff Picks continues to foreground underrepresented yet formative histories of artists’ video through collaborations with archives, distributors, and institutions working across different parts of the world. Staff Picks is a streaming series on e-flux Film of recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history. Subscribe to e-flux Film.
