PART 5

You And I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death - PART 5

Water (2024)

DECEMBER 12, 2024

12 NOON TO 12 MIDNIGHT

In-person at the artLAB Gallery at the Department of Visual Arts, Western University, London, Ontario. Plus streaming via YouTube.

"Water (Deshkan Ziibi)” is curated by Christof Migone, Sheri Osden Nault, and Ruth Skinner.

This year’s event, the 5th edition in the 12-part annual series, will willingly wade the time away, in eddies, in sinks, in drains, in backwaters, through root systems, capillaries, infiltrating, inundating our "humid brains" (Isabelle Stengers).

Recipes for getting wet: out of the blue, blue planet, into the molecular, cellular, time’s involved, time runs through it, hydrophonics, hydrojams, glistening gestures, swimsink, cloud seeding, drought, contamination, advisories, nautical sea, nausea, leagues under, deep diver, pearl mother, Mariana Trench. We quickly see this flow forever, for, as Yve Lomax put it in Sounding the Event: “Yes, this noisy restless sea is pure multiplicity: it is mixture, it is contingency and it is turbulent.” Or, put even more succinctly, as Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar realizes: “isolating a wave is not easy.”

The last 20 minutes of every hour will feature 12 bodies of water as part of the Place (Dis) series. A body of water may be an ocean, a sea, a glacier, a lake, a river, a stream, a steam, a swamp, a well, a swell, a pond, a puddle, a spittle, a sniffle, a rill, a creek, a tear, a molecule. It may be part of a flood or spill, a drip or drop. It may be dammed, bottled, glassed. It can flow, freeze, steam, or boil. It can help grow or drown. It can wave or stagnate. It can be part of juice, tea, coffee, sauce. It can cause mould or just be moist. It can seep, leak, ooze. A body of water is a place that displaces.

"The Anishinaabek People refer to the Thames River as Deshkan Ziibi (which means Antler River in Ojibwe / Anishnaabemowin language). The river has also been called Askunessippi (Antlered River) by the Neutrals and La Tranchée (later La Tranche, which means the Trench) by early French explorers, settlers and fur traders. In 1793, Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe named the river the Thames River after the River Thames in England." (Source: Upper Thames River Conservation Authority).

Western University is located on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Neutral (Chonnonton) peoples, on lands connected to several Treaties including Treaty 6 London Township, Treaty 7 Sombra Township, Treaty 21 Longwoods and the Dish with One Spoon Covenant Wampum. This place continues to be home to diverse Indigenous peoples who are recognized as contemporary stewards of the land and vital contributors to society.

LINKS:

- Chippewas of the Thames First Nation
- Oneida Nation of the Thames
- Delaware Nation

THANKS:

All the artists and presenters. Plus the amazing team of Dickson Bou, B. Kayla Coban, Liza Eurich, Brittany Forrest, Masha Kouznetsova, Eeva Siivonen, Greg de Souza, Dan Tapper.

LINEUP

HOUR 1 (12 EST)
artLab PRESENTS Tom Cull with Daniella Butters and Sruthi Ramanarayanan, plus E.B.B.S.

HOUR 2 (13 EST)
National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition PRESENTS Kaya Joan, Star Nahwegahbo, Amanda Amour Lynx, plus Sheri Osden Nault

HOUR 3 (14 EST)
WalkingLab PRESENTS Eli Nolet plus Lina Choi

HOUR 4 (15 EST)
Doris McCarthy Gallery PRESENTS Farheen Haq, Laura Millard, Jordyn Stewart, Jon Sasaki, Lou Sheppard, plus Bagida’waad Alliance

HOUR 5 (16 EST)
Art Gallery of Hamilton PRESENTS Celia Vernal, Tyler Tekatch, Laurie Kilgor-Walsh, plus Melissa General

HOUR 6 (17 EST)
SASAH PRESENTS Michelle Wilson and the Coves Collective Ensemble, plus Kate Armstrong and Claire Liu

HOUR 7 (18 EST)
Thames Art Gallery PRESENTS Dickson Bou, Jamie Dronyk, Sharmistha Kar, Peter Lebel, Patrick Mahon, Thomas Mahon, Valerie Mills-Milde, & Quinn Smallboy

HOUR 8 (19 EST)
Futura Resistenza PRESENTS Christof Migone with Masha Kouznetsova and Ellen Moffat

HOUR 9 (20 EST)
Forest City Gallery PRESENTS Racquel Rowe

HOUR 10 (21 EST)
Glenfiddich Artists in Residence PRESENTS Penelope Cain

HOUR 11 (22 EST)
McIntosh Gallery PRESENTS Shannon Cooney and Paul Walde

HOUR 12 (23 EST)
New Adventures in Sound Art and Other Sights PRESENTS Brady Marks & Mark Timmings (Wetland Project)

PRESENTED BY

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

RADIOS & STREAMERS

PROGRAMME

PRESENTED BY THE ARTLAB GALLERY

DECEMBER 12, 2024
12 NOON - 12 MIDNIGHT (EST)

LIVE IN-PERSON AT:
ARTLAB (London, Ontario, Canada)

LIVESTREAMED ONLINE ON:
YouTube Livestream

AND VIA STREAMING PARTNERS:
Radius, Radio Bloc Oral, Resonance Extra, and Wave Farm Radio

The audio stream is made possible through a partnership with Wave Farm, an international transmission arts organization driven by experimentation with the electromagnetic spectrum. 

WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 1
9 PST, 12 EST, 17 GMT, 18 CET, 4 AEDT

artLAB PRESENTS Tom Cull with Danielle Butters & Sruthi Ramanarayanan

Preceding the UpStream/DownStream video, we will honor the place by walking on water (fresh snow) from the artLAB Gallery to the Deshkan Ziibi/River Thames (recorded on Tuesday December 3, 2024 at 12 noon (est)).

UpStream/DownStream

UpStream/DownStream is a 2020-2021 project by Tom Cull (with Danielle Butters & Sruthi Ramanarayanan) that brings together art and activism to focus on the question of clean drinking water and healthy river ecology. The work was composed from footage taken at a number of river cleanups held in London, Ontario, and at Oneida Nation of the Thames—two communities that are connected by one river: Deshkan Ziibi/Thames River. Oneida First Nation is currently on a boil-water advisory due, in part, to the ways that the city of London and other upstream communities pollute the river. Volunteers were invited to participate in the cleanups and share their thoughts about what water means to them. 

