2015 Artists

Looking Forward,
Looking Back

OCADU The Great Hall

What has happened within the feminist art movement since the 1970s? What inroads have been made? What victories, if any, have been won? Are we still speaking about the same issues in our work? Are we repeating the same messages, making the same mistakes, saying the same thing? What is different between then and now?

Alize Zorlutuna is a queer Turkish-Canadian artist and writer who employs a diverse range of media in her practice. Working in sculpture, performance, audio and video, her work draws upon her experience as an individual living between cultures. As a diasporic subject, she inhabits a porous and unstable space—one that is characterized by the simultaneous negotiation of multiple perspectives. This embodied liminality informs her creative practice, manifesting in explorations of interstices. Inhabiting the space between, interstices are not static, but open to processes of negotiation and the possibility of transformation. This interstitial space is unstable, and constantly in flux. Activating interstices is a strategy Zorlutuna employs in her cultural production as a means to critique dominant narratives (institutional structures, colonialism, history, patriarchy etc.) without reinforcing stereotypes, oversimplifications, and cultural bifurcations. To approach an interstice is to be positioned on a precipice, where notions of stability are called into question, and the dissolution of what one perceives to be internally consistent is at risk. She deploys art’s capacity to unsettle, to move. Her art challenges the boundaries that exist between viewers and larger structures, and encourages the possibility of shifting our inner landscapes.

Allison Morris is a fine art photographer living and working in the Greater Toronto Area. She has exhibited in Toronto, Ontario and Florence, Italy. Allison has recently completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, and spent her third year of study abroad as part of OCADUʼs Off-Campus Florence program in Italy. Allisonʼs artistic practice explores themes of female representation, the construction of femininity, beauty, youth, identity, and performance from a feminist perspective. She uses self-portraiture as a tool with which she can control her images and challenge the idea of the male gaze by consciously performing for the camera and herself.

Ana Arias is a Venezuelan-Canadian multidisciplinary artist, with an academic background in philosophy. She is currently based in Montreal and works primarily in painting and fiber mediums. Her work deals with themes of personal identity surrounding gender, sexuality and ethnicity often using the physicality of human bodies as her basis. She attempts to explore the ambiguous spaces of these themes from a philosophical perspective highlighting at the same time contradictions and harmonies.

The early space explorations that we mimic were historically at a time and place of great hope and idealism, and were also typically groups of three men. Our collective of three women, climbing trees in public parks, is both in response to that and an imagination of a possible future, one in which we are deeply excited by our existing environments. The Arbornauts is a hopeful idea, as well as a critical look at both our lack of urban greenspace, and our positions as women.

The works submitted here are by a collective of Latina women who have fled their countries of origin because of lack of state protection, interpersonal violence and conflict zones. We root our work within a feminist antiracist queer positive anti-oppressive approach. The women have sought refuge in Canada. However, Canada is not a safe haven of gender equality for women seeking asylum especially since changes to immigration legislation in 2012 that has seriously infringed on women’s access to safety and justice. The collective of women who participate in our Arpillera program must remain anonymous for reasons of personal safety. One of the works we have submitted to the conference was part of two separate exhibitions on human rights – one in Geneva Switzerland and the other Northern Ireland. The following is a common narrative of participants.

This Arpillera was created by a Mexican Woman who sought help at our Clinic with her refugee claim. She explains: “I ran away from Mexico because I could not take the abuse anymore from my family or my children’s father. I asked for help from an agency in Mexico but they did not help me.” In Mexico, violence against women has dramatically increased, a situation which has been described as a “pandemic” by Ana Guezmez, representative to Mexico of United Nations Women, the UN entity for gender equality. Changes to Canadian immigration since 2012 have meant that anyone seeking asylum in Canada from countries designated as safe such as Mexico have less rights and face increased barriers to getting protection. Lynne Jenkins, Director of Counselling Services at the Barbra Schlifer Clinic, states that this has resulted in: “a sharp decline in asylum claims overall, including from Mexico.” This surely represents a compromising of Canada’s reputation as a safe haven of gender equality.

The Arpilleras we have submitted here are three dimensional appliquéd textiles created by Latina Americana women. With bits of cloth and different stitches, the women create what they cannot put into words.

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.

Caitlin McCann’s painting practice concentrates on themes of female self-identity through spectatorship, and the cyclical relationship between social power dynamics, constructed space, and memory. She characteristically employs psychedelic optical tricks or novelty materials to draw unsuspecting viewers into exploded personal narratives about rape culture, abuse survival, anxiety, and tokenism. Her paintings embody and document emotional responses to systemic force.

