Joyce Wieland (1931–1998) became a pioneer of Canadian experimental film by creating a body of work that perfectly expressed her unconventional and radically personal approach as an artist. When she started off as a painter in the 1950s, she earned her living at an advertising and commercial film studio in Toronto where she became familiar with the medium as would later be mirrored in her own films: like her long-time husband Michael Snow, she studied cinematic perception by focusing on objects from a familiar and inanimate world.