A body as a fault in the system, in a system of faults | SCREENING @ BRAMPTON GARDEN SQUARE | July 17
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Amanda Low (she/they) is an arts and cultural programmer, and part time curator. She has curated exhibitions for Xpace Cultural Centre, InterAccess, and for DesignTO Festival. They are interested in how people build connections with and within the spaces they occupy, be it physical or virtual. She assists in programming DesignTO Youth, an arts and design education residency for young people.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Gladys Lou is a Hong Kong-Canadian artist and writer completing a BA in Art & Art History in the joint University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College program, with a double major in Psychology. She works with experimental media and new technologies including video and sound to challenge the boundaries between visual art and performance. Passionate about storytelling, she combines art and writing to visualize emotions and explore the unconscious. Her work revolves around the themes of identity-seeking, mental health, and Existentialism. Gladys has participated in residencies at the Art Gallery of Mississauga and ACCIDA Brampton, and she has interned at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in the Time-Based Media department.
Stephanie Deumer (b.1989, Oakville, Ontario, Canada) is a visual artist currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. Her multi-media installations highlight interrelations between different kinds of reproduction—including biological, visual, mechanical, and social. More particularly, the exploration of feminine constructs is a crucial through-line in Deumer’s practice. Complexities of female identity formation figure prominently, specifically in relation to language, media, science, and technology. Deumer holds a BA from the University of Guelph and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, and has been awarded grants from the Canada Arts Council, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Bar-Fund LA. She has been an artist in residence at Factory Media Centre, Hamilton, Ontario (2021); Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Alberta (2018); Cerritos College, Cerritos, California, USA (2016); and The REEF, Los Angeles, California, USA (2015).
Steven Cottingham is an artist based in New York and Vancouver. His work concerns the politics of visualization, surveillance, and policing. He has recently exhibited at Artists Space (New York, 2022), The Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver, 2021), Catriona Jeffries (Vancouver, 2021), Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art (Kelowna, 2020), and Wil Aballe Art Projects (Vancouver, 2020), and is currently an artist-in-residence with the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (New York, 2021–2022). Cottingham received an MFA from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, 2017), and from 2018–2021 he co-edited QOQQOON, an art theory webzine.
Seyi Olomodosi is a musician and occasional multimedia artist. Their art practice is driven by a need for liberation. In his work, he finds opportunity to constantly create new presentations of his self. Everything he makes is a new iteration of himself that is at once a part of and apart from all other iterations. Art provides for Seyi a vehicle for identity performance that isn’t immediately hinged to their body, a site where they can insist on being read through their self-renderings and not what others have rendered onto their body. By creating so many presentations of themselves, they can foreground their multiplicity and make himself fully knowable and unknowable at the same time. They are especially interested in video, moving collage, and sound because of the ways that movement and repetition serve this purpose.
Chun Hua Catherine Dong is a Chinese-born Montreal-based artist working with performance, photography, video, and AR and VR. Dong received an MFA from Concordia University and BFA from Emily Carr University Art & Design. Dong’s work has been exhibited in many national and international venues, such as Quebec City Biennial, MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image, MAC VAL in France, Museo de la Cancillería in Mexico City, Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris and so on. Dong was the recipient of the Franklin Furnace Award for performance art in New York in 2014 and listed the “10 Artists Who Are Reinventing History” by Canadian Art in 2017. Dong was a finalist for Prix en art actuel du MNBAQ 2020, and awarded with Cultural Diversity in Visual Arts by the Conseil des arts de Montréal in 2021.
Machine Bodies (is Cyborg Good or Evil?) | EXHIBITION @ INTERACCESS | July 14 – August 13
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Karina Iskandarsjah (b. Jakarta, Indonesia) is a Toronto-based curator interested in cultural hybridity, technology, ecologies, and the deconstruction of power structures. Karina holds an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University. She is part of the collective Crocus and Glory Hole Gallery for 2SLGBTQ+ artists.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Madeleine Lychek is a video and performance artist and curator critically interested in work centred on the sex, technology, queer futurities, and cyberculture. Her work uses social media and performance art to engage with conversations surrounding power and play, exploring how a body and its consumption can be used as a radical act of self-discovery. She holds an Honours BA in Studio Art with Distinction, from the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph (2019) and currently works at Ed Video Media Arts Centre as the Education Coordinator.
