Category: Artist

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

Canada

www.justicewalz.com

Justice Walz is an interdisciplinary artist, brand designer, illustrator + maker based in Toronto. She uses her artistic practice as a way to playfully explore her intersections as a neurodivergent, mad, queer biracial woman of colour.  Justice’s work toys with notions of intersectional feminism, re-contextualizing / healing from mental and chronic illness, and the reclamation of her identity, using her interdisciplinary practice as a way to navigate and make peace with her experiences. Balancing the dichotomy of elegance and camp, trauma and healing, beauty and abjection, as well as confrontation and acceptance, Justice uses craft and found objects in a variety of disciplines.  She enjoys working with visually and tactually stimulating mediums in a practice that often includes craft clay, resin, and upcycled secondhand materials.

Justice has exhibited installations and illustrations that join the discourse of mental and chronic illness, feminism, and healing from trauma. She exhibited her earliest installation work in The Sustenance Rite (2017), curated as part of the 5-circuit exhibition series Take Care. In 2018, she showed her next installation at MENTAL HEALTH, as part of the White House Studio Project’s In Space program, conceived of by Sandra J. Manilla and co-produced with Stephanie Avery, Leone McComas, and Nathaniel Addison. This exhibition was funded through the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council, and led to her participation as an exhibiting artist speaker at a community roundtable in partnership with the Artists’ Health Alliance. 

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

Canada

www.shalontwh.com

Shalon Webber-Heffernan is a curator, writer, and doctoral candidate in Performance Studies. Her work as a scholar and live arts curator broadly explores contemporary site-specific performance projects that respond creatively to issues surrounding borderlands, space, disappearance, and disposability throughout the hemispheric Americas.

Currently, she is the Educator-in-Residence at The Blackwood Gallery with the 2021–2022 Curatorial Consortium. Webber-Heffernan also recently curated an exhibition at Vtape entitled love as rupturous as i know it be. She was Curator in Residence at the Curatorial Lab @ Sensorium (2019–2020) and have been independently curating interdisciplinary art events and exhibitions since 2012. She has presented her research internationally, including at the Hemispheric Institute’s Encuentro (México City), Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC), Trans-In-Corporados conference (Rio de Janeiro), and Performance Studies international (PSi) in Calgary.

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

Turkey / Canada

www.simlacivelek.com

Simla Civelek is a performance artist based in Toronto, Canada. Her work has been presented at FADO Performance Art Centre, 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, SAVAC, and Nuit Blanche in Toronto; Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops; Circa in Montréal; Art Nomade in Chicoutimi; Regart in Lévis; Glasshouse Art Life Lab in Brooklyn and Experimental Action Performance Art Festival in Houston, USA; and OPEN Performance Art Festival in China, among other venues.

“I don’t want realism, I want magic.”

I came across this quote recently, once again, years after reading A Streetcar Named Desire for the first time. Things feel inherently different now. An outside world in turmoil and an inner world with angst, fear, and weariness. Blanche makes more sense, or rather, I understand her need. When I have the cynical question of “why make performance,” I also have the inclination to start from the present moment to find an answer, or rather, to look for an answer. As realism can never be a match for magic. ~Simla Civelek

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

USA / Canada

www.jessdobkin.com

Jess Dobkin is an artist, curator and teacher whose prolific practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festival and single bathroom stalls. She creates intimate solo theatre performances, large-scale public happenings, playful subversive interventions and engaging performance art workshops and lectures.

Her creative endeavours have received wide support and recognition, including repeated funding from the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art and the Astraea Foundation, and awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. Her work has toured North America, and has been presented at renowned avant-garde venues in New York, including P.S.122, The Kitchen, LaMama, Dixon Place, Judson Memorial Church, and the WOW Cafe. In Toronto, her work has been presented at the Rhubarb! Festival, SPIN Gallery, the Inside/Out Festival, the Hysteria Festival, and other venues.

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

b.1962, Canada

www.recordism.com

William A. Davison is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist born in Nova Scotia, and based in Toronto since 1989. He has been producing art for almost 40 years, working in visual art, film and video, performance art, music/sound, writing/poetry, networking, artistic collaboration, organizing/curating, and publishing. As a reaction to the cultural isolation and conservatism he experienced growing up in Nova Scotia, Davison sought out anything strange, nonconforming and subversive. His art and ideas developed under the influence of science fiction, the occult, underground and avant-garde comics, psychedelia, Dada and Surrealism, punk, post-punk, and industrial music culture.