Caroline Phillips is a visual artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her materially based works have been exhibited nationally and internationally including the George Paton Gallery, Melbourne, First Draft Gallery, Sydney, the Cité International des Arts, Paris and the Slade School of Art, London. Phillips has been awarded a number of grants and residencies including NAVA Australian Artists’ Grant, City of Melbourne Arts Project Grant, Arts Victoria VicArts Grant, Australian Tapestry Workshop Artist in Residence and the Art Gallery of New South Wales Moya Dyring Paris Residency. Caroline also works as an independent curator and her most recent project The f Word; Contemporary Feminist Art in Australia was presented at two major regional Victorian galleries in 2014. Caroline is currently studying a PhD at the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne), School of Art and her research project explores the relational in contemporary feminist art practices.

Charlotte Henay is a mother, teacher, writer, storyteller and researcher of Black Seminole and multiracial ancestry. She works to counter extinction myths through storywork and lyric scholarship, Indigenous methodologies, and re-membering. Charlotte writes about cultural memory and grandmothers’ gardens as an activist for (de)colonial, Indigenous, and Afro-futurities. She has a background in critical race theory, education administration, and teaching. Her work has been published in Feral Feminisms; Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education & Society, shown at York University’s Crossroads Gallery and 416 Gallery for MIXEDArtTO, as well as presented at conferences. She received her M.Ed in Sociology and Equity in Education from OISE/University of Toronto. Charlotte has been an administrator and consultant in First Nations, mainstream and international education contexts, and is currently a Ph.D. student at York University in Language, Culture and Teaching.

Eye Art Collective is an independent artist collective founded in 2014. We are composed of student activists based in Calcutta, India. We manage an online magazine which provides a platform for independent artists and focuses on emerging counter cultures.

Aranya Gupta was born in Calcutta to a communist family with a history zig-zagging between art and law. His work is influenced by his family’s political history which is deeply entrenched in the history of Indian independence, and the writings of Peter Kropotkin, George Orwell, Che Guevara, Noam Chomsky, Bhagat Singh and other revolutionaries. Aranya was introduced first to feminism by his grandmother, but he truly grasped it as a concept in his sociology classes and during long conversations with Manisha, with whom he co-founded Eye Art Collective, an artivist collective and webzine, in 2014. He has been drawing and doodling for as long as he can remember. Much of his work tries to show the darker sides of human nature, particularly of different kinds of oppressors, be it men or kings. Even more of it is just silly doodling. Aranya’s interests include feminism, art, psychonautics, sociology, Buddhism, permaculture and Eye Art Collective. He is currently reading the biography of Assata Shakur.

Manisha Ganguly is a part-time writer and full-time feminist. For most of her life, she has been seen carrying around a large hammer to smash patriarchy with. She is more partial to cats than to people and hates social interaction unless you want to talk to her about feminist art/literature/politics, kyriarchy, animal rights, post-modernism and Assata Shakur. She writes poetry, a bit of prose fiction, is passionate about investigative journalism, and is currently the Chief Editor of the webzine managed by Eye ArtCollective, a feminist artivist (art-activist) collective she co-Founded with Aranya Gupta in 2014. She has organized events such as Hysteria Fem Con 2015, spoken on panels about gender and sexual politics, and is the administrator of Guerilla Feminism India.

I am a feminist artist, scholar and journalist. Native to Turkey, I came to the USA to study art. After receiving my MFA from Indiana University, I worked and studied with Judy Chicago. I received my PhD, with a focus on Gender in German Turkish Migrant Cinema. For the past six years I have been organizing and curating the Women Exposed Art Show here in Bloomington. The show creates a space for local and international women artists to showcase their talents, and in doing so, also raises money for the local women’s shelter, The Middle Way House, and raises awareness about domestic violence. Over the years I have created a number of art works from a female/feminist gaze for this and other shows.

Fonna Seidu (pronounced “Phone-Ah”) is a queer-identified Black-Filipin@ radical care bear, opportunity curator, community artist/archiver, & an avid action-lister. She is motivated by collaborations, grassroots education, and alternate media outlets. She wholeheartedly supports community building, personal development, and self-care practices.!