Xuan Ye 叶轩 makes publications, installations and performances through a myriad of technologies, often involving improvisation and computation. Their work makes noises in the sensorium, coupling it with more-than-human networks such as the Internet, machine intelligence, electronic circuits and living matters to experiment with meaning-becoming and world-building. Their work has been featured, exhibited and performed internationally, including at the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, Venice Architecture Biennale, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Inside-out Art Museum, the Goethe-Institut (Beijing & Montreal), ArtAsiaPacific, KUNSTFORUM (GE), among others. Their live performances and music releases have received critical accolades from Bandcamp, Musicworks and Exclaim!.
Aljumaine is a queer design technologist and creative manager based in Toronto. They are passionate about using design to bridge the gap between visual design, user experience design, and engineering. Their art practice is rooted in afrofuturism in order to subvert systems. They are an independent researcher with the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto.
Ladan Mohamed Siad is a Toronto and New York-based interdisciplinary Filmmaker and designer, who explores the relationships between design, technology, and the universality of the black diasporic experience. Their work has been shown at the New Museum (New York), Inside Out Film Festival (Toronto), and Goethe Institute (Berlin). Siad works to tell narratives about the world that is possible when radical visionary change flourishes. Siad is a self-taught and community-supported creative, quilting together global black genres into a visual and audio tapestry of home everywhere. Ladan is a Black Muslim Queer Trans filmmaker whose family came to North America as refugees fleeing a civil war in Somalia.
Nicholas Shapiro is an Assistant Professor in the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. He is a multidisciplinary environmental researcher that studies, and designs interventions into, issues of chemical contamination and climate change. He has worked tracking the quasi-legal resale of 120,000+ chemically contaminated housing units after Hurricane Katrina, developing air monitoring systems with communities impacted by unconventional natural gas extraction, and testing fossil fuel-free means of long-distance air travel. In 2019 he founded Carceral Ecologies, a lab where he works with ~20 students and staff, to attempt to assess if environmental injustices are inextricable from mass incarceration.
Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University, Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, and a 2019 Trudeau Scholar. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video & sound installations. Currently, she is a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, and a 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow.
The air we share | EXHIBITION @ BIG ON BLOOR | July 14-24
Megan MacLaurin is a curator and arts facilitator born and based in Toronto/Tkaronto, Canada. She holds an M.A. in Art History & Curatorial Practices from York University and a B.A. in Art History and Arts Administration from the University of Ottawa. Her research and curatorial practice explore the intersections between natural and technological ecologies in a changing climate. Megan is currently the Programming Coordinator at the new media artist-run centre InterAccess and Co-Director of Bunker 2, a curatorial collective organizing itinerant programs that explore issues of economy, mobility, and industry.
Christina Battle is an artist based in amiskwacîwâskahikan, (also known as Edmonton, Alberta), within the Aspen Parkland: the transition zone where prairie and forest meet. Her practice focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster: its complexity, and the
intricacies that are entwined within it. Much of this work extends from her recent PhD dissertation (2020) which looked closer to community responses to disaster: the ways in which they take shape, and especially to how online models might help to frame and strengthen such response.[www.cbattle.com]
Dalia Hassan is an Egyptian visual artist based in Toronto. Her practice is focused on drawing and abstraction and she is interested in the phenomena of consciousness and existence. She experiments with extending drawing to different media beyond paper. In 2019 she was artist-in-residence at the Akin X MoCA Studio Program in Toronto. Hassan received her Bachelor of Visual Arts from the American University in Cairo in 2007. Her work has been exhibited in Cairo and Toronto.
Omar Rivero, also known as Driftnote, is a musician and multimedia artist whose work is centred around improvisation, interactivity, audio visual installations and 3D imaging. He is interested in themes of cultural erasure, systemic oppression, race and identity in the african/indigenous diaspora.
Geoffrey Pugen is an artist experimenting at the intersection of technology and nature through video, photo and installation. Thematically, Pugen contemplates speculative futures, transhumanism, the impact of nature on society and conflicts between the virtual and the real. His most recent sculptural work integrates video screen technology into architectural forms, creating spatially-synced multi-screen installations. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Museum of Moving Image in New York, WRO Biennial in Poland, Bienal De La Imagen En Movimiento, Buenos Aires, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Germany, Rotterdam Film Festival. He is a recipient of the K.M Hunter Award for Interdisciplinary Art.
