Feminist Art Conference Art Exhibition

Abstract Random is a rap electro dub hop mashup infused with feminist politics. Their shows are a multimedia spectacle including visual projections, face paint and costumes. Something different.

JAMILAH MALIKA (vocals)

LOVERSUN aka F.NOCERA (producer, vocals, visuals)

AYO LEILANI (vocals)

Three people, three years, countless shows from galleries & parks to clubs and festivals like; NXNE, Canadian Music Week, Under The Volcano, AfroPunk, Womens’ World Conference, Nuit Blanche, Allied Media Conference, Pride and more. Abstract Random has been blessed to open for amazing acts like Shabazz Palaces (SubPop Records), THEESatisfaction (SubPop Records), Climbing Poetree (NYC) and LAL (Toronto). This past April they toured Europe for 3 weeks and played shows in Berlin, Amsterdam, London and Paris, where crowds took in the best of Abstract Random’s two EPs and recent album Siren Songs. Check out their seven independently produced music videos featured in film festivals in Toronto, Montreal, Brazil, New Zealand, France and Milan.

Ontario Arts Council -‘Popular Music Grant’ recipients. {2011}

Toronto Independent Music Awards – Nominee ‘Best Electronic’ {2012}

88 Days of Fortune music and multimedia collective members.

My name is Aliya Khan and my writing career actually started when I was a young girl. At that time I would write short stories about things I saw which touched me or made me feel like I stood out. One of the first pieces I wrote was about a young girl who was called a ‘tokai’ and my realization that she and I were the same age and yet worlds apart; poverty and illiteracy were our dividers.

As I grew older I worked on pieces which were essay and biographical in nature. I graduated with a Bachelors of Arts majoring in Business Finance and minor in English Literature from USA. During my years at college I entered a writing competition and was selected as one of the winners. My piece was called ‘Heavenly Spirits,’ and it was about a young girl who was molested by a family member. It reveals the battle that a young girl faces when any form of sexual harassment, rape or molestation takes place in a closed society.

I moved back to Bangladesh and taught English and Literature under the Cambridge/O’level curriculum for a private school. I had realized that teaching and writing were two of my passions and finance had no place in my life.

I continued to publish in an English newspaper in Bangladesh. My articles varied in nature from post- partum depression to battling the stereotypical pressures imposed on women to look a certain way.

Currently, I am working on a compilation of short stories that are about the unseen tensions and emotional battles faced by women and in some cases men as well. One of the pieces is ‘Traditional Marriage.’

I am currently completing my TESL certification, continuing my career as a teacher while writing about issues that are close to my heart.

Amee Lê is a collective member at the Centre for Women and Trans People at York University. She organizes around race and gender issues and researches and writes about critical contemporary art and film. She is also in the MBA/MA in Art History joint-program at York. Amee’s film, Genderlines, was featured in Parkdale Film+Video Showcase and Regent Park Film Festival’s REact: Solidarity Sunday (2012) and OPIRG York’s Rebels With A Cause Film Festival’s Red Riot (2012).

My work reflects the varied roles I play; as an activist, artist and educator. My practice takes a critical view of a variety of social, political and cultural issues. I am interested in using multiple media to tell critical stories and have at various times employed film, video, animation, theatre, photography, poetry, fiction and memoir. Frequently engaging with communities and collectives, I have engaged subjects as diverse as gender, sexuality, fetish, cancer, homelessness, migration, HIV/AIDS, labor relations, Palestinian struggles and girl’s issues. Although I use multiple methodologies in creating work, at the heart of many of my projects are individual narratives, usually stemming from interviews.

Using my initial artistic training in film, I have recently been exploring installations as sites for hybrid artworks. Specifically, works that combine performance, visual art and music (most notably as a projectionist/performer for Shary Boyle’s Everything Under The Moon and with Sean Frey for performances at the Royal Ontario Museum, Music Gallery and SummerWorks Theatre Festival). My 2012 installations Black Water (created for Tete a Tete Media Talks in Sackville, New Brunswick) and Heavy Sleep (for Nuit Blanche in the Gladstone Hotel ballroom) used multiple film and video projections combined with sculptural structures to create elaborate and shifting landscapes.