Tumaini Lyaruu is a Toronto based HIV/sexual health educator and craftivist. Tumaini’s preferred gender pronoun is ‘T’ and T is a sparkly confetti mosaic of badass queer afro-blackness. T uses the power of crafting, compassion & our truths to foster meaningful growth across communities, and believes that they are tools to participate in each other’s liberation.!

Wood is Fran’s primary medium. Ever since she was a child, she was drawn to its natural shape. Wandering through forests, she was mystified by these giants – by the shapes of their branches, burls and leaves. Unlike a block of stone, wood has a story to tell. Fran believes that it’s up to her to discover what that story is and bring it to life. Sculpture in wood is one of the most physically demanding art forms, so growing up on her parents’ apple orchard was great training. On a farm Fran learned how to be tough, how to work with her hands, and most importantly how to be driven by sheer discipline. In subsequent years Fran became fascinated by the subtle and often not so subtle differences in gender, especially in terms of role and behaviour. Her interest in feminist perspectives and literature grew immensely. It is the driving force behind so much of her work.

I am a Wurundjeri woman from southeastern Australia. Having grown up in Canberra (the political capital of Australia) in the 1980s, I developed a strong interest in art, politics and human rights. This interest led to a 15-year career in the community sector, where I travelled Australia to work with women, young people, children and families. In 2000, I moved south to rekindle a sense of belonging to the places my mother and grandmother had been raised and lived. In reconnecting with my family’s origins, I decided to redirect my humanitarian passion into a full-time art practice. I have since relocated to a rural environment in the Central Goldfields, in country Victoria. Where I live with my partner and two very silly little dogs. I have been selected for various awards and scholarships, and I am a recent recipient of the CAL Victorian Indigenous Art Award for three-dimensional works as well as the Victorian Indigenous Art Awards “People’s Choice prize”. My goals as an artist are to explore and challenge notions of race, gender, otherness, and intersectionality with an emphasis on the body, the abject and the sacred. My hope is to develop a new visual language through my work by exploring ideas of cross- pollinating and examining Indigenous epistemologies and continental philosophies. My aim is to reveal new understandings of the importance of flesh and the spiritual to the empowerment of Indigenous women. I want to contribute to a new feminist language that is inclusive of Indigenous cultures – where sexual difference is recognised and valued, where spirituality, ritual and environmental connections are prioritized.

Barbara Bickel is an artist, researcher, and educator. An Associate Professor of Art Education in the School of Art & Design and Director of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Southern Illinois University, she teaches art as a social inquiry and meaning making process. 

Barbara’s website

Nané Jordan is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Paris 8, France. Her current research focuses on creative life writing methodologies in education and arts-based research, in relation to the texts of Hélène Cixous. The topic of mothering has been central to her arts- and life- based inquiries. Nané has published widely in women’s and motherhood studies, education, and the arts. 

Nané’s website

Medwyn McConachy is a community artist whose work is inspired by her love for the earth and all beings. Medwyn uses an arts-based inquiry methodology to explore the relationship between the living planet and the attitudes and beliefs of human populations. She works with mystery, and movement in the conscious and unconscious realms, interpreting her experiences through visual, tactile and performative artmaking.

Medwyn’s website

Cindy Lou Griffith is a documentary filmmaker, writer, visual artist and mental health activist. Her art practice manifests as selfdirected research utilizing autoethnography to document what she has named a symbiote consciousness; whereupon, the emergence of a conversant speaker is documented. This symbiote other offers her a lens – an objective eye and ear by which she is lifted into a discrete world to tell a story of Her. Cindy Lou is a graduate of Emily Carr University of Art and Design, she lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Ingrid Rose is a lyric-prose writer who calls up her words from infinite inner space to thread sensetenses on and off the page; performance art & mobile sculptings & sharing creative process with many students are her current occupations.

Haley Craw is a multidisciplinary artist currently living in Calgary, Alberta and attending the Alberta College of art and Design. Her practice takes the form of sculpture, installation and the fibre arts. Using elements from the personal and the political, the emotional and intellectual, and the beautiful and abject, her work focuses on deconstructing binaries constructed through ideology and reinforced through society that oppress and simplify female sexuality, agency and choice.

Concerned with deconstructing feminine archetypes such as the virgin and the whore, she uses a vocabulary informed from historical Christian art and the feminist practice of using objects from personal life as politically weighted symbols. Her work critiques systems that simplify or objectify women, as well as draw attention to the potency of sexual suppression. The work draws attention to how the oppression of sexuality limits women on a fundamental scale and highlights the damaging construction and maintenance of female purity. Exploring the politics of the body and how that is linked to identity, she references the pure female body that is not sexual, the sexual body that is tainted, fertile to polluted, the systematic confinement of female desire. The feminine used as a symbol of a fertile womb with new life, a battle within herself, a destructive body masking imminent decay.

