Vincent Tangredi was among the first generation of artists in Toronto to work with image and text during the mid-1970s. Often centred around subjective narratives concerning desire and conflict, Tangredi’s early works possess a dramatic intensity that engages but does not directly address the viewer. This enables the work to function as an investigation of experience which the viewer can enter and yet at the same time observe. But although we as the audience find ourselves acting as witness, we are nevertheless drawn into the works by their powerful emotional and psychological pull. Our attention is galvanized by their intensity of feeling and clarity of focus. Indeed, one of the characteristic features of Vincent Tangredi’s work throughout his career has been that each work seems to possess a kind of resonant core that elicits almost immediate sense of connection from the viewer. In the works of the 1970s and early 1980s this core centres around the “I” that appears in the texts of these works. Rather than concentrate our attention on the speaker, however, it enables us to “locate” ourselves intuitively and imaginatively within the “scene,” relationship and issue presented in each work.