In 1984 he founded Recordism, his own idiosyncratic take on Surrealism. His prolific and eclectic artistic output derives from an uncompromising experimental approach and a commitment to the punk D.I.Y. ethos. Davison’s dedication to enlivening his local scene has gone hand in hand with an international reach via appearances at major festivals, exhibitions, and events, as well as through numerous publications and audio releases. W.A.Davison was a recipient of an Acker Award in 2018.

Canada

https://claudiaedwards.info/

Claudia Edwards is a performance and visual artist based in Toronto, Canada. Of Indo-Guyanese and British descent, their work explores issues of identity, memory, queerness, power, and decolonization. Their approach is conceptually driven and formally determined by operation and circulation, spanning the forms of socially-engaged performance art, persona, somatic dance, photography, video, text and objects. Edwards has created performances for Pi*llOry, The School of Making Thinking, Flux Factory, Virtual International Exchange, and more. Their curatorial work includes HOTWIRE, a live art series featuring QTBIPOC artists hosted in residency at Hub14, and serving on the Rhubarb 2020 curatorial collective. They obtained their BFA at Concordia University in 2016.

Canada

www.dionfletcher.com

Vanessa Dion Fletcher is a Lenape and Potawatomi neurodiverse Artist. Her family is from Eelūnaapèewii Lahkèewiitt (displaced from Lenapehoking) and European settlers. She employs porcupine quills, Wampum belts, and menstrual blood, to reveal the complexities of what defines a body physically and culturally. Reflecting on an Indigenous and gendered body with a neurodiverse mind, Dion Fletcher creates art using composite media, primarily working in performance, textiles and video. She graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 with an MFA in performance at York University in 2009 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. She has exhibited across Canada and the USA, at Art Mur Montréal, Eastern Edge Gallery Newfoundland, The Queer Arts Festival Vancouver and the Satellite Art show in Miami. Her work is in the Indigenous Art Centre, Joan Flasch Artist Book collection, Vtape, Seneca College, and the Archives of American Art. 

Photo courtesy of the artist, 2020

Canada

Roy Mitchell’s artistic practice encompasses media arts, performance, community organizing, curation, podcasting, writing and more. He holds an Honours Degree in Social/Cultural Anthropology from the University of Toronto (1986). Between 1996 and into the 2000s, Mitchell created over 16 short videos and films. These mostly personal, documentary pieces have been screened locally, nationally and internationally at film festivals, galleries and artist-run events. His art writing has appeared in various magazines and publications including (Xtra, rabble.ca) and he was the Executive Director of Trinity Square Video in Toronto from 2001-2013. 

Before moving to the small hamlet of Hybla near Bancroft, Ontario in 2013, Mitchell created several interventions in public space inspired by Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and other local politicians. Drawing The Line was a performance-intervention that started with a free-to-all figuring drawing class in the square outside of Toronto City Hall. After some instruction, the participants moved en masse into the council chambers where participants sketched the councillors during a public meeting. The drawings that were created were later exhibited at Toronto Free Gallery. Many of the participants in Drawing the Line had never been to city hall or a council meeting before, and some had never been inside a gallery. Drawing The Line was a remarkable convergence of art and politics that insprised much of Mitchell’s current artistic interests. Mitchell later created the Embarrassing Mayor Tour Public Art Tour where he lead people on tours of city hall to talk about the public art there and weave in embarrassing stories about Toronto’s most embarrassing mayor, Rob Ford.

Mitchell’s work continues to be deeply informed by his politics, and tends to focus on community politics at a municipal level. He approaches all of his work an earnest criticality and a large dose of humour. He uses social media as a platform to create wry commentary on local activities, playing around the edges of journalism, performance, persona and parody. His first podcast, Roy Nation, focussed on Mayor Rob Ford and the happenings of the Toronto art community. His current project, the Hybla Minute is a weekly podcast that was created to address the dearth of local broadcast and print media in Hybla. Launched specifically to bring COVID-19 information to the local community, the podcast has grown to feature interviews and music from artists, activists and community leaders. Guests have included: performance artists/activists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan; comedians Paul Bellini and Martha Chavez; Glad Day Bookshop owner Michael Erickson; local mayors, Vic Bodnar and Paul Jenkins; and many young people starting out their careers in opera and journalism. Between 2015–2017 Mitchell published and was the sole writer for Bancroft This Week, a news-zine that covered news stories happening in Bancroft.