Helena Wadsley works with video, textiles, paint, photography, and has recently had work included in exhibitions in Italy, Vancouver, and across the US. Her work examines transgression through dress and disguise, using humour to provoke critical investigation. Wadsley teaches visual arts in Vancouver and founded and run an artist residency in southern Italy during the summertime. She has been selected to participate in The Clipperton Project Floating Lab in the Dominican Republic in December 2015 and The Arctic Circle residency in June 2016.

Throughout her creative career, being an artist experiencing life as a woman in different countries and cultures, Hoda Zarbaf has sought to make her very own narration of intimacy alongside solitude. Her work, in the past decade– although very different in forms of representations– has almost steadily been a reflection of the complexities of social, emotional, and gender identities. Displaying this womanly practice of deliverance and releasing – whether it is the act of child bearing or expressing pain and joy – has always been Hoda’s fascination about women.

Above everything that happens in Zarbaf’s work, there is always (self)portrait of a woman enduringly exposed and in solitude. She creates the female figures in different roles or states of being; whether she’s vulgar, maternal or cartoonish, she is nevertheless engaged in a lively act of releasing. And this sacred act is what defines her and puts her in a position of reverence. Born in Tehran amid early years of the Islamic Revolution and war, Zarbaf’s imagination has been influenced by the age-old folktale of her childhood.

These stories, in conjunction with her layered and one-off experiences, have formed a whimsical visual language that streams in her work. She received her BFA and MA in Animation from the University of Tehran. In 2008 she relocated to Canada to pursue an MFA from the University of Windsor. Over the years, her work has reflected the complexities of social, emotional, and gender identities. Zarbaf’s sculptural pieces are made intimately in her Annex studio in Toronto.

Hope Wells is an independent academic, researcher and artist with affiliation to the Art and Design Department and the Engineering faculty at the University of Alberta, Canada. She has written and created artwork on the phenomenological experience of the Canadian landscape, the experience of environmental damage, the creation of identity in the work of Egon Schiele, and abstract theory. Currently, her work is exploring the intersection between female phenomenological perspective of physical diseases, mental health and nature that relates to the environmental damage in northern Alberta.

Through photographic documentation of northern Alberta landscape, ecological qualitative analysis reports, landscape theory, Ecofeminist theory, collected ecological traditional knowledge and the origins of the materials used in the artwork. Hope creates ‘portrait landscapes’ that expresses thoughts and emotions of otherness. The otherness that Hope alludes to is similar to what Karn Warren in Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What it is and Why it Matters, defines as: “… [an] unjustifiable dominated groups as “Others” both “humans Others” (such as women, people of color, children and the poor) and “earth Others” (such as animals, forests, the land).

The reference to “Others” is intended to highlight the status of those subordinate groups in unjustifiable relationships and systems of domination and subordination.” “A portrait landscape” maps the relations and intersection where the time tracks nature’s deterioration to a place of otherness, while the space of systems threads all three together.

My work enacts the process of my transformation in response to trauma, especially the duality between my interior trauma and exterior appearance. The work represents my feelings of an event that occurred, the experience it, and how I overcame it. I only recently realized art is a powerful and transformative healing tool. Initially making this for people who have experienced trauma, they may feel a sense of healing from the work. Because it is hard to find people who will share openly, this would need permission from the witnesses, started to represent my experience first.

James Knott is an emerging, Toronto based artist, currently studying Integrated Media and Drawing/Painting at OCAD University. His practice combines video, animation, performance, audio art, and theatre to create immersive experiences for the viewer. Common themes and motifs include synesthesia and the visualization of sound, anxiety, suburbia, inner dialogues, multiple selves, queer issues, and identity.

Jenna Reid first learned to quilt as a preteen as a way to connect with her paternal family. Experiences of grief, intense nostalgia and a deep respect for the feminist roots of quilt making have inspired Jenna to use quilting as her chosen medium in order to engage with and express issues of disability justice. It was through her aunt that Jenna learned the essential skills of the craft of quilt making. This included the fundamentals of construction and the significance of making the connections between her current practice with both her personal history and the history of the social world around her.

