Andrea Cooper is an interdisciplinary artist with a MVS from the University of Toronto and a BFA from Concordia University. Her work Room for A Pony was selected for the Gros Morne Playwrights’ Residency. Strange Things won the National Film Board of Canada’s Emerging Filmmaker/Video Artist Award at the Images Festival. Cooper’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Grunt Gallery (Vancouver), Red Head Gallery (Toronto), and Eastern Edge Gallery (St John’s).

The Key of F. video is a five-minute performance video in which Cooper takes sexually aggressive sexts/texts sent to her from men she has met on Tinder. As a single, sexual woman who is active in social media, she has discovered through sexting that there is a liminal line between desire, sex, pornography, and violence when it comes to communication. For all the intense intimacy in the conversations and visual graphics, there can be a complete lack of intimacy and inhibition when it comes to technology. Men often feel free to type whatever they want without consequence. As a woman looking to make a connection, or to simply get off, men’s choice of language can sometimes be the antithesis of arousing. By performing these words directly from texts, as a woman and an artist, Cooper has the agency to “take them back” so that they have new meaning. When spoken, these words live outside of the phone and become their own entity.