Located in the John Labatt Visual Arts Centre at Western University, the artLAB Gallery is a vital facility within the Department of Visual Arts. Our primary focus is to act as a pedagogical tool, to support student and faculty-led research and production. Exhibitions provide a platform to respond to pertinent social and cultural issues, and/or explore conceptual, formal and material-based interests. 

Place (Dis) - 1

The last twenty minutes of the 1st hour features the contribution of E.B.B.S. to the Place (Dis) series.

Eight Beats By Shore

E.B.B.S is a collective of student artists currently taking the Sound & Performance class taught by Christof Migone at Western University. They are Dorian Handley, Brianna Hopkins, Tamaki Konan, Joshua McKee, Emily Osmond, Daniel Bali-yang Penano, Andrea Winckler, and Meiheng Zhang. Each of them made a recording of the Deshkan Ziibi that was then assembled by the Teaching Assistant for the class, PhD student Masha Kouznetsova.

WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 2
10 PST, 13 EST, 18 GMT, 19 CET, 5 AEDT

National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition PRESENTS Amanda Amour-Lynx, Kaya Joan,  and Star Nahwegahbo

Video document of Kaya Joan speaking about their and Star’s work, followed by:

Archive of Trickster 2 by Kaya Joan

Archive of Trickster weaves together kaya’s observations of physical and digital archival imagery relating to projects of urbanization at the mouth of the Humber. Working with personal interactions with the land as an archive themselves (land as multifaceted being with agency), the way they exists in the present, the indications of how they once were and how they would like to become (again). This is the second project kaya has created under this title, inspired by Octavia Butler’s unwritten book Parable of the Trickster. Harnessing tools embedded in visionary and speculative fiction, world building and ancestral storytelling practices, this video collage of footage explores archives informed by land as sites of transformation. In this project, kaya a.k.a ‘spyke’, embodies the energy of a trickster, a being who moves outside of linear temporality and binary, to engage with “the archive” as an embodied experience of place. This work was created for National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition's project in partnership with VUCAVU We Come Together.

Humber Water Dance by Star Nahwegahbo 

In expression of gratitude and care, we hear the singing of Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee water songs and the healing sounds of the jingle dress dance as loving offerings to water. Star’s practice includes her Mother, Auntie and Grandmother. Star would like to acknowledge the following people who were part of the video:

Jingle Dress Dancer - Robin Rice
Nibi Water Song Singer - Leslie Neshkiwe 
Haudenosaunee Water Song Singer - Kaya Joan

Video document of Amanda Amour-Lynx in conversation with Sheri Osden Nault, followed by:

Nasunikejk (elmitukwi’k) by Amanda Amour-Lynx

She flows(runs) home to the place of tall reeds. Ki’kwesu’skul, muskrat root or sweet flag is a rhizomatic medicinal wetland plant featuring tall grassy reeds that extend from the water. Nasunikejk embraces sensations of both hope and grief surrounding habitat restoration and the complex relationship between expropriated unceded territories that hold matrilineal and ancestral histories. Fantasy, dream and prayer stitch together a sacred landscape, touched by care and wisdom of the elders’ hands who tend to the lodges of the living. Nasunikejk is the place name for Queensport, Guysborough County, that features a harbour that overlooks one of the coastal lines where the first ships sailed across the Atlantic to Canada, featured in ancient L’nu petroglyphs that notified community of the arrival of an unknown civilization. Sweet flag spreads rhizomatically creating thick beds of root mass, preventing erosion, bridging the water world and earth worlds through their contractual union.

The National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition (NIMAC) is an Indigenous led and run organization that serves Indigenous artists working in Media Art through support, mentorship and exhibition.

Place (Dis) - 2

The last twenty minutes of the 2nd hour features the contribution of Sheri Osden Nault to the Place (Dis) series. 

touching, knowing

Sheri Osden Nault shares documentation of hide tanning, highlighting the unsettling beauty of this deeply tactile and intimate process. The interior patterns of the skin, traces of capillaries and veins, resemble aerial views of waterways, while the exterior of the hide reveals scars from barbed wire and other encounters. As the hide is worked, the moisture of the dermis is replaced with oils and it transforms from a wet raw hide to a soft textile. This video was created at the artist's home near the Deshkan Ziibing (Thames River) in London, Ontario.

WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 3
11 PST, 14 EST, 19 GMT, 20 CET, 6 AEDT

WalkingLab PRESENTS Eli Nolet

SPIT HOLD

SPIT HOLD by Eli Nolet is a single channel video work of a durational performative exchange. Starting with a mouthful of water, the artist and their partner pass the fluid back and forth between each other until only spit remains. This exchange becomes a process of transmutation through contact – water to saliva, our bodily boundaries between self and other dissolving. Exploring the ways in which queer and trans bodies can embody states of flux, SPIT HOLD challenges fixed notions of relationality and intimacy – here, they are both containers and contained; bodies a vessel for one anothers fluid, emotions, and remnants. SPIT HOLD investigates how we contain and transform one another, how queer and trans bodies can be both containers of desire and active participants in transmutation, and how queer kinship, like the body, is ever shifting – porous, fluid, in constant flux.

WalkingLab studies and advances the theory and practice of critical walking methodologies through interdisciplinary arts practices and public walking events. The various projects and events activated at WalkingLab draw on feminist-queer, anti-racist, anti-ableist, and anti-colonial thought and practice to question who gets to walk where, how we walk, under whose terms, and what kind of publics we can make.

Place (Dis) - 3

The last twenty minutes of the 3rd hour features the contribution of Lina Choi to the Place (Dis) series.

Water Texture-Sound Study

A video by Lina Choi of the rivers, streams, lakes, and canal that was recorded during a residency at Centre Daïmôn in Gatineau, Québec. 

WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 4
12 PST, 15 EST, 20 GMT, 21 CET, 7 AEDT

Doris McCarthy Gallery PRESENTS Farheen Haq, Laura Millard, Jordyn Stewart, Jon Sasaki, Lou Sheppard, and Bagida’waad Alliance

Forgiveness (2022) by Farheen Haq (2min 32sec)

In this video, I am washing my teenage daughter’s hands. A mundane act of care that a mother would routinely undertake with a toddler takes on new meaning and intimacy once the child has become a teenager. The ceremony of washing our hands together is a desire for healing and becomes a gesture that is more powerful than words.

it takes friction to create a lather
holding this body in a slippery space
between us, vanishing
as we listen, washing
what can’t be seen

Time as was told (2024) by Laura Millard (5min 01sec)

Time as was told was shot in Hambergbukta Bay directly opposite Hornsund Fiord on the southern tip of Spitsbergen in the international territory of Svalbard. Between these inlets, Hornbreen-Hambergbreen Glacier is melting at an accelerated pace. When this glacier retreats it will open a passage creating an island at the southern tip of Svalbard for the first time on record. Svalbard is heating up more dramatically than any place on earth ‑ evidence of the devastating effects of the climate crisis. As the U.N. Climate Action Summit struggles to find ways to limit the global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius, temperatures on Svalbard have already risen by 4 degrees Celsius. The permafrost and glaciers are melting at a speed that could not be predicted even a few years ago. Circling a small piece of glacial ice in Hambergbukta I was thinking about time, how much we have, and how we measure it. Knowing rapidly melting polar ice has affected the earth’s rotation, and therefore the length of the day, I saw a visual analogy between this glowing, rounded, melting piece of ancient ice and our planet. How do we count the days we have left? The minutes? The seconds? We’re out of time.

Compulsory Figure (2016) by Jordyn Stewart (5min 30sec)

Compulsory Figure is a performance for video that takes place on a series of ponds, flood basins, and marshes that sit along the Niagara escarpment. Dressed in a skating uniform, I assume the role of a figure skater determined to perform upon untouched icy surfaces that exist in the landscape. The title of the work, Compulsory Figure, is defined as the carving of specific patterns or figures onto the ice surface by the skater’s blade. These marks made on the ice were the original purpose of the sport. As a self-taught amateur figure skater my techniques are based on my own rendition of skating routines. While adopting this constructed persona, I critique the hyper-femininity of the sport and challenges its traditional context. I perform outside of the traditional enclosed arena stage and traverses the landscape. Seeing my attire outside of an arena context further emphasizes the absurdity of the garment's hyper-feminine design. The video documents multiple perspectives of the performance as I prepare to execute my routine.

Reimagining Niagara: Sights and Sounds of Niagara Falls (2024) by Jordyn Stewart (30sec)

Reimagining Niagara: Sights & Sounds of Niagara Falls is a stop-motion video created in response to the exhibition, To play a daredevil's advocate at the Grimsby Public Art Gallery. The exhibition paid tribute to Annie Edson Taylor, the first person and woman to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive. In the early 1900s, during the height of daredevil activity surrounding Niagara Falls, one woman surprised everyone. Confined in only a whisky barrel padded with a few pillows, Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to successfully plunge over the brink of the Horseshoe Falls and survive. The work documents a miniature replica of the iconic Falls. The waterfall soundscape was created by layering foley sound effects created using found objects. I would like to thank the production crew, Naomi (8), Dylan (10), and Leonardo (6) for their assistance.

Jack Pine, 8' Camera Crane (2010) by Jon Sasaki (4min 32sec)

Jack Pine, 8' Camera Crane is a sweeping 360-degree crane shot at the majestic vista where the notable Canadian landscape painter Tom Thomson created his iconic Jack Pine (1916-1917). Far more cumbersome than a paint box, the crane literally clashes with the subject with slapstick intensity. The work is an affectionate critique of the ineradicable Canadian landscape genre, and a humorous look at the ways it can be incompatible with some tools of contemporary artmaking.

Unchartered Waters Kempenfelt Bay (2024) by Lou Sheppard (20min, excerpt)

Uncharted Waters (Kempenfelt Bay) is an act of reorientation, from an anthropocentric position of conventional charting and mapping of Lake Simcoe to acts of listening and responding to the changes that are taking place there. To “sound” a body of water means to send a sonic signal below and wait to hear how long it takes to return. Sounding allows us to chart and map the bottom of a body of water, navigating what is below. To create Uncharted Waters I began by dropping a hydrophone deep into Lake Simcoe passively listening to the sounds that exist below. I brought these sounds to three musicians asking them to respond and amplify what they heard to create a new reflection of the lake- a sonic navigation of this changeable and fragile body of water. Reversing the process of navigational sounding, Uncharted Waters ask us to listen to what is changing in the lake through sound, an echo(dis)location within this shifting environment. How do we navigate beyond our familiar borders? How do we re-orient from fixed point navigation to understanding matter as active, changing and interdependent?

The Doris McCarthy Gallery is a professional public art gallery within the University of Toronto Scarborough that advances artistic innovation, critical thinking, and cultural exchange through engagement with contemporary art.

Place (Dis) - 4

The last twenty minutes of the 4th hour features the contribution of Bagida’waad Alliance to the Place (Dis) series.

For this video, members of Bagida’waad, along with Marla Hlady and Gwen MacGregor, went out onto the water in canoes near the Akiwenzie home at Neyaashiinigmiing.

WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 5
13 PST, 16 EST, 21 GMT, 22 CET, 8 AEDT

Art Gallery of Hamilton PRESENTS Celia Vernal, Tyler Tekatch, Laurie Kilgor-Walsh

Artists have mythologized water in their art for centuries. Water has been many things—subject, medium, metaphor, and message, and in each case carries with it a fascination and a connection with the natural world. Through a selection of images chosen from the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s permanent collection, including works by Lawren Harris, Mary Wrinch, Edward Burtynsky, amongst others, members of AGH staff (Celia Vernal, Tyler Tekatch, Laurie Kilgor-Walsh) discuss and highlight the various distinct styles and influences as each artist attempts to capture the essence of this universal element.

The Art Gallery of Hamilton is situated on the Treaty Lands and Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the Traditional Territory of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, and Haudenosaunee. This land is covered by the Between the Lakes Treaty (No. 3), negotiated between the Crown and the Mississaugas of the Credit in 1784, and ratified in 1792.

Place (Dis) - 5

The last twenty minutes of the 5th hour features the contribution of Melissa General to the Place (Dis) series.

Kehyá:ra’s 

Kehyá:ra’s (2016) shows Melissa General repeatedly walking into the Grand River—a river that plays an important role in General’s personal and cultural history, including it being used as a landmark defining the territory promised to the Haudenosaunee in the Haldimand Proclamation. There she collects water using her mother’s Mason jars. Accompanied by underwater recordings of the artist soaking in a medicine bath, General’s repeated journeys into the river underline the importance of water as traditional container of memory, healing, and spiritual connectedness. 

WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 6
14 PST, 17 EST, 22 GMT, 23 CET, 9 AEDT

SASAH PRESENTS Michelle Wilson and the Coves Collective Ensemble

A Confluence of Legacies

"A Confluence of Legacies" is a new hybrid video and live performance created by intermedia artist Michelle Wilson. This work of speculative fiction combines archival images, video, and narration, drawing upon Wilson's community-engaged research. It explores how personal, familial, historical, and more-than-human legacies converge around an abandoned paint factory site within an Environmentally Significant Area known as The Coves, located in London, Ontario.  This piece continues Wilson's collaboration with the Coves Collective, which is partially funded by the London Arts Council's Community Arts Investment Program. The Coves Collective is an ad-hoc group of artists, educators, and activists that have come together to attend to our responsibilities and relationships with the Coves: an environmentally significant area in the middle of London, Ontario. The Coves Collective is founded on an ethos of direct action, accessibility, collaboration, and justice. 

The School for Advanced Studies in the Arts & Humanities (SASAH) is part of Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. SASAH is an interdisciplinary undergraduate program focusing on the foundations of the humanities. Students gain practical experience in many career fields in a range of sectors—including arts and culture, non-profit, for-profit, education, and information technology—and undertake opportunities in the London community, nationally, and internationally. SASAH is grateful to its community: students and alumni, teaching fellows, valued Advisory Council, community partners and supporters.

Place (Dis) - 6

The last twenty minutes of the 6th hour features the contribution of Kate Armstrong and Claire Liu to the Place (Dis) series.

Flow by Kate Armstrong

Flow features images and sounds from across New Zealand and Southern Ontario. It explores the concepts of presence and focus in the places we find ourselves in, encouraging thoughtfulness and patience with ourselves and the world around us as we navigate our lives.

SURFACE TENSION by Claire Liu

Through the rhythms of cooking and cleaning, this film is a mediation on quiet, restrained burdens. Water, ever-present and ever-flowing, reveals the tension between control and release, until—a chaotic moment of catharsis.

WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 7
15 PST, 18 EST, 23 GMT, 00 CET, 10 AEDT

Thames Art Gallery PRESENTS Dickson Bou, Jamie Dronyk, Sharmistha Kar, Peter Lebel, Patrick Mahon, Thomas Mahon, Valerie Mills-Milde, & Quinn Smallboy

Shipwreckiana

Shipwrecks figure in our cultural and ‘aqueous’ imaginaries for myriad reasons. Arguably, the notion of voyages gone awry takes on increased significance in our time when climate disasters and their affects, and the deleterious results of colonialism (which has relied so significantly on shipping) are everyday realities. Yet shipwrecks are also suggestive of other narratives: reminders that, historically, transformation has often arisen alongside tragedy and disaster, whether real or metaphorical. A recent volume, The Ancient Sea: The Utopian and Catastrophic in Classical Narratives and their Reception (2022) , edited by Hamish Williams and Ross Clare, is filled with texts suggesting more complex ways that watery wreckage tales might be construed. Shipwreckiana is a multi-medium project that is comprised of a combination of recorded video and sound, it will include real time interventions deploying sculptural materials, lighting, spoken word, and water itself. Patrick Mahon and collaborators, some of whom have worked with him before on the project, GardenShip and State, will present an allusive event where references to water and shipwrecks forge abstracted spaces marked by trouble, beauty and difference.

The Thames Art Gallery (TAG) is a non-profit gallery dedicated to promoting the understanding, appreciation, conservation, and enjoyment of the visual arts in the community of Chatham-Kent for present and future generations. TAG's primary curatorial activity is the interpretation of contemporary Canadian art and its history, with a focus on artists from the region of south-western Ontario. We research and produce exhibitions in a range of media, and aspire to be responsive to the challenges of presenting high quality, innovative art in all forms, including installations, electronic and interactive works, websites, film, video and performance, both within the Gallery and off-site. The exhibitions program is designed to provoke, inspire and encourage reflection on the particularities of our locale and population, and extend the definition of art as it relates to broader contemporary culture.

Place (Dis) - 7

The last twenty minutes of the 7th hour features a continuation of Shipwreckiana to the Place (Dis) series.

HOUSE(LIGHT)

Video by Jamie Dronyk. Sounds by Dickson Bou and Peter Lebel

WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 8
16 PST, 19 EST, 00 GMT, 01 CET, 11 AEDT

Futura Resistenza PRESENTS Christof Migone

Temper (Length Wave)

Premiere of a new piece by Christof Migone featuring twelve vintage electronic metronomes. They are all set to the slowest speed, and are arranged in a wavy line. They will be manipulated and mixed so that they no longer demarcate time but scramble it, stir it, muddle it. Each metronome sounds a bit differently, due to wear and tear, plus the fact that there are various models and brands. Some don’t keep time steadily, others emit a noticeably loud electrical hum. None of them can be depended on for accuracy, in fact, they each exude an idiosyncratic character. It’s clear that each one much prefers to be on its own wavelength.



The above describes the live version that will be presented in the artLAB. Simultaneously, the online version will stream a prerecorded version that will be mixed with the work The Release Into Motion - see description below.



Performed by Masha Kouznetsova and Ellen Moffat.

The Release Into Motion

A mouth holding a tomato frozen into a block of ice until both melt and fall off. At the onset the teeth can barely hold, the block is so hard, so cold, hands out of frame help. Slowly but surely the teeth sink in. The pace is so protracted a good part of the face is in pain from the bite of the frost. As the ice melts drops of water fall down into a metal bucket. Each drop makes a ting and marks time. Eventually the ice block falls off and all that’s left is a mouth holding on to a melting and leaking tomato. The jaws are more active now because they can bite down deeper. The tomato eventually splits open and gravity has its way. The abject scene is of a protruding tongue in the process of escaping from the mouth. 



2023 remix (audio and video) of 2000 piece. Four different mixes are included on Wet Water (Let’s Dance), a 2xCD published in 2023 by Futura Resistenza.

 For this event, the 2023 version will be mixed with Temper (Length Wave) - see description above.

Futura Resistenza operates somewhere on the edges of performance, music and the visual arts. Interdisciplinary at its core, for Futura Resistenza a concert is never just a concert and a record reaches far beyond just what meets the ear. The label invites musicians and artists with direct personal connections within its community, as well as people who they simply admire and want to see published or on stage.