Through her training in the Fibre Arts Program at Haliburton School of the Arts, Jenna has worked towards developing and honing her skills as an emerging fibre artist by focusing her studies on quilt making and the processes of nature based dyeing. Working across the disciplines of Critical Disability Studies and Fibre Arts Jenna is able to engage artistic practices as political and socially engaged expression. In this way, Jenna hopes to connect her own personal practice as a fibre artist as being intricately linked to her engagement with and contribution to the Mad and Disability Communities around her.

Jen Lewis is the Conceptual Artist and Menstrual Designer behind Beauty in Blood, a bold, transformative macrophotography and video art project that confronts social taboos pertaining to menstruation and the female body. She received her B.A. in the History of Art from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 2001. Her work has been displayed in group exhibitions internationally, such as Women at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (United States), Period Pieces at the Urban Artroom (Sweden), the 9 th Annual Juried Art Show at The Kinsey Institute (United States) and Art to Change the World at ArtPrize® (United States).

Jen is an active member of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research with a monthly “Menstrual Pin-Up” series on their blog, re:Cycling, and is curating a menstrual art show entitled “Widening the Cycle” for the biennial conference in 2015. Additionally, Jen is a Planning Committee Member for the Feminist Art Conference (FAC) based in Toronto as well as the FAC Documentation Coordinator/Video Archivist. She currently lives and works in Denver, Colorado.

Lee has exhibited across Canada and is the recipient of several awards including Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, RBC/Canadian Art Foundation’s New Canadian Painting Competition and the Asian Canadian Artists Fund for Visual Arts. She is represented in the Magenta Foundation’s Carte Blanche: Painting, a survey of contemporary Canadian painters. She currently lives and works in Toronto where she teaches painting and drawing at OCAD University and holds the position of Director, First Year.

Kara’s Website

Kara Stone: Kara Stone is an art-maker creating videogames, interactive art and traditional crafts. She achieved an MA in Communication and Culture at a joint program at York and Ryerson University, focusing on mental health, affect, feminism, and videogames. Her work has been featured in Vice, Wired, The Atlantic, and NPR. It consists of feminist art with a focus on gendered perspective of affect – but it’s much more fun than it sounds.

Beth’s Website

Beth Maher: I make my own little games both board and video (though not as many as I’d like while chasing around a toddle), help out on others (usually by making extraordinary cutsey pixel art) and mentor with Dames Making Games. I was on the jury for the 2013 and 2015 Independent Game Festival Awards. I have run workshops on creativity and ideation for video games – kinda like an art school crash course for the tech set, as well as teaching children and other newcomers how to start making their own games. I’m always up for collaboration and I have dabbled in graphic design and like to whip up logos for my friends.

Karen Miranda Augustine is a Canadian artist, writer and videomaker whose works have exhibited in Canada, the US, Scotland, and in Haiti at the 2nd Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince. She has been published and cited in various books and publications, including Caribbean InTransit Arts Journal, The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts (Cleis Press) and The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press). Her creative projects ride on the confluence of sex, pop culture, spirituality and the underground. She holds an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies from York University.

Lacey Ford was born 1989 in Prince Edward Island Canada. Today she resides in Toronto and is finishing her studies at the Toronto Art Therapy Institute to become an art therapist and has started a non-profit organization to open an art therapy centre in Toronto. Lacey is self-taught, she became interested in art at the age of seven & began creating artwork on a regular basis at 16, all together she has10 years of art making experience. A lot of her artwork focuses around the effects of trauma & her personal journey to inner peace. Her art is: emotionally charged, transformative & vibrant. Other Influences are: Jean-Michel Basquait, Claude Monet & Salvador Dali.

Born and raised in Cobourg, Ontario, Lana Missen is a Toronto based visual artist working with photography to explore themes of the body, identity, and female representation. Through portraiture, she aims to create visibility and a space to share her own and others’ stories to a wider audience. A strong believer in the importance of collaboration and community, Missen’s practice is based on engaging with individuals and her viewers. Her current body of work “That F Word” was shown at OCAD University’s 100th Graduate Exhibition this spring, and is a part of the ‘Contact’ photo festival in Toronto in May.

She has also displayed works in the juried CLIC Eastern Ontario Photo Show, where she won first place in 2012. She was part of the “Aperture” show at Moniker Gallery in downtown Toronto in 2014. She has an interest in art education and, outside of her fine art practice, Lana enjoys documenting performances of live theatre, dancers, and musicians. Lana Missen graduates this year from OCAD University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography and a minor in English.

