Wednesday Lupypciw’s formal training is in textiles — she’s a grad of the fibre program at the Alberta College of Art & Design — but she says it’s not a big leap to work in video. Lupypciw says the low-fi and analogue technologies she is drawn to allow her to be “crafty in a video realm.”

“You can push it around the same way as yarn or clay... the way you can piece it together or snip it apart is kind of like making a weaving... or a tapestry,” she says.

Just as in textile work, texture is important to video, and Lupypciw likes the pace. “It’s slow moving... editing a video, you can spend so long editing an inch.”

Lupypciw’s video work, “Tranzar E Pras Amantes: Sex is for Lovers,” is included in Timeland: The 2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, at Edmonton’s Art Gallery of Alberta. She is one of only five women in a cross-generational show that includes 24 artists. Richard Rhodes, biennial curator and editor of Canadian Art, describes her piece as “a homegrown episode of a Latin-language television soap opera... a coming of age story of self-realization.”

In this beautifully layered, sexually charged video, Lupypciw plays double rolls as youthful Portuguese speaking lovers separated by geography and culture — one woman is in the north (Alberta), the other in the south (Brazil). In scenes constructed and overlaid with special effects, the two come together to play out fantasies and rituals — hands in leather gloves, rope tied around wrists, an exposed light bulb applied to skin — and in the end seem further apart.

The 15-minute video is comprised of footage shot over three years. Lupypciw’s working process is organic. She makes footage impulsively, which she accumulates as raw material. Eventually, she says, it begins to “suggest in itself how it can be paired together... and might form a loose thread.” With one or two strategic moves, Lupypciw links it all together and creates a loose narrative structure that allows audiences different points of entry into her work. Having multiple characters, even if she’s playing them both, “diffuses the attention on the screen, and diffuses the pressure,” she says.

“ICKKFAXX 2010,” the video currently on view in With Nothing You Starve, With A Little You Survive at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, was made in a similar fashion with Lupypciw again playing two distinct characters. “ICKKFAXX 2010” shows an erotic tryst with what might be the least provocative communication technology, a fax machine. The video oscillates between sexy, awkward and humorous. Are the girls on either end of the transmission communicating with each other? Is this the daydream of a bored office worker?

Lupypciw’s next projects are a bit different. She’ll be performing in front of a live audience, rather than a camera, which is something she hasn’t done since 2008.

Currently, Lupypciw is engaged in research that will culminate in a new body of work. She plans to travel to Red Deer to re-enact the 1975 inaugural meeting of the Hand Weavers, Spinners and Dyers of Alberta and is collecting the stories of the women who participated.

In October, Lupypciw will be part of the Mountain Standard Time Performative Arts Festival, with a performance work-cum-“all girl, cut-throat competition.” For The Ladies’ 500 Metre Challenge, she’ll construct a custom loom, and two teams will face-off, tasked by a referee to produce fabric using different techniques. In the end, their work will be judged. Audiences are invited to watch and cheer on the competitors.

In terms of current inspiration, Lupypciw cites the work of video artist Aleesa Cohene, who works in Germany and experiments with found footage, and the practice of Toronto-based artist, curator and intellectual Allyson Mitchell. Other influences include Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch, Lupypciw’s best friends and collaborators in the Ladies Invitational Deadbeat Society collective, who maintain significant practices outside of Calgary.

And what’s on her summer reading list? Lately, Lupypciw has been boning up on homeopathy — what she calls the “closest thing to being a witch in modern days.” She’s also investigating women’s culture of the 1970s, often referred to as the “beige decade” in textile circles, and is exploring the concept of “back-to-the-land” living.