Roy Mitchell and collaborator Ken Fraser share the 100-acre homestead they own with the many artists that visit to participate in their home-grown community and arts initiatives. Each summer they hold a garlic festival on their land, and have started Hybla’s first Pride Parade. In 2017, they created the first Hybla Comedy Workshop. Paul Bellini, writer and performer from Kids in the Hall and This Hour has 22 Minutes, was organized to present a masterclass in standup comedy. Participants took an intensive all-day workshop with Paul and then presented their work to a full house at The Arlington Hotel in Maynooth.

Mitchell is the Director of the Hybla Academy, where area- and away-artists are invited to present workshops for locals. Workshop have been presented by Lise Beaudry, Keith Cole, Joey Shulman. Mitchell has also facilitated workshops for the Hybla Academy including Keto and the Keto Pizza and Trimming Your Bush: How to Harvest Cannabis. Mitchell and Fraser have also created the Hybla Residency, which offers artists a place to come and contemplate their practice and present new works or talks to local community. Some projects have been presented in partnership with the Art Gallery of Bancroft. Past residents include Keith Cole, Penny McCann, Laurie Townshend, Lise Beaudry, and Madi Piller. 

Mitchell’s show Hybla Minute can be listened to on Anchor.fm, and his cultural content can be viewed on his Facebook page.

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

artist bio

COMING SOON

artist bio

Canada

www.alexisbulman.com

Alexis Bulman is based in Epekwitk’/ Prince Edward Island and has a BFA from NSCAD University. Through performance, sculpture, and installation Bulman explores themes of trust, care, and negotiations of access measures in public and private spaces. Bulman’s bodily instincts and experience with disability informs her conversations with site-specific places and movement. Most recently, Bulman has presented with Eyelevel Gallery during Nocturne: Art at Night, The Confederation Centre Art Gallery, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Artspace, Connexion ARC, Flotilla and was the inaugural artist in residence with for the Interrogating Access Residency supported in partnership by OBORO and Spectrum Productions.

Canada

http://kieraboult.blogspot.com/

Kiera Boult is an interdisciplinary artist and performer from Hamilton, Ontario. Boult’s practice utilizes camp and comedy to skeptically address issues that surround the role and/or identity of the artist and the institution. In 2019, Boult was the recipient of the Hamilton Emerging Visual Artist Award. Her video and installation based works have been exhibited at Art Gallery of Hamilton, Trinity Square Video and Artcite Inc. She has performed in the Art Gallery of York University’s final Performance Bus, 7a*11d’s 7a*md8 – ONLINE,  and the Art Gallery of Ontario’s First Thursday. Boult has participated in Life of a Crap Head’s Doo Red (2019), special performance show presentation at the Toronto Biennial of Art, and in Killjoy’s Kastle in Philadelphia (2019), a performance and immersive visual art installation by artists Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue. Boult’s work has also appeared in the Chroma Issue of Canadian Art, Peripheral Review and the Brut Neuve issue of Blackflash. She holds a BFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University and is currently Vtape’s Submissions, Collections & Outreach Coordinator.

www.hollytimpener.wixsite.com/hollytimpener

Holly Timpener is a queer performance artist exploring themes of gender, identity, trauma, and memory. Their lived experience with Body Dysmorphic Disorder informs their work which uses the body to confront issues surrounding gender divides, expectations of gender, and the judgement placed upon physical appearance. Timpener’s work challenges the perceptions and expectations surrounding the “female” body within our society. Performing using the body as an object creates the capacity to disseminate complex issues within the idea of “the personal is political” in modern socio-political context. While their body is often objectified, Timpener feels that with fearless intimacy and durational presentation, their naked self challenges viewers to elevate preliminary ideas of form and gain deeper insight within the work.

b. 1976, Cameroon
www.fokouaolivier.blogspot.se

Serge Olivier Fokoua lives and works between Cameroon and Gatineau, Canada. He received his artistic training at the University of Yaounde, and through workshops organized by Renc’art studio of the Yaounde Spanish Embassy. He also attended advanced training on cultural management in Institut für Kultur Konzept in Hamburg, Germany.

Working mainly in installation and performance, Serge Olivier Fokoua’s work has been presented in numerous art exhibitions, performance events, and projects in Cameroon, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Canada and Finland. In 2011, he presented his work at le Lieu Centre en art actuel (Québec City), and le Grave (Victoriaville). In 2013, he was awarded a residency fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center (USA).