Mandy Espezel is a visual artist originally from Fort McMurray, Alberta. They received a BFA from the University of Alberta in 2007, and a MFA in 2012 from the University of Lethbridge. In between their years in academia, Espezel contributed regularly to Prairie Artsters.com (the Alberta-based visual arts blog created by Amy Fung) and also co-authored the column Art Box with Jill Stanton, published weekly in Edmonton’s SEE Magazine.

Recently Espezel’s work was included in the group exhibition “The Missing Body: performance in the absence of the artist” curated by Cindy Baker, at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, and in the solo exhibition “Inappropriate Intensities” at the Trianon Gallery. This summer, she will be creating a site specific installation piece for The Works Art and Design Festival, in Edmonton. Espezel lives in Lethbridge, Alberta.

Born in 1980 Bergen, Norway. Lives and work in Oslo, Norway. Margreta Stolen with her sharp skill, large scale and subject matter make her the one to watch of her generation. She describes herself as a visual storyteller, and make dystopian and fragmented stories told through drawing. The darker sides of our culture have always fascinated her. Black Metal and horror movies often influence Margreta Stolens work, but she twists the imagery around to portray contemporary feminist view on female identity. Educated at Central St. Martins, London, (2004 – 2007), and Goldsmith College, London, (2015 – 2017). Margreta Stolens work has been exhibited in the U.K., Germany, and had numerous solo exhibitions in Norway. She has received National Exhibition Funding from the Norwegian Arts Council in 2013 and 2014.

My work shows an obsessive repetitive behaviour as I use my body to perform an action as a way to interact with objects. The process of performing the action provides meaning to the work. I use the medium that makes the most sense and therefore work in a large variety of mediums. My work attempts to regain a sense of self with figuring out how our bodies occupy and alter spaces and objects. The actions I perform in my work are ubiquitous as well as intimate. Currently I am working on projects that investigate societal spaces and the power dynamics of those spaces. I work with objects that have inherent cultural identities within those spaces. I work especially with objects that reflect our priorities within our society.

In 999 Less – A Newer Library I work with the books within a library as they reflect our societies priorities of what is import enough to be recorded and what is not. In this project I checked out 999 books from the NSCAD library for two weeks. All the books checked out were solely about a white western male ‘genius’ or ‘masters’ of their time. These male ‘genius’ create a binary where they are the only ones able to create political change. With taking out the male master books I am reclaiming the space of western archive allowing space within the library for the next generation of artist to not be held down by these ‘old masters’ that oppress multiple views of art making.

Gao’sassas Natalie Ball. I am an indigenous visual artist who examines internal and external discourses that shape Indian identity. I believe historical discourses of Native Americans have constructed a limited and inconsistent visual archive that currently misrepresents our past experiences and misinforms current expectations. I excavate hidden histories and dominant narratives to artistically deconstruct them through a theoretical framework of auto- ethnography to move “Indian” outside of governing discourses to rebuild a new visual genealogy in refusal to line-up with the many constructed existences of Native Americans.

Because auto-ethnography refers to the self, my location as a descendent of African slaves, English soldiers, and a great great granddaughter of Kientpaush, also known as Captain Jack who led Modoc resistance during the 1872 Modoc War informs my work. Within the thematic focus of my work and because of my descendancy, it is here where my artistic approach and interest lies. With degrees in Ethnic Studies and Indigenous Visual Arts, my work is always in discussion with racial narratives critical to understanding of both the self and the nation and necessarily, our shared experiences and histories. My art is not limited textually, it goes beyond the language of memory to allow for witnessing that does not diminish the past or the present.

Currently based in Toronto, I am a recent graduate of the University of Ottawa’s BFA program. In Ottawa, my work has been shown at The Fritzi Gallery, Studio 66, St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts, and Gallery 115. I also participated in Ottawa/Gatineau Nuit Blanche 2013, as part of the StrangeLoops Collective. Farther afield, my work has been exhibited at Z Art Space in Montreal as well as at The Whitestone Gallery in Guelph. I have also been the recipient of several awards including the Gunter Nolte Scholarship for Excellence in Drawing, the Visual Arts Alumni Fund Award, the Dean’s Honour List Scholarship- Arts, and the Edmund and Isobel Ryan Visual Arts Scholarship (in Painting): 2nd Place Prize.