Place (Dis) - 8

The last twenty minutes of the 8th hour features Christof Migone's contribution to the Place (Dis) series.

Empty (Bucket)

I drown myself in a shallow bucket as opposed to an endless ocean. I am inundated by a few drops. I dunk my head over and over until all the water has spilled out of the bucket onto the floor. The slosh of the water mixes with the gasps for air. Asphyxiated, I learn how not to breathe. Suffocated, I learn to answer my own question: is a wound with no trace really a wound or is it simply thirsty?



2023 remix (audio and video) of 1997 piece. The most recent mix is included on Wet Water (Let’s Dance), a 2xCD published in 2023 by Futura Resistenza.

WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 9
17 PST, 20 EST, 01 GMT, 21 CET, 12 AEDT

Forest City Gallery PRESENTS Racquel Rowe

Refraction

Refraction (2024) is an underwater video by Racquel Rowe that explores the sensation of dissolving within water. As I swim slow, methodical laps, I reflect on the boundaries of my body and the lane, feeling my form gradually dissipate into fluidity. With each movement, I sink deeper into a breathless, weightless state. Moments of resurfacing interrupt this trance, reconnecting me to the surface, before I’m drawn back into the depths, caught in a cycle between dissolution and reformation.

Forest City Gallery (FCG) is an artist-run centre founded on artistic autonomy with a commitment to excellence in programming exhibitions and events that reflect and address recent developments in cultural production. FCG serves to foster and support contemporary art, promoting dialogue among local, regional, and international arts communities. FCG represents artists of all disciplines and career levels with a focus on emerging artists and practices.

Place (Dis) - 9

The last twenty minutes of the 9th hour features Racquel Rowe's contribution to the Place (Dis) series.

Sea Bath I and II

Sea Bath I and II (2023) presents an intimate, sacred ritual performed by Mother and I, taking early morning baths in the sea in Barbados. Through an amplified ritual of washing, we wash off our bodies with soap and salt, this act affirming water as a vital part of our everyday lives and our shared identity across generations.

WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 10
18 PST, 21 EST, 02 GMT, 03 CET, 13 AEDT

Glenfiddich Artists in Residence PRESENTS Penelope Cain 

Rimlands

The term ‘Rimlands’ was coined by WWI British politician, Halford John Mackinder, to describe that which was at the periphery of the centre. In this series of works, Penelope Cain draws on various watery peripheries that speak of human infrastructures and end-Holocene actions and impacts spoken through watery entry points. 

Skywalking the Rimlands is a brief meditation and performative action, walking the point calculated to be halfway between high tide and low along a remote intertidal zone. It was filmed in the Cromarty Firth, a watery body off the Black Isle, Northern Scotland. With a 5,500 year old Neolithic settlement on the landward side and a line of oil rigs on the seaward, as they overwinter in the Cromerty Firth awaiting oil price fluctuations, the site speaks of human oceanside activities, harvests and extractions across 8000 years.

Donald Trump Versus The Wind considers the soon-to-be-President-again and whatjko0ghm,,,,sw78 the voice of wind-over-water can tell us about a future with this man, through his past actions relating to this coastal site. 

With Salt And Rocks In Our Veins consists of excerpts from a digital game set in a real-world remote salt water lagoon in the middle of the Atacama Desert in Chile. Driven by a webcrawler searching the internet for terms related to the lithium led green energy transition, the game plays out the near-future of this lagoon as it dries up due to lithium-rich groundwater mining to service the growing needs of the lithium battery industry.

The Glenfiddich Artists in Residence program invites breakthrough and award-winning artists from all over the world – Canada, China, Scotland, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States of America – to the historic setting of the Glenfiddich Distillery, deep in the highlands of Scotland, to create original pieces of art. Every summer since 2002, we bring bright new talent to stay with us.  Penelope Cain was the artist-in-residence in 2019 representing Australia.

Place (Dis) - 10

The last twenty minutes of the 10th hour features Penelope Cain's contribution to the Place (Dis) series.

Drone over water atacama

Drone over water atacama completes the series with a hypnotic fly-over the driest desert in the world, in search of natural salt water lagoons. The Atacama salare is a salt-plain in the driest of deserts, where the annual rainfall is 15 mm (0.6 in.) per year. A deep-time land-locked sea, now dehydrated, molecularly recalling memories of past oceans through its deep salty bed, up to hundreds of meters deep. Thirty per cent (30%) of the world's lithium is sourced from here, by pumping lithium rich salty groundwater up to 100 meters below the ground, to evaporate in shallow ponds. Saline groundwater is one of the few free forms of water in Chile so the economics of dehydrating groundwater meet the Global North's demand for low priced lithium to power a green energy revolution. A site encompassing a complexity of contested water; needed by the uniquely coevolved ecosystem and demanded by energy transition needs, to help address human induced climate change. This video and sound work meditates via these complexities on this site and its watery oceanic deep-time memories.

WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 11
19 PST, 22 EST, 02 GMT, 03 CET, 14 AEDT

McIntosh Gallery PRESENTS Shannon Cooney and Paul Walde

Fluid Resilience by Shannon Cooney

Fluid Resilience amplifies our subtle and dynamic interrelatedness to water in Nature. Researched and created with Shannon Cooney’s dance practice Dynamic Expansion which embodies fluid dynamics and seeks to honestly move the physical body from fluid impulses. The work took inspiration from conversations with Dr. Quinlan, and sought to create a choreography with elements of the of Resilience’s Socio-Ecological Complex Adaptive Systems theory and practice. Another source of inspiration was attendance at a water circle in 2017 hosted by Anishinabek Elder and Water Walker Josephine Mandamin, who in her lifetime walked 30,000+km around water and waterways to listen and bring attention to water.

Video excerpts of a live performance of Fluid Resilience on October 17, 2020, at Tanzfabrik Uferstudios, Berlin. Choreography by Shannon  Cooney, co-creative performers Jared Gradinger and Sigal Zouk, Dramaturg Igor Dobricic, Sound Marla Hlady, Costume Nina Gundlach, Lights Emese Csornai, videographer and editor Ben Mergelsberg, Resilience expert Sr. Research fellow Dr. Allyson Quinlan.

The McIntosh Gallery is a public art gallery based at Western University. Since 1942, the McIntosh collaborates with artists, curators and academics to develop innovative strategies to interpret and disseminate visual culture.  

Place (Dis) - 11

The last twenty minutes of the 11th hour features Paul Walde's contribution to the Place (Dis) series.

