Sydney Southam is a visual artist, filmmaker, performance artist, and professional pole dancer. She often works with archival 16mm film, exploring themes of nostalgia, death, memory, and identity. Her current work explores the backstage and domestic lives of exotic dancers and how their private and professional lives are defined through ideas of Feminism, objectification, power, and love.
Sydney is one of the founding members of Vancouver-based Iris Film Collective, and the curator of the potluck dinner and artist talk series Special Sunday Supper. Her films and artwork have shown across Canada, Europe and Asia, at venues such as MOCA Taipei, Gabriel Rolt Galerie (Amsterdam), Athens International Film and Video Festival, Antimatter Media Art Festival, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Access Gallery, Emmedia Gallery, Yinka Shonibare Guest Projects, Vivo Media Arts Centre, Cinema Spectacular, Western Front, Cinemateque Vancouver and the Haida Heritage Centre.
She graduated from Central Saint Martins with a BA Fine Art First Class Honours in 2011 and from the University of Toronto with a BA in English, Philosophy and Cinema Studies in 2007.
Find more of Sydney's work on her Instagram!
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The 3 channel film “That’s Why I Like It” is a culmination of my work as an artist, filmmaker, professional pole dancer and stripper. Using my own experience with strip club labour conditions as inspiration for my line of questioning, I began interviewing and filming professional exotic dancers from varying backgrounds in their homes, asking them questions around feminism, objectification, power, and love. The edited interviews are paired with a multi-channel video depicting the women’s bodies from behind, swaying and twerking in hypnotic slow motion. The resulting work seeks to understand what is means to be consensually objectified for a living, and is a critical and empathetic look into the lives of a group of women who are simultaneously exalted and demeaned for their chosen profession.
