Love + Numbers: The Videos of Theo Jean Cuthand

Theo Jean Cuthand has been experimenting in and through video for thirty years. His work ranges from diaristic explorations of sexuality and politics to performative radical histories and finally narratives that dive deep into the edges and centres of society's treatment of mental health, sexuality, Indigenous peoples, and land.

Always authentic, honest, and raw, Theo’s work broke open often-taboo topics and gave us a new freedom through the camera. This exhibition’s earliest work from 1995 explores “baby dyke theory” and the latest work from 2024 combines both the joy of transition and the violent turn against trans rights we are seeing today. Theo’s works never create victims; instead they celebrate the margins as the centre. In doing so, Theo deploys humour to realize a new viewpoint that wasn’t visible in the media around him. I have arranged the videos in the exhibition around topics that reoccur in Theo’s work, namely, land and community, mental health, sexuality, and performativity. Each section crosses time to show a sustained engagement that allows for discourses to shift as Theo aged and changed also.

In 1995, when Theo was only sixteen, he developed his campy, naked, transgressive, and smart style. Three early works were done on Super 8 (a film format) and Hi-8 (an early video format): Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory (Hi-8, 1995); Working Baby Dyke Theory (Hi-8, 1997); and Manipulation/Dictation (Super 8, 1999). These three works from the late 1990s were ahead of their time in the fun way they address a lack of lesbian representation, let alone a lonely Cree lesbian of the prairies. Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory was made at the age of sixteen when Theo, then Thirza, felt like the only lesbian in town so uses candy to bribe others to come out. The joke is about how what forms reality in media is not always the reality one sees daily—especially if it is hidden. This early lesson most likely led Theo to centre his lived realities that often exposed the lie within popular representations.

Working Baby Dyke Theory was produced at Video In Studios in Vancouver (now VIVO Media Arts Centre). The narrative speaks to the way children are dismissed by adults and Theo’s theory that it’s because adults want to eat them. This is visually mirrored by a low camera angle—as if the camera is a child’s point of view—and the unequal power dynamic it implies. This hilarious beginning is undercut with a very real agism in the lesbian community where teenage love is seen as a lack an older lover can fill. But for Theo there is no lack—only light, as they are all dolled up in Christmas lights. Lastly, the image of abuse arises as a very real aspect of the uneven power dynamic between adults and teens in a sexual relationship. Manipulation/Dictation explores power through objectification, manipulation, and betrayal by lovers and former lovers in their attempt to be friends.

Made when Theo was between the ages of sixteen and twenty, these works flip power dynamics on their head, putting youth in charge of describing the experiences teenagers often aren’t allowed to voice. Queer desire, seduction, betrayal, friendship, and abuse are all treated with a visual language that complicates a simple reading of power or sexuality as top/down or submissive/dominant. Context is key to understanding a power dynamic and here one should never underestimate a teenager. Theo’s wit transforms a potential trauma into a lesson, a theory, a pathway, and a subversive imagination.

Theo holds multiple perspectives from living at the intersections of trans life, Indigenous/Cree culture, and the experience of bipolar disorder, a unique space that informs the three works that form the section on mental health. Taking place over seventeen years, Theo gives us an honest exploration of his experience of hospitalizations, medicines, family, and love in and through manic episodes. Love & Numbers (2004) explores the relationships between colonization, normalization, capitalization and hospitalization. What might seem paranoid in one view could just be realistic from another perspective. And what about love, where does love fit into it all? Theo tries to make greater meaning from a particularly cruel experience of hospitalization in Montréal. Madness in Four Actions (2008) exhibits an almost anti-psychiatry argument through appropriated popular culture to process the prison-like experiences he and many others have faced when attempting to seek institutional help. By 2021, Theo was ready to dive into his last hospitalization in 2007 with his mother, fellow artist Ruth Cuthand. Neurotransmitting is an honest look at the impact of manic episodes between a parent and adult child that doesn’t shy away from the struggles within the relationship. These works do a lot to end the stigmatization of speaking about living with bipolar disorder but also challenge society to redefine what is normal.

The three works in the sexuality section are profound while being humorous and celebratory in tone. Boi Oh Boi (2012) is a diary of a time in Theo’s life, pre-transition, when he had decided to identify as a butch lesbian for love. The video in true non-binary fashion explores the many expressions and sources of gender identity. Flash to a hilarious infomercial for two-sprit support, with 2 Spirit Introductory Special (2015). The latest video in this series, The Lost Art of the Future (2022), pays tribute to Âhasiw Maskêgon-Iskwêw and other Indigiqueer men who have passed away from HIV/AIDS. Through reproducing Maskêgon-Iskwêw’s performance work, Theo both mends and opens the wounds from mourning the art Maskêgon-Iskwêw will never make and the loss of mentorship for queer youth in his passing. Theo’s work defiles the readymade identity for the real that is sometimes unseen until he shows us.