Jason Isolini is a Brooklyn based artist, whose techniques of 360° collage and network interventions test the increased conflation of corporate, public and private environments. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, and holds an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. Intervening within Google Maps, he has created large-scale public art installations that comment upon our new digital commons.
kaya joan is a multi-disciplinary artist born, raised and living in T’karonto, Dish with One Spoon Treaty territory, with Vincentian, Kanien’kehá:ka, Jamaican and Irish ancestry. kaya’s work focuses on exploring relationships and responsibility to place and storytelling. Black and Indigenous futurisms and speculative fiction are also themes important to Kaya’s practice, as they map towards futures of abundance and joy for their kin. Kaya has been working in community arts for 7 years as a facilitator and artist, and is a member of Milkweed Collective.
Laura Margaret Ramsey is a Toronto-based scholar, imaging specialist and artist. Ramsey is known for her use of data visualisation & sonification to explore the natural world, imaging processes and computational awareness. Her work is heavily influenced by the structure of the archive, the preservation of obsolete technology, and the algorithmic approaches in data management. She holds an MA in Film + Photographic Preservation and is a Contract Lecturer in Image Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Sally McKay is an artist and writer based in Hamilton, Ontario. She has been working with animated gifs since 2003. Other media include zines; performance; and installation. She often works collaboratively with other artists such as Von Bark, Scott Carruthers and Lorna Mills. Sally’s artwork has been displayed and disseminated through numerous platforms including the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Hyperallergic.com, Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland), z-Bar (Berlin), Fly Gallery (Toronto), Harbourfront Centre, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. She and Von Bark are currently preparing a major installation, The Haunted Scanner, coming to the McMaster Museum of Art (Hamilton) in early 2023.
Another Life | PERFORMANCE @ The TRANZAC | July 22
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Sonja, also known as Sofie Mikhaylova, is a DJ, artist, writer, curator, workshop facilitator, and creator of independent record label Biblioteka Records. Her writing has been published in Vice, Thump, Noisey, Paste Magazine, A.Side, Double Dot Magazine, Vinyl Me, Please, Mixmag, Exclaim! and more. In April 2022, she published her first poetry chapbook, “I love you so much, I miss you so much” through Bottlecap Press. Her mixes have been aired around the world, from Brooklyn to New Delhi to Melbourne. In October 2020, she released her first experimental modular/found sounds EP, Grounding, following with her second release, Violence Now, in February 2021
Myriam Bleau is a composer, digital artist and performer based in Montréal. Using music and sound as a point of departure, she creates gestural electronic music performances, audiovisual interfaces, video works and installations that articulate sound, light, movement and images. Her work investigates performance, both as a codified cultural manifestation, and as an embodied reenactment of symbolic systems through human and non-human agencies, including machine learning. It has been recognized and presented internationally, in festivals such as Prix Ars Electronica (AT), Japan Media Arts Prize (JP), Sónar (ES, HK), MUTEK (MX, CA, AR, JP), ISEA (CA, KR), Transmediale (DE).
Erin Corbett is an experimental electronic musician and game designer from Kenora, Ontario. Over the last decade she has developed a unique approach to live performance, blending modular synths with electro-acoustic techniques to create dynamic, colourful, improvised soundscapes. Erin also uses the game engines Unity and Unreal to craft visual accompaniments, creating a body of work that explores themes of alienation, 21st century decay, and gender euphoria. In November of 2020 Erin released their fourth full-length solo album, Swelter Molt Sweat and Mettle, on Toronto-based record label Biblioteka Records.
Dot Starkey is a Computer-driven audio visual artist, pulling from elements of generative patterns, vintage applications, and archaic media to fuel her practice. Focusing primarily on Vintage CGI visuals, Dot Starkey explores spaces and textures reminiscent of early 90s computer art and video. Her music likewise breaks down ideas and sounds in that time period into fragments to be sampled and rearranged into new ideas. Dot Starkey’s most recent work, under her alias Hex-A-Decimal, “We questioned everything”, navigates television, radio, and film clips from the 1990’s to address her own memories of absorbing media that was absent of transgender identities and ideas surrounding gender fluidity, as wels as the impact of dysphoria on childhood memories.