I am a recent graduate of the Adult Education and Community Development program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto) with the Centre for Arts-Informed Research. As an educator, I work with youth and adults, using theatre, film, and photography as a way to tell stories.

Writer and spoken word artist Andrea Thompson has performed her work at venues across North America and overseas for the past twenty years. A pioneer of Slam poetry in Canada, Thompson’s work has been featured on film, radio, and television; and included in magazines, literary journals and anthologies across the country. Thompson’s poetry is hybridist and unique – blending elements of jazz, dub, hip-hop and traditional literary verse into a style all her own. In 2009 she was awarded the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word’s Poet of Honour: For Outstanding Achievement in the Art of Spoken Word, and in 2005, her spoken word CD One, was nominated for a Canadian Urban Music Award. Thompson is the co-editor of the anthology Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out, the author of the poetry collection Eating the Seed, and is a recent graduate of the University of Guelph’s MFA Creative Writing program. She currently teaches Spoken Word through the Ontario College of Art and Design’s Continuing Studies department. Her first novel is due out in the fall of 2014 from Inanna Publications.

ARTIFACTS explores culture, looking at myths, assumptions, and fantasies, and places them in a new context. The work is informed by feminism. Performance art well suits this process and, while the performances may contain many personal and specific images and text, our intention is to investigate how women have been/are being formed, and to reveal our attempts to negotiate this formation. The tension is between the personal and the formal, which raises questions for us as to the nature of feminist art practices and women’s roles in society.

While concentrating on performance, ARTIFACTS has also has created sound and video works and visual exhibitions. Recent works include: Pentimenti, Gallery 1313 and Individual Points of Fiction, A Space Gallery in Toronto 2012; Pacing the Cage, Collisions 2006, Victoria; The Voyage Out for Buddies in Bad Times’ Hysteria : A Festival of Women; and Passing (2001), 7A11D International Performance Art Festival. Other works include: Detale (detail), presented for Roundup, 89; Attending II, staged as part of the series Access to the Process at A Space Gallery; Attending the Interior, performed at The Banff Centre, and Suburban Mirage, staged in the Danceworks series at Winchester St. Theatre, Toronto. Earlier works included performances in theatres, the street, and at the Theatre Centre and Partisan Gallery. ARTIFACTS will be performing this spring at EdgeZones International Performance in Miami with Miklos Legrady.

Artistic Director, International Performer and Choreographer, Ashima Suri, began Limitless Productions in 2007. Since then Ashima has Choreographed Indo-contemporary dance theatre pieces that challenge the social norms and break down social barriers. She has produced several large productions at The Toronto Fringe Festival, Winchester Theatre and most recently in the Dance in Kotoen in Osaka, Japan. She has also participated in festivals and events such as Pride, Dance Umbrella of Ontario – Dance in my Hood, Nuit Blanche and Dusk Dances.

Brette Gabel is a graduate of the University of Regina with a B.A. Honours in Theatre Studies and a minor in Visual Arts. While in school Brette began embroidering, quilting and watching horror movies. Following school, Brette moved to Toronto where she participated in the Toronto School of Art’s Independent Studio Program where she investigated both her interest in the macabre and textile crafts. After which she became a contributing member to the White House Studio. Recently Brette has lived in Regina, Saskatchewan where she participated as the University of Regina’s artist in residence and Windsor, Ontario where she was an emerging artist in residence. Currently Brette resides in Toronto. Brette’s work strives to connect love, fear, heartache and the grotesque with craft and social interventions. Brette is currently an MFA candidate at OCAD university.

Carol Mark is an activist for human rights with an emphasis on women and children. Carol believes Art can change the world with the voice of women.

Carol established ACA Gallery (art, culture, aid) that “art can change the world” with proceeds of art sales to grassroots projects targeted for women and children. ACA Gallery was the first art driven gallery in Toronto to raise awareness and funds, as well as bringing awareness that art can create social change.

This was a first kind of art gallery to incorporate art, artists and purchasers involved in direct participation of change. ACA Gallery was an incubator where public school children created art that had a direct influence of where the funds from sales of their artwork at the gallery were donated, exhibits to include themes on women and violence, exhibits of art by homeless women and international support to include Rebecca Lalossa, women’s only village in Nairobi Park to establish a children’s library. This village was originally established when abused women had no where to live after leaving an abused domestic situation.