Glacial

The sounds of a glacier melting are modified using musical instruments as acoustic signal processors and accompanied by a detailed video portrait of the glacial environment from where the recordings were made. Using violins, cello, double bass, timpani, and cymbals fitted with sonic transducers, naturalistic field recordings are transformed into the resonant frequencies of the instruments which form the basis of a sound composition. The video, generated from a massive composite photograph, leads the viewer through a tour of the glacier in slow motion from distant vistas to extreme details. The photos and field recordings for Glacial were recorded at the Coleman Glacier at Qwú’mə Kwəlshéːn aka Mount Baker, Washington. For this event excerpts from Paul Walde's 5 hour composition will be presented to show some of the range in the work that would normally not be possible to witness in under one hour and feature a stereo soundtrack generated from an ambisonic virtual recreation of the installation in the studio. 

Glacial (2019- 2023): excerpts from 4:55:00 sound and video installation, 4k video with 11 channel audio adapted to stereo.

WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) - HOUR 12
20 PST, 23 EST, 03 GMT, 04 CET, 15 AEDT

New Adventures in Sound Art and Other Sights PRESENT Brady Marks & Mark Timmings (Wetland Project)

Wetland Project

Wetland Project is a multipart, multidisciplinary study of an environmental soundscape. Its inspiration lies in a tiny bit of Earth and the sounds that emanate from it: the ṮEḴTEḴSEN marsh in W̱SÁNEĆ territory (Saturna Island, British Columbia). For ten years, this beautiful, reverberant soundscape featuring birds, frogs and airplanes has been investigated by artists Brady Marks and Mark Timmings, and musicologist Stephen Morris, and shared with audiences around the world in the form of slow radio broadcasts, new-media installations, musical performances and an artists’ book. Each iteration of Wetland Project delineates a distinct path to knowledge, a means by which the sonorous source is investigated in all of its dynamic, life-affirming power. The project’s conceptual base is rooted in an original algorithm that transforms the sound frequencies from a 24-hour field recording of the marsh into pure colour fields in flux. This metamorphosis, achieved using a colour scale that maps the pitch range in the recording onto the visible light spectrum, produces a spontaneous visual expression of the entire circadian rhythm. The synesthetic experience it provides sparks forces of apperception that re-enchant our awareness of the wetland and, by extension, of the environments we inhabit.

For the final hour of You And I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death, Marks and Timmings present a new audiovisual interpretation of the Wetland Project field recording. Corresponding with the start time at 20 PST (23 EST), the first 23 hours and 40 minutes of the soundscape are compressed into a decelerating 40-minute piece. Then the remaining 20 minutes are played in real time. Time compression has a distilling effect that reveals patterns in the soundscape. After hearing this distortion, listening at normal speed becomes a refreshed experience.

The artists wish to thank recording engineer Eric Lamontagne and programmer Gabrielle Odowichuk for their enormous contributions to Wetland Project.

New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) is a non-profit media arts organization that operates the NAISA North Media Arts Centre and Café in South River, Ontario, Canada. Arts presentation with a focus on sound and listening are the basis of its year-round exhibitions, online broadcasts and performances. NAISA is located on the traditional territory of the Anishinabewaki peoples covered by the Williams Treaty (1923) and Robinson-Huron Treaty (1850). NAISA recognizes the significant ongoing contributions of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples to aural culture in Canada.

Based in BC’s Lower Mainland, Other Sights is a collective whose many art projects consider the aesthetic, economic and regulatory conditions of public spaces and public life. The concerns of regional waterways, of the foreshore, and newly piloted studios on wheels can be found at currentsandwaves.ca.

Place (Dis) - 12

The last twenty minutes of the 12th hour features Wetland Project 's contribution to the Place (Dis) series.

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PARTICIPANTS

Amanda Amour Lynx is a Two Spirit, neurodivergent urban L’nu-Scottish interdisciplinary artist and facilitator currently living in Guelph, Ontario and member of Wagmatcook FN. Their art combines traditional l’nu’k approaches, contemporary painting with new media and digital arts guided by Mi’kmaq cosmology, star stories, ecological knowledges, gender identity and language resurgence. Amour-Lynx’s recent projects include Spark Indigenous (2023), a collaboration with Meta and Slow Studies Creative, an augmented reality creator accelerator that amplifies Indigenous cultural expression and storytelling through using emerging technology and AR. 2S Digital Constellations (2023) a short project incubator and virtual reality exhibit highlighting emerging two spirit textile-based artists using new media. Virtual Beginner Two Spirit Regalia Making Skills (2021-2023) with Indigenous Youth Roots, a program for Indigiqueer, two spirit and LGBT+ youth, that provides access to regalia making workshops, genderfluid ceremonial teachings, pow wow culture rooted in peer-led community and cultural practices.

Kate Armstrong is a fourth year student double majoring in the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities and Sociology at Western University.

The Bagida’waad Alliance is a grassroots organization that includes a majority of members of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation, whose traditional territory’s shoreline is over 800km. Saukiing Anishinaabekiing extends from near Thornbury on Georgian Bay around the Saugeen (Bruce) Peninsula and down Lake Huron past Goderich. The Alliance has been running a program called New Journey to Save Fish: Oshki Maadaadiziwin Jaa Bimaaji’ut Gigooyike. At least for the last ten years, the commercial fishers have noticed changes in the weather patterns on Lake Huron and Georgian Bay: in particular, increasing winds and increased severity of storms. These changes have had negative effects on the number of safe days for being on the water. Each day when we decide whether to fish or not, one of the critical issues is how windy it is. We either decide it is worth the risk or stay on shore. When one family, the Akiwenzies, started fishing fifteen years ago, we used to have two windy days a week with five calm days a week to fish. Today it is about five windy days a week, with one or two days of calm. 

Dickson Bou is an interdisciplinary artist working out of London, Ontario. His work relies on the connection he makes to the land through traveling on his bicycle. He holds a BFA from Western University and MFA from University of Victoria. He is also part of a noise/sound performance group called "Eights". 

Penelope Cain’s artistic practice centres around land, water and air storytellings from the Anthropocene and Post-Carbon; these occupied, colonised, extracted and transformed lands. Informed by her biological science background, her research-based art practice is located between scientific knowledge and unearthing connective untold narratives in the world. She works across media and knowledge streams, with scientists, datasets, people and residues, drawing on more-than-human entry points to speculate on planetary storytellings and near/future mythologies, as they emerge in end-Holocene times.