The Glitch as a Remix | SCREENING @ SMALL WORLD MUSIC CENTRE | July 15
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Roya DelSol is Black lens-based artist, curator & cultural worker currently living in T’karonto/Toronto. Creating motion work ranging from experimental documentaries to music videos; she aims for her work in all spheres to centre and uplift the experiences Black, queer, and marginalized peoples. Past photographic work captures Black femme intimacies, strength & joy in hopes of visualizing new, liberated worlds. In her curatorial practice, this envisioning takes shape by means of disruption via institutional critique. She sees technology, magic and ancestral knowledge as not disparate, but interconnected frameworks to inform each other; utilizing the subversive qualities of magical realism in imagining Black futures.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sylvain creates images as a filmmaker and DP. His unique ability blooms from an expertise as a film lab technician; allowing him to use an extensive array of film stocks and processing techniques in order to push the boundaries of a more conventional aesthetic. He performs live with multi-film projections, as he works in direct collaboration with various musicians and composers, and also maintains a steady practice as a film photographer. Embodying expertise in all film formats – with an emphasis on 16 and 35mm- Sylvain is available for a wide range of commercial and experimental projects.
Scott Pilgrim is a multifaceted Artist and Creative Director living in Toronto, ON.
Casey MQ is an artist, composer, and producer from Toronto, now based in Los Angeles. Growing up, Casey’s adoration for pop music intersected with his training as a classical pianist. As he grew older Casey began to work more closely with electronic music. His inspirations widened as he explored the fusion of classic and contemporary sounds. His writing and production styles uniquely reflect that – marriage of the ultra modern and the Timeless. “Telephone Light” follows Casey’s debut album babycasey in 2020 and its remix addendum babycasey: ultra the following year, which saw his boyhood fantasies come to life with whimsy and depth. As a songwriter and producer, Casey has collaborated with a range of artists, including with oklou, Christine and The Queens, Flume, Dorian Electra, Girlpool, Vagabon, Hannah Diamond, Austra and more. His ability to help artists hone their individual voices, and express them in a way that captures the moment, is exceptional. Casey has also scored numerous feature films that have premiered at TIFF, SXSW, Sundance and other major festivals.
The Kitsch Generation is an emerging, Trans led, Toronto (T’karonto) based film development and production company founded by Onyeka Oduh and Goldbloom Micomonaco in September 2020 – born out of a desire to create work that speaks to the experiences of marginalized artists. In 2021, The Kitsch Generation produced five music videos for Toronto artists, Ceréna, Almandrez, TNTRM, and CJ Wiley. With a growing creative slate, The Kitsch Generation puts an importance on inclusivity and access for Trans, Queer, and BIPOC folks in the film industry – crewing their productions to match the diverse and beautiful world of difference, as well as giving access to those without, to learn and gain experience on-set in an atmosphere that is human first. The Kitsch Generation makes work by and about their communities and intersections that are not only smart, but prepossessing, fun, and resonant.
Yú is a film and video director based in Toronto. Yú’s eclectic taste and curiosity in experimentation permeates throughout her work. Her perspective explores genre-bending, taking unconventional approaches to film. rooted in exploring identity, Yú’s chinese heritage is a foundational influence on the stories she explores. Her most recent work includes an experimental short, “Flowers While You’re Here”, funded by Canada Council of the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and the Fantavious Fritz and Charlotte Day Wilson Work Film Grant, and the documentary series “The Lunchbox Dilemma”, currently on CBC Gem and CBC Docs.
blackpowerbarbie (Amika Cooper in real life) is a multi-faceted still and motion artist specializing in 2D animation from Toronto, currently based in NYC. blackpowerbarbie believes in the transformative and reflective power of storytelling, and approaches each body of work with sensitivity and reverence for her subjects. The backbone of blackpowerbarbie’s work is an innate curiosity in the human condition, supported by research in the work of artists across disciplines who have come before her. Whether it is music videos, or live projections her art is motivated by a desire to create compassionate and creative representations of Black femmes and other marginalized communities, and to contribute to healthier futures for all.
Director / Digital Artist Sammy Rawal has earned international attention for his original, hyper-stylized approach to image-making featuring bold color, choreography, and innovative VFX. Sammy’s work is informed by a mashup of culturally diverse influences, fashion and hip-hop. He has brought his signature quick-fire style to commercial campaigns, music videos, 3D inspired video portraits, and digital installations for clients such as Cardi B, Lizzo, Kelis, Elton John, Reebok, Twitter, Axe, and Chanel. His work has been shown at the BFI Southbank, Art Gallery of Ontario, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, and nominated at the UK Music Video Awards, the Berlin Music Video Awards, and the Juno Awards. Sammy’s passion for LGBTQ+ rights flourish in commercial projects such as SoulCycle’s Pride 2021 mixed media collaboration and his acclaimed work, “Life’s A Ball,” for Equinox, which Adweek called the most “show-stopping” of 2019 Pride campaigns.