Carol has served on Toronto’s Committee on the Status of Women, a member of a women’s only film collective SHE -TV and her first short was in the UNESCO Women’s Conference in Beijing.

As a supporter of women’s rights she supported Femaid  based in France underground schools for girls in Afghanistan through RAWA, Revolutionary Afghanistan Women’s Association. Carol traveled to Afghanistan in secret in Oct 2002 with a commitment to aid the women to include 15,000 lbs of aid and a girls’ library named after Malalai Joya, the first elected woman parliamentarian on the support of a girls library.

Presently, Carol is the founder and President of the love of tea, a purveyor of specialty pure blended teas that support art and social change through its donation programs from sales of tea. Tea infact was the focus of women’s rights in the 19th century in North America, as women could only legally gather during teatime .

Dana Ayotte is an artist, composer, engineer and interaction designer.  After working as a mechanical engineer for many years she decided to go to art school.  She recently completed a diploma in studio art at Capilano University followed by painting and sculpture studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design  in Vancouver, BC.  A job as an interaction designer at the Inclusive Design Research Centre (Ontario College of Art and Design) recently brought her to Toronto, along with her partner and their 2.7-legged cat.  Her art is informed by her diverse life experiences, including working in a male-dominated field, being a lesbian, growing up Catholic, surviving a fleeting dream of being a ballerina, volunteering as a front-line, anti-violence worker, and most recently delving into issues of accessibility and digital technology.  She will be a feminist until all women are free.

Deb Wiles is a prolific professional multidisciplinary artist. Her art practice runs the gamut from abstract expressionism to fine art portraiture.She works in various mediums: pen & ink, watercolor, oil paint and bronze sculpture. This artist is no one trick pony, she is an artist’s artist, an outsider and renaissance woman with a distinctly feminist twist. Ms. Wiles is a graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design, art instructor and Director of Trident International Artists’ Retreat. She currently lives works in Toronto where she continues to elate and discomfit audiences with her vulvae and brush.

Elaine Stewart: The ‘victorian wheelchair’ is one commentary on my life experience with a wheelchair, psychically and physically bound to an object I can’t move without or live easily with. Its presence summons up a cacophany of understandings for me. The restraints placed upon women in victorian times by social constructs, still continue to reverberate in my wheelchair.

I entered the world according to wheelchairs eighteen years ago. Eventually I decided to return to school, art school. I finished my diploma studies at TSA two years ago. I still continue to study with other artists. While I was at school I started exploring the impact of the wheelchair, the multiple ways it affects my reality and my perceptions. I want to invite others to explore a world they might not know.

Gillian Collyer has been a practising artist since graduating from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in 1995. Since then she has developed a practice as a mixed media installation artist, working in a combination of fibre, video, sound and performance. In 2004 she completed an MFA in the Fiber & Material Studies department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited her work in galleries in Canada and the U.S. Her work is in the collections of Museum London, Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, Halifax, and The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Since returning to Toronto in 2008 she has been teaching at the Ontario College of Art and Design and continuing to make and exhibit work

Grace An is a painter, illustrator and comic book artist from Toronto and Lindsay, Ontario that works under the brand ‘Sunshinable’. She has exhibited in small galleries in Lindsay and participated in art-related events in Montreal, Quebec.

Her work mainly deals with issues of identity, most often about racial and gender identity, targeted towards women. As well as addressing issues regarding womens’ rights, her work aims to challenge and question human behaviour through self reflection and character analysis, asking the existential question of ‘Who am I?”

Grace An’s art problematizes existing systems of oppression by critiquing different aspects of human relationships which are a part of everyday life. She does this by examining the psychological interactions that have become strongly influenced by capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy and white supremacy.

Bridging the space between poetry and visual art, Grace values the vitality of the comic book medium because of its low culture status. Her graphic works narrate stories, personal experiences and philosophy as a political statement to reject and interrogate social constructs not only in content but in medium. Using comic books as her main medium is an act of reclamation as well as the images Grace creates. They often express the problems in representations of female, political, racialized and marginalized bodies in the perspective of a Canadian-born Korean migrant who identifies as cis woman of colour.

