Paul Lang

male
Born in
ON
Canada
,
Ontario CA
Lives in
Vancouver , BC
Canada
,
British Columbia CA
Biography

Video maker. Ontario-bred, Vancouver-based Lang is one of the most articulate voices on Vancouver’s AIDS activist artistic front. In 1993 an early collaboration with Zachery Longboy led to Choose Your Plague (6), an often-programmed poetic tape in which the two artists literally eat (and spit out) the words that determine their existence as HIV+ gay men, from “fear” to “racism.” In 2001 Lang solo’d HIV Rollercoaster (27), a disturbing, open-ended essay on the culture of barebacking, in which testimonies and performances by a range of “stake-holders” (one enthusiastic participant brags that he measures the unprotected loads he receives in litres), interpolated with porno clips. Two predominant visual metaphors predominate, the famous rollercoaster in the Pacific National Exhibition site and a less familiar one: the rosy, anal Fantastic Voyage/Innerspace landscape of colonoscopy images. Lang has collaborated as camera with most of the Video In queer artists.