Lina Choi is a Montreal-based artist, originally from South Korea, who majored in sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London, UK. In her current artistic research, she explores different bodies of water, focusing on various aural imagery. She seeks immersive and meditative sound projects that encourage audiences to interact with her work through performance, installation, and audio composition.

Shannon Cooney is a Canadian dance artist, choreographer, dance educator, creative facilitator and Craniosacral practitioner based in Berlin since 2006. She has been creating and touring her choreographic work since 1992 which encompasses stage, installations and landscape art. She danced and toured with Toronto’s Dancemakers from 1994-2006 and continues to collaborate with independent choreographers. She created a teaching practice, Dynamic Expansion/Moveable Cinema, which are embodiment approaches that meld her experiences of contemporary dance, movement research, performance, Craniosacral bodywork and Nature. She teaches in universties, art institutions, dance companies, and movement training centres.

Poet and writer Tom Cull is a community activist based in London, Ontario. In 2012 he and Miriam Love co-founded Antler River Rally, a grassroots environmental group which works to protect and restore the region’s Deshkan Ziibiing (Thames River).

Jamie Dronyk is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the intersections of language, texture, and tempo. Her poetry captures the slippery nature of words, echoed in her enamel paintings. Her new video work blends digital and analog, sparking abstract happenings. Rooted in the rhythms of daily life, her art invites viewers to linger in the spaces between this and that. She resides in London, Ontario, Canada.

Melissa General is a Mohawk artist from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. She is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design and received a Masters of Fine Arts degree from York University. She is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, audio, video and installation. Her practice is focused on her home territory of Six Nations and the concepts of memory, language and land. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, Lamont Gallery, Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Harbourfront Centre, Stride Gallery, Gallery 101, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography and has been included in the 2016 Contemporary Native Art Biennial in Montréal. She is a Hnatyshyn Foundation REVEAL – Indigenous Art Award laureate and was named as the 2018 Ontario Arts Council Indigenous Arts Award Emerging Artist Laureate.

Farheen Haq (b. 1977, she/they) is a South Asian Muslim Canadian artist who lives and works on unceded Lkwungen Territory. She was born and raised on Haudenosaunee Territory, in the Niagara region of Ontario, amongst a tight-knit Muslim community. Her multidisciplinary practice, which often employs video, installation and performance, is informed by interiority, relationality, family work, embodiment, ritual and spiritual practice. Haq’s current work focuses on understanding her family history on Turtle Island, caregiving and the body as a continuum of culture and time.

Kaya Joan is a multi-disciplinary Afro-Indigenous (Vincentian, Jamaican, Kanien'kéha:ka, Irish) artist, born, raised in T’karonto, Dish with One Spoon treaty territory. Kaya’s work focuses on exploring relationships and responsibility to place and storytelling. Black and Indigenous futurisms and speculative fiction are themes central 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.

Sharmistha Kar is an artist from India, currently living in Montreal, Quebec. She did her MFA at Western University and is currently a doctoral student at Concordia University. Kar’s education began in West Bengal, India, and she pursued higher education in Fine Arts at the University of Hyderabad. She continued her studio practice and worked as a lecturer in Hyderabad. She was awarded SSHRC 2024, Peter N. Thomson Graduate Scholarship, 2023, Concordia Merit Scholarship 2022, Charles Wallace India Trust Award, 2013; the Graduate Thesis Research Award, 2018 at Western University. She had exhibited in India, the United Kingdom, the USA, Finland, and Canada.

Peter Lebel is a transdisciplinary artist best known for his 16mm projector performances, innovative community-based program design, and the curatorial series Sweet Magic London. His work embodies an attitude of openness and curiosity, often taking a holistic approach that crosses disciplinary boundaries and challenging established concepts. He lives in London, Ontario, Canada.

Claire Liu is a fourth-year student at Western University studying SASAH and English Language & Literature. As a writer and artist, Claire is fascinated by the human condition and the ways in which certain universal experiences—grief, love, the indomitable passage of time—afflict us all. With a strong interest in politics and decolonial justice, Claire aims to explore the world through a nuanced, intersectional, and empathetic lens.

Patrick Mahon is an artist, a writer/curator, and a Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts at Western University, in London, Canada. Mahon’s artwork has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally. Recent solo and group exhibitions include, Patrick Mahon: Messagers’ Forum, Thames Art Gallery, Chatham, On (2020-21); Written on the Earth, McIntosh Gallery, London, ON, curated by Helen Gregory, (group exhibition, 2021); and GardenShip and State, Museum London, London, ON, co-curated by Patrick Mahon and Jeff Thomas, (group exhibition, 2021; a second presentation at Thames Art Gallery, Chatham, 2024). The exhibition was one of two finalists for the Ontario Galleries Exhibition of the Year in 2022. Patrick’s work is included in numerous private, corporate, and museum collections.

Thomas Mahon is a designer and architect based in Brooklyn. He has worked across a wide range of projects and media, from graphic design to urban scale initiatives, with an interest in ecology and environmental equity. Past work in this area includes a wetland revitalization project for the Jordan River with EcoPeace Middle East, and the master plan of a sustainable community on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He received a Bachelor in Architectural Studies from the University of Waterloo, and a Master of Architecture from Yale University, where he studied architectural integration methods for urban farming.

Brady Marks is a computational artist who lives and works in xwməθkwəy’əm, səlilwətaɬ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh territories (Vancouver, BC). She holds a M.Sc. in Interactive Arts from Simon Fraser University and teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Marks is concerned with our technological entanglement and creates media configurations that express a middle way between technological fetishism and dystopian fantasies. She works with technology and against technological thinking. Her specialization exploring sound, light and interaction is informed by a broad understanding of the contemporary issues and technologies driving our computer-mediated world.

Christof Migone‘s research delves into language & voice, bodies & performance, intimacy & complicity, sound & silence, rhythmics & kinetics, translation & referentiality, stillness & imperceptibility, structure & improvisation, play & pathos, pedagogy & unlearning, failure & endurance. Current and ongoing investigations: microphone hitting, book flipping, tongue extruding, record releasing, word hyphenating, para-pedagogical positioning, careless curating, noise making, sequitur following, paper passing, interval counting, rhythm repeating, phone licking, machine fingering, playlist compiling, and silence listening.