Grace An also enjoys reading intellectual books, sleeping, staring into space, eating bread, drinking coffee and cuddling with cats. She is currently living in Montreal, studying Film Animation in Mel Hoppenheim school of cinema at Concordia University.

Gudrun Lock addresses themes of garbage and waste, women’s roles in society and the fine line between stable and unstable mental states in her work. She often uses found materials and relies on the narrative form as a mechanism for disseminating her ideas. She has installed her work in foreclosed homes, storefronts, bars, a houseboat and a soon-to-be demolished apartment building as well as in Union Square park and the Atlantic Ocean. Her video work has been shown at the Montréal Underground Film Festival, on MNTV and at the Tweed Museum. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2007.

Helene Vosters M.A., M.F.A. is a performer, activist, and scholar. Currently a PhD candidate in Theatre Studies at York University, Helene’s performance and research focuses on the role of public mourning practices in the construction of narratives of death related to militarism and war. In 2010 Helene began a series of durational performance meditations that seek to engage the public body in a dialog about relationships (and lack there-of) — not only the intimate and interpersonal relationships of romance, family, or friendship — but the collective relationship of multiply-located human beings concurrently inhabiting and manifesting history. Each mediation engages repeated, task-based actions as a means to focus attention and intention into an embodied investigation of the space between “Us” and “Other”, between individual and social grief, between personal ritual and public protest, and between art and politics.

Helene performed Impact Afghanistan War, a year-long public memorial project throughout Canada, the U.S. and Europe, and exhibited Impact in Brisbane (2010) and Utrecht (2011). She has publicly performed Unravel: A meditation on the warp and weft of militarism atEdmonton’s Visualeyez Performance Art Festival (2011), at the Festival Of Original Theatre in Toronto (2012) and at PSi #18 and the LUDUS Festival in Leeds, UK (2012). In addition to her durational performance meditations Helene has performed at the Toronto Free Gallery (2011); Toronto’s Rhubarb Festival (2011) and F.O.O.T 2011; with La Pocha Nostra (2010); and at San Francisco venues including the Garage (2008), Faultline (2007) and Intersection for the Arts (2006).

Ilene Sova is a conceptual portrait painter who creates paintings which reference anti-oppression feminist themes. She has an MFA in Painting from the University of Windsor and her work has been shown in extensive solo and group exhibitions in Canada and abroad. Her work has been shown at the Department of Canadian Heritage, MOCCA, and last summer at Guadi’s Casa Batlo at the prestigious Barcelona Showcase. Sova’s work has been featured in a variety of television, web and print media including Al Gore’s television program The Current. Most recently Sova’s work was featured in the Nigerian Arts Journal Tabula and she has been invited to have a solo exhibition at Centru Mutro Gallery in Barcelona June 2013.

Jacqueline Valencia is a Toronto-based poet, writer, and illustrator. She earned her BA (Honours) from the University of Toronto. Her art and illustrations (comics, fashion, and logo design) can be found in Amelia’s Magazine, Sheena’s Place, Playful Grounds Cafe, The Girl Bakes, and The Brooklyn Art Library (Sketchbook Project Limited Edition Vol. 2). She has three chapbooks, of which “Maybe” was chosen for the Arte Factum exhibit by Poetry Is Dead Magazine for its use of art weaved through poetry.

Jamaias DaCosta is a musical artist, writer and radio programmer and journalist. A member of the multi-disciplinary artist/activist group R3 Collective; Host and Producer of The Vibe Collective on CIUT 89.5FM and Executive Producer of Indigenous Waves Radio, also on CIUT 89.5FM, Jamaias has been actively engaged in community, music and radio for well over a decade. Most recently, Jamaias has developed workshops for both grade schools and universities in Toronto around stereotypes; Indigenous education and decolonial thought. Jamaias has also worked with Caribbean Tales Film Festival and has written for the CBC, First Nations House Magazine, U of T’s Independent Weekly and several news and community blogs.