Fokoua is a co-founding member of Les Palettes du Kamer collective and since 2008 he has been the Artistic Director of the Biennale RAVY: Yaoundé Visual Art Encounters. Since 2006 he has been a member of IC Zone, an international network of festivals and art centres and has invited over 20 artists and international curators to Cameroon. Currently, he is actively working on multiple platforms for artistic exchange between Cameroon and several countries.

Canada

http://batemanreviews.blogspot.com/

David Bateman is an arts journalist and performance poet currently based in Toronto. He was born in Peterborough, Ontario and holds a PhD in English Literature with a specialization in Creative Writing (University of Calgary), and an MA in Drama (University of Toronto). He has taught at a number of post-secondary institutions including Trent University (Peterborough), Thompson Rivers University (Kamloops), University of Calgary, and Emily Carr Institute for Art and Design (Vancouver).

His performance work has been presented in Canada, the United States, and Europe He has four collections of poetry published by Frontenac House Press (Calgary), as well as collaborative poetry manuscripts with Hiromi Goto (Wait Until Late Afternoon) and Naomi Beth Wakan (pause)—also from Frontenac. His collection of short stories and creative non-fiction (A Mad Bent Diva) was published by Hidden Brook Press in 2017. His arts reviews can be seen online at Bateman Reviews.

Martens completed her Masters of Fine Art at the University of Waterloo in 2018. She is also part of the programming committee for CAFKA (Contemporary Art Forum of Kitchener & Area) and has interviewed artists for arts and culture blog, www.culturefancier.com. She has participated in performance art residencies and performed internationally. In her art practice, personal experiences are re-contextualized through performances. These performances draw from memories that are simultaneously nostalgic, shameful and based in fear. There is an attempt to fight off shame and guilt associated with exposing oneself in her performances. Humour is often used to invite and engage the viewer. 

Canada

www.katebarry.ca

Kate Barry is currently based on the the unceded, traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) nations in Vancouver, Canada.

Barry is a performance artist whose work investigates queerness, subjectivity and embodied practice through painting, drawing and video. She has contributed over 20-years to working in artist-run spaces committed to the exhibition of artwork outside the mainstream. She has performed and exhibited in galleries and festivals throughout Canada and internationally, including the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Open Space (Victoria), 7a*11d Festival of Performance Art (Toronto), World Pride Toronto, and the Rider Project (NYC). In addition, she has self-produced work at the Musee d’Orsay (Paris, France) and Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto).

From 2011–2014 Kate Barry was a member of the board of directors for FADO Performance Art Centre (Toronto). She was the project manager for More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (edited by Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars) and she worked as the archival and research associate for the book, Wordless: The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore. She was as the project lead for the MPCAS, an urban screen launched by grunt gallery in 2019. Currently, she is a sessional faculty at Emily Carr University of Art & Design and serves on the board of directors of the Mutual Aid and Reciprocity Fund (MARFEC) at ECU. From 2013 until 2016, she wrote a popular Blog called Performance Art13 that focused on the Toronto performance art scene from a visual art perspective.

Barry has curated several shows including: PLACE for the MPCAS, grunt gallery, Vancouver, 2019–2020; Nature Lover: Performance for the Camera (Fabulous Fringe Film Festival, Durham Region, 2017); 11:45PM, FADO Performance Art Centre’s Emerging Artist Series (Xpace Gallery, Toronto, 2014): and White Wedding to the Snow: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephen’s performance art wedding (Ottawa, Canada, 2010).

Kate Barry is represented by Vtape, Toronto, Canada.

Canada

www.cindy-baker.ca

Based out of Lethbridge and Edmonton, Alberta, Cindy Baker’s practice is informed by a commitment to ethical community engagement and critical social inquiry, drawing from queer, gender, race, disability, fat, and art theories. She has exhibited and performed across Canada and internationally, including in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Finland, and is represented by Dc3Projects in Edmonton.

www.dianalopezsoto.com

Mexican artist Diana Lopez Soto graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art in 2005 (Vancouver). She is an active performer, dancer and artist working with video, performance installations and public interventions. Diana is a founding member of Norma, an art collective formed by eight artists who over the past five years have produced installation and performance works that employ absurdity, physical endurance and repetition in an exploration of collective identity and cultural anxiety. As a professional dancer, she has danced for Firebelly Productions  at the Vancouver International Dance Festival (2004), the “Calgary Biennale Celebration” (2005) and other theatre/dance productions by Kira Shaffer.