As a feminist artist, I am interested in blurring the lines between what is considered empowerment and what is subordinate through captivating and sometimes dark imagery. My work prompts viewers to grapple with ideas of identity, desire, and self- creation while it also considers the criticality of youth.

Often erratic and raw, my work addresses the adolescent portrayal of the self by exploring profound emotions and building outward facades. In an attempt to hold on to past experiences, both good and bad, I fetishize them in my work, in turn creating a mediated memory. My construction of memory begins to form by choosing to photograph select times in my life and specific moments of personal experience. These photos in turn create a string of memories mediated by the medium.

My photographs influence my paintings by being tangible indexical objects documenting time. Once these memories are translated into paintings I allow them to enter the realm of the unreal and fantastical. Affectations of this kind function as a subtext in my work since they highlight the artificiality of painting (it is, indeed, at a remove from the immediate realism of a photograph), while also enabling my freedom to inject the work with more symbolic meaning. Subsequently, the images are more loaded than they were in their original incarnation – when they were simply photographs – because they have begun to take on the potent, and more loaded, possibilities that only oil paint will afford.

After her strict Middle-Eastern father forbade her to act, dance, or sing publicly, Orli Auslander turned to drawing because pencils were one of the few things that couldn’t be outlawed. At 17 she dropped out of school to earn money and fled her family’s home in London, England landing in New York City. Auslander spent years building a business as a milliner, making hats for the Kentucky Derby, for Hollywood movies and clients like Bruce Springstein and Cynthia Rowley. Needing a change she left to become a Radio Personality on WLIR, New York. In 2002, Auslander returned to her first love, drawing, sculpting, and painting. Auslander created her first graphic novel Vagina Money. Her work has been shown at numerous galleries and most recently has appeared on the series Happyish for Showtime Television.

Pamela Dodds is a visual artist and printmaker. She was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, grew up in Toronto, and was transported to the USA as a young teen due to family permutations. She received an Honors B.A. in Fine Arts from Brandeis University, Massachusetts, USA. Dodds’s work is represented by Open Studio Printmaking Centre, Toronto and William Busta Gallery, Cleveland, Ohio, and has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in galleries, museums and other venues in the USA and Canada. Periodically she has taken preference for exhibiting in public institutions, such as hospitals and community centres for the purpose of bringing her work to an audience who may not choose, or be able, to visit a museum or art gallery.

These exhibitions have rewarded her with some of the most insightful, frank, and heartfelt viewer response to the work. Pamela Dodds was a 2014 recipient of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant for Feminist Art. In 2008 she received the generous Individual Support grant from the Gottlieb Foundation, N.Y. She has also received support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Ontario Arts Council, among others. She was the 2008 Nick Novak Fellow and the 2014 Hexagon Fellow at Open Studio, Toronto, and has been granted international residencies, most recently in Spain, England, USA and Québec.

Her work has been reviewed in Art New England, The Boston Globe and The Globe and Mail, among others, as well as by lesbian, feminist playwright Carolyn Gage; and has been purchased for public collections such as Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Purdue University, Illinois; Boston Public Library, Massachusetts; and is included in the collection of Carleton University, Ottawa and numerous private collections. She is a citizen of both the USA and Canada, and currently lives and works in Toronto.

Praba Pilar is a Colombian multi-disciplinary artist, technologist and cultural theorist. She explores globalized forms of economic and ecological crisis generated by emerging technologies through counter-narrative performances, street theatre, interactive electronic installations, digital artworks, writing and websites. Her work has traveled internationally to multiple performalogic and dialogic spaces, including performance festivals, universities, galleries, museums, conferences, public streets, election halls, lecture halls, nightclubs and bookstores.

She has been written about in numerous publications, and honored with multiple awards. She is now focused on liminal zones beyond subjection, and is developing her own embryonic language of performative unintelligibility as an approach to creative resistance. A life-long feminist activist artist, she is deeply influenced by the feminist activists, theorists, writers and critics Gloria Anzaldua, Chela Sandoval and Donna Haraway, among others. A recent immigrant to Canada, she has a PhD in Performance Studies with an emphasis on Feminist Theory and Research from the University of California at Davis (2014).

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.

Shelby Lisk is a photographer and art student finishing her final year of her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Ottawa. In her artwork she deals mostly with ideas of her own identity by investigating gender roles, relationship dynamics, and her cultural identity as a Mohawk and Canadian woman. She investigates these roles through her imagery and performative actions, using photography and video as her main mediums. She would like her viewers to question a part of their own lives when looking at her work and experience a sense of her perspective through the visual aspects. Her work can be interpreted as a feminist approach to an investigation of personal identity.