Jen Lewis was born in 1979 in Flint, Michigan. She received her B.A. (History of Art) in 2001 from the University of Michigan and has resided in the Ann Arbor area since 1997. Beauty in Blood is the serendipitous result of switching feminine care products in early 2012. After just a few uses of the Diva Cup, Jen became entranced by the designs her poured blood made in the toilet: the stark contrast of bright crimson against the porcelain white; the varied plunging speeds at which the clots, fluid, and tissue travelled to the bottom; and the patterns made by the fluid from first impact followed by its subsequent movement as it dispersed through the water. Captivating. Unexpected. Undeniably attractive. These previously never observed qualities could benefit both men and women by challenging the socially conditioned ‘ew’ response many people have to menstruation. Recognizing this as a potential tool to shift society’s perceptions and reactions to menstruation, Jen enlisted her partner, Rob Lewis, in her artistic vision to photograph her menses and assist in the creation of aesthetically pleasing, abstract photographs that captured this unpredictable and traditionally unseen beauty.

Born in Quebec, Joelle Circé now lives in Ontario, Canada. My artwork strives to reflect the many facets and nuances of the female condition. My unique social positioning as a woman of transsexual experience, lesbian, femme, feminist, informs the lens with which I view the world. I seek to explore and represent women in our most vulnerable as well as in our most powerful states. I seek to celebrate the power and beauty of all women and finds reward and happiness in representing the diversity and grace of women in often over looked and ignored marginalized spaces, and my work speaks often to the social, political and cultural realities of women living and surviving in a misogynistic world. While my work reproduces familiar concepts of the nude and the female erotic, my art is integrated in a feminist anti-oppressive framework that contributes to the narrative and symbology evident in my work.

Jordan Clarke currently maintains a studio in Toronto’s Historic Distillery District. Most recently, Jordan received funding from the Ontario Arts Council. In addition to appearing in solo and group exhibitions in Ontario and abroad, Jordan’s art has been published in the anthology Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out, edited by Adebe DeRango-Adem and Andrea Thompson. Another of her paintings provided the cover art for A Many-Splendored Thing, poems by Peter Austin.

In 2008, Jordan studied at the Academy of Realist Art in Toronto, completing the Drawing curriculum. In 2007, she graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design, receiving a BFA. While attending OCAD, she was fortunate enough to participate in the off-campus studies program in Florence, Italy, 2005-2006.

Katherine L. Lannin is a Toronto based artist. She holds a B.F.A from the University of Windsor and an M.F.A from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Lannin’s work comprises photographs, intervention/site-specific installations and mostly relate to a long-term interest in everyday objects. Lannin uses installation as a way to explore what it means to disrupt a space, change its configuration and purpose. Lannin has exhibited at the Art Gallery of Calgary, Nuit Blanche Toronto, Gallery 44, and Art Souterrain/Nuit Blanche, Montreal.

Kirsten McCrea is a Canadian artist known for her collaborative art endeavours and patterned drawings. Her art has been exhibited internationally and has appeared in numerous publications, including Chatelaine, Juxtapoz (online), and the Montreal Gazette. She can often be found alongside a number of art collectives, including the drawing initiative En Masse (whose work was recently shown in the form of a massive installation in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montreal). In 2008 she founded the affordable art subscription Papirmasse, which has sent over 20,000 art prints to people around the world for the low price of $5 each, including postage. 

Her painting series Hot Topic is an attempt to engage in a form of art-making that is not critical of dominant culture, but instead celebratory of alternative social movements. It is to-date comprised of 80 portraits of feminist icons, many of which have been suggested by visitors.

Lishai Peel uses the power of the pen to connect, reflect and educate. She was raised in Europe and the Middle East, but is a daughter of India’s diaspora. Every time she steps to the stage, her words carry the rich tradition of storytelling that her grandmother gifted to her.

As part of her journey, she has competed in national and international poetry slams, including representing Toronto at the Women of the World Poetry Slam, The Vancouver International Poetry Festival and the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in 2011. In the same year she organized the first Canadian Underground Individual Slam. In 2012, she completed a spoken word residency at The Banff Centre. Alongside her 4 teammates, she is the 2012 national slam champion.

Currently Lishai facilitates spoken word programming in various schools throughout the GTA with Unity Charity. She is the coordinator of Uniffect – a group of 25 young artists who are leaders in the youth poetry scene and their communities. With thanks to funding from The Toronto Arts Council and The Ontario Arts Council, Lishai is currently recording her first album.