Laura Millard has exhibited in artist-run, commercial and public galleries across Canada and internationally. She is a member of Red Head Artists’ Collective in Toronto and is currently an Associate Professor at OCAD University. Millard has participated in several artists’ residencies including Arctic Circle Residencies in Svalbard, KIAC in Dawson City, the Banff Centre, Brucebo Studio, Sweden and Red Gate in Beijing. The recipient of numerous awards including grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Alberta Foundation for the Arts, she has received critical acclaim for her work in publications such as Canadian Art, Border Crossings, C Magazine and Blake Gopnik ‘On Art’.

Valerie Mills-Milde is the author of the novel “After Drowning”, (Inanna Publications) which won the 2017 Silver Ippy (Independent Publisher Books Award) for Contemporary Fiction. Her second novel, “The Land’s Long Reach”, (Inanna Publications, 2018) received a “Very Best” Award from the Miramichi Reader. Valerie’s short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, and a collection of these was a semi-finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award. Her latest novel, “The Current Between”, is set over the days of the Great Storm of 1913 in Huron and Bruce counties and was recently released through AOS Publishing.

Star Nahwegahbo is Anishinaabe, Scottish and English from Aundeck Omni Kaning First Nation, Ontario, Robinson Huron Treaty. Star is a mother, interdisciplinary artist, former social service worker of 12 years, grassroots community organizer and expressive arts facilitator. Star's work explores mental health, the parallels of motherhood and land, the impact of colonial violence on Indigenous families, grief, medicine and the art of braiding ourselves back into our rightful place in creation.

Sheri Osden Nault is an artist, community worker, and Assistant Professor in Studio Art at the University of Western Ontario. Their work spans mediums including sculpture, performance, installation, and more; integrating cultural, social, and experimental creative processes. Through this, they consider embodied connections between human and non-human beings, land-based relationships, and kinship sensibilities as an Indigenous futurist framework. Methodologically, they prioritize tactile ways of knowing and learning from more than human kin. Their research engages anti-colonial, queer, Indigenous feminist, and ecological theory and praxis. They are also a tattooer the Indigenous tattoo revival movement in so-called Canada, and run the annual community project, Gifts for Two-Spirit Youth.

Eli Nolet (they/them) is a queer trans settler-Indigenous artist and arts worker from the occupied territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas (otherwise known as Hamilton, Ontario). Their work explores how technology and affective materiality can function as a vessel for the medium of self and queer potentiality. Across their practice, Nolet is interested in investigating the many layered histories of queer culture and desire, and questioning the binaries of visible/invisible, normative/transgressive.

Racquel Rowe is an interdisciplinary artist from the island of Barbados currently residing in Canada. She’s exhibited widely across Canada and holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo and a BA in History and Studio Art from the University of Guelph. Her practice is continuously influenced by many aspects of history, matrilineal family structures, diasporic communities, and her upbringing in Barbados. Her work includes performance, video, photo, painting, drawing and installation.

Jon Sasaki is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist with a lifelong interest in the Canadian landscape genre, its history and its place in contemporary art practice. His work has been exhibited widely across Canada and is represented in numerous private and public collections. He has completed public art commissions both collaboratively and independently for the City of Mississauga, Sheridan College, the Toronto Transit Commission, Toronto's waterfront and the City of Barrie Ontario. Jon is represented by Clint Roenisch gallery in Toronto.

Lou Sheppard works in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation based practices. His work focuses on climate crisis, loss, queer bodies and ecologies, responding to the material and social histories of sites, bodies and environments. Lou often creates on site, through extended periods of research and responsive processes, his works reflecting the conditions and affects of the places they are made. Lou has created new works across Canada and internationally, recently at The Banff Centre, The Art Gallery of York University and for Kumu Kunstimuuseum in Estonia. He is a settler on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq in Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia.

Ruth Skinner works as an arts organizer, researcher, curator, publisher and educator in London, Ontario. Her research encompasses experimental publishing practices and artists' books; forensics and clairvoyance; histories, theories of representation & spectatorship; digital & media literacy, archival practices & access; artist-run culture in Canada.  She has operated as the art imprint Edna Press since 2017, and is a co-organizer of Support project space alongside Tegan Moore and Liza Eurich. She is the current Director of Forest City Gallery, is part of the Advisory Circle for the newly revitalized Embassy Cultural House, and was a cofounder of Good Sport Gallery.

Currently, Quinn Smallboy’s artistic practice investigates what it means to be a “contemporary Indigenous artist.” Specifically, he questions how customary symbols and icons of Indigenous culture translate into painting, sculpture, and installation.  Smallboy’s drum-related works are a flip on a familiar shape within Indigenous culture. For Quinn, this idea of flipping or reshaping familiar objects provides a new look at Indigenous storytelling.

Jordyn Stewart (she/her) is an artist, educator and arts administrator. She received her MFA from the University of Waterloo and her BA from the University of Toronto, joint program with Sheridan College in Art & Art History. Her work has been programmed in spaces such as Art Museum, Hamilton Artists Inc., Trinity Square Video, Idea Exchange, and Gallery Stratford. She teaches in the Department of Visual Studies at The University of Toronto Mississauga and is living in Onguiaahra/Niagara.

Mark Timmings is a multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer who explores perceptions of place by gathering environmental data from around his home on TEḴTEḴSEN (Saturna Island, BC) and enfolding them into the domains of art and music. Timmings creates bodies of work that operate as conceptual machines driven by algorithmic systems. His works intimate an infinite and vital web of interconnecting natural cycles and human patterns by transforming field observations and aspects of science into aesthetic considerations and contemplative experiences. These challenging and magical transformations resonate far beyond the source material.

Paul Walde is an interdisciplinary artist living in Victoria, Canada on lək̓ʷəŋən territory where he is a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Victoria. Originally trained as a painter, Walde’s music and sound compositions have been a prominent feature in his artwork for 25 years. He is best known for his interdisciplinary performance works staged in the natural environment, and documentation of these events is frequently used as the basis of Walde’s sound and video installations which have been the subject of exhibitions nationally and internationally. 

Michelle Wilson is a queer, neuro-divergent artist and mother currently residing as an uninvited guest in London, Ontario. Her work focuses on artistic collaboration as anti-colonial care work, which means she rejects individualistic conceptions of the artist and instead prioritizes working at the periphery, making space for a diversity of hands to come together through creation. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the University of Guelph and teaches at OCADU and Fanshawe College.