Stella Cade Rotstein (1988, Toronto) has studied at the Art Students League, Concordia University and received her BFAfrom OCADU in 2013. Her work explores the intersections of trauma, ritual and healing. Cade was awarded the People's Choice Award at the Toronto Outdoor ArtExhibition in 2011 and The Donna Maclean Award for portraiture and representational painting from OCADU in 2013. Most recently Cade has exhibited at Katzman Contemporary and Angell Gallery. Her work has been included in the 2017 collections for Art with Heart, ArtsEffect and Art Gems. She is currently living in London, UK completing her MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Stéphanie McKnight (Stéfy) is a MA candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. Initially from northern Ontario, Stéfy began her career as a visual artist while undergoing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Nipissing University in North Bay. Interested in how cultural themes relates to ideas of social construction, her research focuses on social sorting, gender performativity, and surveillance post Edward Snowden (2013). Stéfy’s research areas are broad, which indicates her passion for connecting and linking cultural ideologies to every day life. Her primary artist medium is installation art in forms such as site specific, video and media; performance and found object related installations.

Street harassment and gender-based sexual violence are real concerns for women* inhabiting public spaces in Toronto. Using humour and subversive advertising, The Street Talk Project brings attention to the ways in which public space is navigated differently by different bodies; address how sexism is felt viscerally on a day-to-day basis; promotes solidarity for the safety of women*; and further the belief that we are all responsible for making public spaces accessible and welcoming for all persons. The Street Talk Project addresses our Right to the City as women* and how this right is compromised by street harassment.

Seven artists were commissioned to respond to these concerns using street sign iconography and design. The designs were installed in the streetscape of Kensington Market as well as in Whippersnapper Gallery from April 16-23, 2015. The Street Talk Project is a collective of 10 women who came together through the Arts Administration program at Humber College. We believe public art is a great vehicle for discussing the lived experiences of the city and through this project wanted to create a platform through which shared experiences could be presented and discussed.

Tara Atluri has a PHD in Sociology. She is a Lecturer at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. She recently held the position of post-doctoral researcher at the Open University in the United Kingdom, as part of Oecumene: Citizenship After Orientalism.

Working through the lens of feminist gaming I create strong female protagonists through the medium of transparent materials. Upon wearing them the transparency creates a duality between the character and the self. The creation of a strong female protagonist is empowering and allows for reclamation of the female form. Each character is then partnered with a video game that exists online. Video games are a new media for providing narrative, as a community we must decide to be more critical of the stories we tell and the effect they have.

This work was made as a response to Zoe Quinn, GamerGate, and Anita Sarkeesian and is about feeling empowered by video game play, but also looking at video games as a medium, as well as its fan base with criticality. I’m a multidisciplinary artist who has completed my BFA with a major in Drawing and Painting and a minor in English at OCAD University. I’m a graduate of June 2015 and spent my thesis year exploring the theme of cyber-femininity, and creating work that explores the female protagonist in video games and motivational speaking for the industry of video games to be looked at more critically.

I grew up as a stranger to my own story; adopted and re-named, grafted into a new family tree. The discovery in adulthood of my Ojibwa-Metis heritage was a revelation that set me on a path of discovery. I work in the powerful tradition of the vessel as metaphor for individuals; we fill and re-fill ourselves throughout life to create our own story. My developing story as an indigenous heritage woman and her quest for harmony with the natural world.

Nature not only inspires my forms but provides the substance of my sculptures. Working in beeswax as a sculptural medium is a concept I have developed based on the tradition of encaustic painting. This special medium is wonderfully pliable and responsive when heated and results in a finished object with a delicate scent and a soft, magical, tactile quality.

Carew is a Graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media and Design program at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. She earned her Honors BFA in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University. Her paintings are included in private collections internationally and has an extensive portfolio of freelance and privately commissioned work for patrons throughout Canada and The United States. She has exhibited nationally and in Europe and has taught inquiry and place-based environmental literacy through visual art practices in Toronto, Canada. Carew’s figure based paintings are narrative works which discuss contemporary urbanity, innocence and culpability in relation to environmental disconnection.

Her research examines myth-making regarding wild spaces in children’s books and pictorial narratives in various media. Currently her reflexive methodology explores domestic space, pedagogy and ecoliteracy through the lens of feminist theory via sculpture/installation, textile media and performance.