Cornelia Wyngaarden, Artist in distribution

Cornelia Wyngaarden (1942) is a Canadian media artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She creates works in video, sculpture, and installation, and has played a significant role in the development and institutionalization of new media in Vancouver.
Wyngaarden has worked in various artist-run centres in Vancouver as a bookkeeper, editor, grant writer, administrator, photographer, fundraiser, and artist. Her video-based installations and single channel videotapes explore feminist themes, issues of gender, sexuality, technology, and the ways in which history and social conditions have complicated women's rights. She juxtaposes technological media with human subject matter to extend the interpretive possibilities of her work.
Wyngaarden's work also addresses cross-dressing either overtly or subtextually, in order to deconstruct stereotypes and power relations. Employing lived experience, queer theory, and "forgotten" history and cultural mythology, her video installations also create an arena for queer representation.

A well known cultural dissident and important voice of Canadian feminism, Wyngaarden has been a pioneering force in the development and institutionalization of new media in Vancouver. Along with producing theoretically complex and formally compelling works of video and sculpture, Wyngaarden rallied, fought and forged for years at both Video In and Western Front to lay the ground rock on which much of the Vancouver’s media community flourished.