She has worked for Circus Orange in Aviator, a public theatrical/circus dance and pyrotechnical performance installation that took place at Dundas Square for “Just for Laughs Festival” (2007). Diana is an active environmentalist and human rights advocate who moved from Vancouver to continue her art career at her studio quarters and organic farm in Ontario. Her work investigates patterns, human relationships and movement among, within and outside of our social/cultural and physical entities. Engaging the viewer through playful gestures that evoke self awareness, she crafts time-based journals, installations or performances inspired by her studies of everyday physical, intuitional and spiritual patterns in her life.

Originally from East Farnham, Québec, Moynan King is a Toronto-based performer, director, curator, writer and scholar.

As an actor she has over forty professional film, theatre and TV credits, most recently roles in the hit CBC series Baroness von Sketch Show, and John Greyson’s silent subway thriller Murder in Passing and his upcoming feature Last Car. She is the author of six plays, the creator of performance installations, including the The Beauty Salon and Mothering, and was the co-creator and director of trace, which toured across Canada in 2015. She has been an artist-in-residence at Studio 303 in Montreal, and Nakai Theatre in Whitehorse. Moynan was co-founder and director of the Hysteria Festival (2003–2009), co-director of the Rhubarb! Festival (2003–2005), and has curated many a cabaret (Cheap Queers; Explain Yourself; Anne Made Me Gay; City of Freaks; Strange Sisters; Hysteria @ Edgy Women). 

King holds a PhD from York University. Her academic writing has been published in journals (Canadian Theatre Review; nomorepotlucks; Canadian Literature), and books (More Caught in the Act; Once More, With Feeling; Compulsive Acts; Toronto Theatre and Performance). She was the editor of Canadian Theatre Review, issue 149, Queer Performance: Women and Trans Artists. 

Canada

www.lobil.art

I am a queer settler, a second generation working-class Canadian. I work speculatively, aiming for non-repeatabiliy, creating oddly formed moves and energetic flows to connect abstracted impulses to sublimated images. I let speech affect movement and movement affect speech—hypothetically articulating injuries that were entrenched in states of dissociation and hidden in forms of respectable behaviour. I describe this as ‘post-clown’ ‘anti-objective’ work. Taking my physical practice into performance layers on inter-relational complications, as I notice how my body responds while being seen by others. This is my best attempt to understand the strangeness of the world.

Canada

Hélène Lefebvre’s practice is an inquiry into identity and alterity, all the while weaving links between visual art, culture, and society. The body in movement and sensorial active listening (epicenter of performance action) have been a sustained interest of hers for over ten years. Recently, her work has taken the form of performance, installation and video. Her practice in corporeality takes inspiration from studies in visual art, contemporary dance, and authentic movement, a form in which improvisation is central. The richness of performance art resides in the search for the other, their humanness, an identity that appears to be different than one’s own. This meeting gives the impression of coming out of oneself while also offering a better grasp of who we are exactly.

Hélène has presented her work at a number of exhibitions and performances in Canada (Ontario, Québec and Nova Scotia), Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Ottawa.

USA

http://marilynarsem.net/

Marilyn Arsem has been creating live events since 1975, ranging from solo performances to large scale, site-specific works incorporating installation and performance. Arsem has presented work at festivals, alternative spaces, galleries, museums and universities in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asian. In 2016 she completed a 100-day performance at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Many of her works are durational in nature, and minimal in actions and materials. Created in response to the site, they engage with the immediate landscape and materiality of the location, its history, use, or politics. Arsem has often focused on designing site-specific events for audiences of a single person, allowing her to explore the unique properties of live performance: the possibility of direct interaction between performer and audience; the opportunity to engage the audience’s full range of senses including taste, touch and smell; and addressing the implications of the temporal nature of the live event, which can be retained only in memory. The performances often hover at the edge of visibility, creating an experience in which the viewer must stretch her or his perceptual capacities to their furthest limits.

She has been the recipient of numerous grants, including a Research Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, 1997; a National Endowment for the Arts Solo Theater Fellowship, 1994; an Artists’ Projects: New Forms Initiative Award, 1992, from the New England Foundation for the Arts in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowship in New Genres, 1991.

Her work has been reviewed in many publications including The New York Times (Dunning, 1994), Parachute (Todd, 1998), Text and Performance Quarterly (Anderson, 1994), Women and Performance Journal (Todd, 1996; Parker, 1988), P-Form (Askanas, 1998, 1994), New Art Examiner (Abell, 1992), and High Performance (Engstrom, 1991; Sparks, 1990; Miller, 1990; Perez, 1986; Pederson, 1986; Sommer, 1985).