Outside of poetry, Lishai is the coordinator of Toronto Women’s City Alliance and a strong advocate for women’s inclusion, equity and equality in the municipal political arena. From City Hall to the classroom to the stage, Lishai continuously strives to use poetry as a medium for social change and community building.

Mary (Mack) Tremonte is an artist-educator-DJ currently living in Toronto, ON where she is a masters student in the Interdisciplinary Art, Media, and Design program at OCADU. Her vibrant silkscreen prints explore queer animal sexualities, amplified possibilities, and signifiers. As a DJ and party organizer she strives to create temporary safe spaces for expression, as well as to raise funds and awareness for grassroots causes. She is consumed with printmaking, totally teens, collaboration, communication and the politics of social space, particularly the danceparty.

Melissa Sky is a proud femme, lesbian, feminist indie filmmaker whose award-winning work focuses on bringing fresh images of queer sexuality to the big screen. She has a PhD in English literature and has studied filmmaking at the Factory Media Centre. She is also an accomplished academic and writer. When she’s not creating art, she teaches youth and works for positive social change.

Olivia Appiah-Kubi is an emerging artist and Post-grad student working mostly in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. But living in Brampton. The core theme of her work is essentially the relationship within the White person and the Subject of colour. her use of wording for the second part makes it ambiguous citing her exploration of Ethnic subjectivity. Her different bodies of work don’t strive to answer that question, but rather to ask it in different ways. She is interested in Jungian Psychology, particularly of how the collective unconscious was a reservoir of all the experience and knowledge of the human species. She juxtapositions that with relationships within nature, Escapism in the public sphere, and a physical or spiritual, ontological wound that only the body remembers. Since 2012, Olivia’s practice has becoming more diverse and includes painting, installation, photography, video, performance and set design. she has a strong interest in experimenting with materials.

Olivia was born in Toronto and lived with her Large group of family (including relatives) in a single house in Mississauga. As she grew, the community of relatives started to drift to other places including her father who left his young wife and 3 kids. She soon remarried and moved to Brampton, Ontario, Canada at a young age where the young Olivia spent most of her life to this date. Olivia would described herself as an introverted and solitary child, saying that she was most happy when she was left alone to his thoughts. She always thought that she was at a constant war with her body and mind; from eating disorders, to sexual maturity, to creating immense worlds in which she can only access. After completing courses from Sheridan and Humber College in Journalism, Health studies and Visual and Digital arts. She enrolled at the Ontario College of Art & Design in hopes of seeking and being taught in a more challenging artistic environment. Currently she is acquiring her BFA in for Sculpture and Installation, (a long, long process she notes.)

Piffin Melchior Duvekot was born in Rotterdam in 1989. He lives and works in Toronto. Piffin has recently completed his BFa at OCADU. His plaster and oil paint work represent the gendervaryant people around him. These semi-realistic portraits explore the subjects’ personalities and gestures, as well as their physical likeness. Being outside the established gender categories, just like the models he choses allows him to make his work without othering his models. The relationship he tries to build with his models is one of integrity and mutual trust, through conversation and time spent together. His work explores the appearance, as well as lived experience, and perspective of people whose bodies don’t fit into the established binary sex and gender systems.

Rema Tavares is the Founder of Mixed in Canada (MIC), a national cultural resource centre for mixed-race identified Canadians. She is also an artist and has been photographing mixed-race identified Canadians since 2011. These photos have shown in several exhibits including “Defining Moments: Discovering our Canadian Stories”, a year-long international show of work by 26 youth under 30. Rema has also been asked to speak at the “Spaces of Multiraciality: Critical Mixed Race Theory” course at the University of Toronto, at Ontario Public Services regarding mentorship and diversity, as well as Elementary Schools and radio shows about her work with MIC.

