Magnetic North showcases the recent explosion of compelling independent video from Canada in a six-part series produced by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Video Pool and Plug In, Winnipeg. Occasionally shocking, often funny, and above all, genuinely experimental, this body of work asserts beyond a doubt that video is alive and well, and that Canadians have produced some of the most energetic work in the international arena. Comprised of forty tapes by forty-seven artists from the last thirty years and organized by thematic concerns, each program establishes relationships between diverse works. From innovative documentary to conceptual art, experimental narrative to performance video, the programs create associations across history, regions, languages, and genres. The featured videos travel a full spectrum of story and style: from John Greyson’s explicit mixing of a gay cruising bust and a 1940s film adaptation of Kipling in The Jungle Boy to the storytelling via CB radio of an Inuit women’s collective in Piujuq and Angutautug to the humorous portrait of two Québecois women’s obsession with Formula One racing in Le Beau Jacques to photographer Donigan Cumming’s subversive and powerful video eulogy for his elderly model in A Prayer for Nettie. As curator Jenny Lion writes in her introduction to the book Magnetic North, "Many of the videomakers in Magnetic North take risks—they risk offending, self-revelation or self-assertion, political commitment, resisting censorship . . . or entertaining in the face of catastrophe. At stake is the act of invention."