She is a member (and the founder) of Mobius, Inc., a Boston-based collaborative of interdisciplinary artists. She taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for 27 years, establishing one of the most extensive programs internationally in visually-based performance art.

Canada

www.emilydicarlo.com

Emily DiCarlo is an artist and writer whose interdisciplinary work applies methodologies that often produce collaborative, site-specific projects. Evidenced through video, performance and installation, her research connects the infrastructure of time with the intimacy of duration. Since 2007, her work has been shown both locally and abroad with most recent exhibitions at the Art Museum in Toronto and SÍM Gallery in Reykjavik, Iceland as part of their artist-in-residence program. She is the recipient of the 2020–2022 OAC Media Artist Creation Project grant, the 401 Richmond Career Launcher Prize, and recently held the 2019-2020 Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research grant (SSHRC). She has been a council member for The International Society for the Study of Time since 2016 and this past year, co-edited an issue of their academic journal KronoScope, which focused on “Anthropocenic Temporalities.” She currently lives and works in Toronto (Tkaronto), Canada.

Canada

http://golbooamani.com/

Golboo Amani is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist, who creates works focused on process and research through a variety of mediums including photography, performance, space intervention, digital media, and participatory practice. She received her BFA at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Concerned with the configurations of power imbedded within institutional structures of knowledge production, Golboo’s practice centers on pedagogical practices and artist-run counter culture. Through cross-disciplinary collaborative projects, the artist’s recent bodies of work involve facilitating inclusive spaces of agency, organizing sites for generous skill sharing and embodied acts of reclamation.

Photo by Karine Locatelli, 2018

Canada
www.marieclaudegendron.com

Through a multidisciplinary approach in action art, visual arts and media arts, Marie-Claude Gendron attempts to identify the patterns of a community that is constantly actualizing itself in the public, private and intimate spheres. She considers the potential of the archive and of ruin through action and spatial settings that she sometimes presents as “tableaux vivants.” In the order of raw commemoration, her projects highlight the inevitable transformation of the existing. She is interested in the multiple possibilities of the book-object and the different forms of poetry in action.

Born in Québec City, Marie-Claude Gendron is involved in the organization of self-managed performative events and participates in several residencies, exhibitions and events in Quebec, France, Brazil, Italy, Northern Ireland, Thailand, Mexico and Switzerland. His work has been the subject of solo and collective presentations at the Galerie de l’UQAM (Montréal, CAN), the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre (Bangkok,TH), the Museo de medicinal laboral (Real del Monte, MX), the Galerie des arts visuels (Québec City, CAN) and as part of RIAP 2012 and 2014 (international performance art meetings, Le Lieu, Québec City, CAN). She has won various prizes and creation grants, including the original initiative grant for the independent broadcast of Première Ovation in 2012 and 2013, the FARE grant in 2014, support from SODEC in 2016 and travel and creation grants from CALQ in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2019. Marie-Claude Gendron holds a Bachelor’s degree in Visual and Media Arts from Université Laval and a Master’s degree in Visual and Media Arts from Université du Québec à Montréal.

Louise Liliefeldt. Land of the Living. 2022. Photo by Henry Chan.

South Africa / Canada
www.louiseliliefeldt.com

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Louise Liliefeldt is a Toronto-based performance artist and painter. Liliefeldt’s work has been presented across Canada in a wide array of festivals, platforms and venues including 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art (Toronto), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Art Gallery of York University (Toronto), FADO Performance Art Centre (Toronto), Images Festival (Toronto), LIVE Biennale (Vancouver), Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts (Toronto), Mercer Union (Toronto), Rencontre Internationale Performance D’art (Québec City), and Western Front (Vancouver) among many others. Her work has been presented internationally in the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey, USA, and Wales. She is a co-foundering member of Toronto Performance Art Collective (TPAC), which produces the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art.

In 2016, Liliefeldt was commissioned to create a new performance in the context of the exhibition, Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries 1971–1989 at the Art Gallery of Ontario and curated by Wanda Nanibush. Liliefeldt’s performance, entitled What Does It Mean To Forget? was the first in a series of works that focused on the more fragile aspects of the human experience: aging, dementia and death. Her work is predominately concerned with the politics of identity as it intersects with gender, race and class; and seeks to examine the cultural conventions of spectatorship and the links between emotional and psychological states, and physical experience. The methodology of her performance art practice is shaped by the notion of always taking into consideration the significance of changes in circumstances.