Tannis Nielsen is a Metis woman of cree, Sohto, Dene and Danish descent. As a practicing professional Indigenous artist, and academic, Tannis has focused her research interests upon the examinations of an anti-colonial, Fourth World / Indigenous paradigm, as well as the Western / Euro-centric paradigm, in order to further understand how certain theories born from the European Enlightenment period, have served as “an attempted justification” for the imperial domination over Indigenous peoples. In class, the pedagogical objective is to elucidate the negative effects of these theories, by utilizing the study/practice of (both Indigenous and Western) art, as a decolonization methodology. As an academic, Tannis has created / taught a variety of course listings, in both the Faculties of Arts and Liberal Studies at OCAD-University. As an educator she is located within the praxis of a critical method of instruction that places emphasis towards the ideas of political, cultural, spiritual, social and environmental justice. As an artist, Tannis has exhibited her works at such galleries as the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and has curated exhibitions such as the Enacting Emancipation show at A-SPace Gallery , with Vicky Paul as co-curator, which was created in order to address the similarity of colonial oppression(s) between the Indigenous peoples of North America and Palestine. The intention of curation was to unravel a universal, international system of colonial technique and strategy in order to reveal diverse, localized modes of resistance. Together, the artists in this exhibition – James Luna, Emily Jacir, Erica Lord, and John Halaka – signified the individualized experiences of Fourth World peoples who have been stripped of context and denied distinction, Tannis has also written a number of articles on arts and culture, some of which include “Re-materializing the Matriarchy” for Spirit Magazine. The Conundrum of Critical pedagogy in Community Arts Education”

I Have Recovered video

Teresa Ascencao is a photo based artist whose work deals with gender and sexuality constructs through unique cultural perspectives and technological approaches. Often using out-of-the-ordinary interactivity, her poetic and kitschy artworks invite audiences to rediscover gender and sexuality through peculiar folk and pop inspired artworks.

Teresa Ascencao was born to Azorean parents in Sao Paulo, Brazil and immigrated to Canada at a young age. She holds a Graphic Design Diploma from Humber College and graduated with distinction from the University of Toronto’s Honours Fine Art Studio program. She recently graduated with an MFA from OCAD University, specializing in Media Art and Sex-Positive Feminism. Ascencao’s work has been exhibited throughout Canada and internationally. She lives and works in Toronto and teaches at Ontario College of Art University.

My name is Wanda Carroll. I am a Newfoundland comedic storyteller. I use stories from my life to tell the story of the individual and the story of being human. I believe we need to retell the story of what woman want.

Textile artist Luisa Milan will be working in collaboration with the Women’s Painting Club to create a Quilt.

The club started in early 2012 as a venture to find 10 women painters to do studio visits with, the club now has 80 members. Our activities include meetings, going to shows, expressions of women artists we admire and just helpful tips on keeping the brush to canvas. For the Feminist Art Conference, I will be collecting WPC members’ painting clothes. Each square with multiple paint strokes will be fashioned into a quilt. The quilt will have 20 different women painters and will be accompanied by an index indicating the location of the artists painting smock.

The quilt was deemed a domestic craft. In the hierarchy of art, it was simply not art. In women’s movement artists, like Miriam Schapiro, sought to reclaim the ‘feminine aesthetic’. Schapiro states, “I wanted to validate the traditional activities of women, to connect myself to the unknown women artists who made quilts, who had done the invisible “womens work” of civilization. I want to acknowledge them and honour them.”

The quilt is a dialogue of two. We are looking at the minimal paint. We are looking at the minimal paint stroke, the kind tossed a side on your clothing when painting. It has no identification as ‘women’s work’, the clothing and marking can belong to any gender and of any level of skill. Then we have the quilt, deeply considered a domestic craft, a work by women. Both with a sort of invisible trait, one deemed simply women’s work with no artistic merit and the other the symptoms of art making, the ambiguous painting smock. In combining the two, we speak about how even in the art world, where a women’s practice in the so called viable art form of painting, it is still very much a struggle to work beyond the restraints of what is deemed a work of value. The quilt is a representative of that. The ambiguous paint stroke, cropped into the so called feminine aesthetic. This Quilt is an honouring of a practice of the past, a proud affiliation with the invisible mark making by women.

Zoë Horne is a self-identified feminist artist working in Toronto, completing her Bachelor of Fine Art with a major in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University. Her entire body of work utilizes various artistic methods, such as collage and hand-lettering, and often incorporates craft techniques, including embroidery and quilting. The subject matter of her work is often personal, and ranges from talking about her experiences with mental illness and medication, to exploring rape culture and popular perceptions of current feminist concerns and issues.

Smith’s studio practice involves constantly critiquing her own position within the feminist movement, and acknowledging and keeping in check the privileges from which she does benefit.