The performance section forms the backbone of the entire exhibition by presenting methods and theories of embodiment and identity that inform all the works. Theo’s work from 1995 to today has been a measure, a document, and a catalyst of transformation. When he started making videos in the 1990s, he was pretty alone in the honest, vulnerable, and radical nature of the work. He sought out artists to mentor him and used humour as an Indigenous strategy to deal with trauma in ways that do not victimize. Through the Looking Glass (1999) shows the performance art roots of Theo’s video practice. The thorn in this rose is the need to choose between white or red. Just Dandy (2013) is a playful performance of a fantasy where an evil colonizing queen and invasive species exists—or is this just a gentle introduction to reality? Finally, in his most recent work Dreams of Sunlight Through Trees (2024), we feel the full joy of a fantasy realized in Theo’s transition. Lurking underneath but unable to dislodge this joy is the threat of another evil, the attack on trans rights we see violently unfolding globally.

A subtle activism emerges in all the work because Theo lives life simply and fully as himself whatever path that leads him down. This is visible in Less Lethal Fetishes (2019) where activism—and interrogating their place within it—is the subject. When invited to show in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Theo was faced with the tainted and violent nature of arts funding and the need for a response. A Whitney board member was being protested for profiting off tear gas manufacturing used to suppress dissent and resistance in Palestine, Ferguson, and Standing Rock. Theo’s art practice has often sat uncomfortably within both contemporary art settings and cinema. It was a much-deserved recognition to be included in a prestigious biennial and a potential boon for his career. Theo deals headlong with the conflict this raises while at the sometime not allowing for a merely moral rejection of his participation by turning the very signifier of both violence and protection, the gas mask, into a fetish. In Less Lethal Fetishes, activism, kink, and the art world are brought together through the concepts of complicity and toxicity embodied through Theo’s burgeoning fetish. While you could read his work through an activist lens, it is an activism that never loses sight of desire and bodily freedom that may still lie outside of the group morality.

Theo is from this land now called Canada and has been raised in the prairies by his Cree-Scottish family. This fact arises in many works but is dealt with most directly in the two-channel installation Medicine and Magic (2020) and in Homelands (2010). The interesting aspect of these works is the expression of fullness within his identity as both Cree and Scottish. Often artists have to choose one over the other as if one could mark out blood in the body this way. Theo rejects this premise and connects the two sides by the Ocean that joins them. Another aspect of these works is the bridging of Christianity, Paganism, and Cree spirituality. Theo explains the genesis of the documentary Homelands the following way:

"On my mother’s side there are two lands I come from, separated by the Atlantic Ocean, all those fathoms deep. The lands of my grandma and grandpa. I had been through the lands of my grandfather, that is where I still live. The now tamed prairies, missing their bison herds and fenced out into neat geometrical patterns. My grandma comes from a similarly colonized land, Scotland. Ruled by the British Commonwealth and forbidden to speak their language […] I had never been to Scotland. And I wanted to see my grandma’s traditional territory. This is the story of our family, about where we started and where we came from.”

The film makes clear these narratives and peoples are intertwined and Theo wouldn’t exist without the stories the family tells of itself. Often the binaries of Indigenous/White, Christian/Pagan, keep us from understanding real lived experiences which don’t fit into binary/singular categorization.

Medicine and Magic grew out of ongoing research and family storytelling prior to and after Homelands. Theo’s Cree great-great grandfather Misatimwas was healed through ancient medicine and ceremony. The medicine bundle and the bear robe that were used in this healing carried the spirit of the bear and its protection. Theo knew there were medicine men in his family but later discovered a Scottish ancestor who had been executed as a witch for doing a ceremony to protect the cattle. Both sides of his family come together through medicine and magic in this beautiful meditation on what has survived the attempted erasure of healing practices on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Another aspect Theo draws our attention to is how both grandparents were Christian. Theo explains the importance of this fact:

“I’m sure there were pagan beliefs in my Scottish grandmother’s roots, but her family was clearly Christian by the time she came into this world. My grandpa, Stan Cuthand, Misatimwas’ grandson, was an Anglican Minister. And yet he was very proud of telling us about his grandfather, about the struggles that he had in 1885, and about things he believed in that were not Christian at all. Near the end of his life he said he was not going to Heaven, he was going to where his ancestors were, he was going to the stars. That’s an old Plains Cree belief and I found it so interesting that after a lifetime of devotion to Jesus he still was going home to another place. I feel like these videos unearth some of this history and my hope is that they lead people to draw their own conclusions about spiritual, magical, medicinal histories.”

Throughout his career, Theo has disregarded the often-siloed nature of film and art categories that separate documentary, experimental, installation art, video diary, and performance art. One of the earliest artists in Canada to use video to break these categories, Theo’s work in specific genres tends towards expanding their definition. The radical gesture of challenging what is considered normal in a society, and what is considered a proper subject of art, has been the enduring legacy of Theo’s work to date. We can thank the freedom of his imagination, the vulnerability of his honest narratives, and the full embodiment he exhibits that arise out of his unique experiences as a Cree, trans, and bipolar artist.