Participating Artists

Blind Stream

A1 Heather Smith

Heather Kai Smith is an artist, animator and illustrator from Calgary, AB, Canada, currently living and working in Vancouver, BC. She is currently completing her Master’s of Applied Arts at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Over the past ten years Smith has actively contributed to her local arts community through artist-run centre directorial work and workshop facilitation, and has regularly exhibited her artwork locally and abroad. Smith has attended residencies in Germany and New Mexico and has participated in workshops, festivals and exhibitions across Canada and the United States. Her practice is rooted in examining sincerity of self through the act of production, the culture of display and the desire to collect and re-determine the function of the historical image. heatherkaismith.com

A2 Maggie Groat

Maggie Groat is an interdisciplinary artist who works in a variety of media including works on paper, sculpture, textiles, site-specific interventions and publications. Her current research surrounds site-responsiveness with regards to shifting territories, alternative and decolonial ways-of-being, methodologies of collage, and the transformation of salvaged materials into utilitarian objects for speculation, vision and action. Groat studied visual art and philosophy at York University before attending The University of Guelph, where she received an MFA degree in 2010. She has taught at the University of Guelph, the University of Toronto and at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where she was the Audain Artist Scholar in Residence in 2014. In 2015 she was nominated for the Sobey Art Award. Recently, her work has been included in exhibitions at Mercer Union, YYZ Artists’s Outlet, Art Gallery of York University (Toronto), Western Front, SFU Audain Gallery (Vancouver) Rodman Hall Art Centre (St. Catharines) and Walter Philips Gallery (Banff). She lives on the southern shore of Lake Ontario on the traditional territory of the Attawandaron and Haudenosaunee nations. www.maggiegroat.com

A3 Andrea Young

Andrea Young is a Canadian performer and composer specializing in experimental voice and live-electronics. She performs an acoustic, amplified, processed and resynthesized voice, as well as a re-purposed sound-controlling voice enabled through feature extraction and data-driven live electronics. Her work integrates her digital voice with analogue and re-purposed electronic media. Her work has been presented by Vancouver New Music, Calgary New Works, Open Space New Music, Galerie Sans Nom and Innovations en Concert. She has performed her work internationally at REDCAT and Automata, Los Angeles, Casino Baumgarten and Espace Senghor for Kyma International Sound Symposiums in Vienna and Brussels, The Emily Harvey Foundation, New York, as well as during ICMC in Athens. Her research has been published in The Leonardo Music Journal Vol.#24, her performance of Agostino di Scipio’s Audible Ecosystemics No.3b was published by La Camera Verde and she is affiliated with several performing ensembles in Canada, USA and Europe including EXO//ENDO, ILK, OFFAL, Espace Vide and Ensemble SISYPHE. Andrea studied at The University of Victoria (2001), The Institute of Sonology, The Hague (2007), and The California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (2014). www.andrea-young.ca

A4 Robert Bean

Robert Bean is an artist, writer and curator living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is a Professor at NSCAD University. Bean has edited books and published articles on the subject of photography, contemporary art and cultural history. He has been an active contributor to the Cineflux Research Group at NSCAD University and the Narratives in Space and Time art and mobility project. Bean is a recipient of grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Canada Council for the Arts. Robert Bean was the Artist in Residence at the Canada Science and Technology Museum, Ottawa, in 2010.

Utilizing public archives and collections, Bean considers the uncertainty that photographs and digital media evoke in relation to experience, technology and language. Specific to this project is the production of interdisciplinary artwork and publications influenced by the culture of ubiquitous networks, psychogeography, mobile computing and obsolescence.

Robert Bean’s work is in public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) Karlsruhe, Germany and the Donovan Collection, University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto, Ontario.

Dialogical Stream

A5 Khan Lee

Khan Lee was born in Seoul, Korea. He studied architecture at Hong-Ik University, before immigrating to Canada to study fine art at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Through sculptural and media practices, his work attempts to exhibit results of experimentation with form and process in order to express inherent relationships between material and immaterial content. He is a founding member of the Vancouver-based artist collective Intermission and is presently a member of the Instant Coffee artist collective. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Lee lives and works in Vancouver, BC. www.republicgallery.com/artists/lee.html

A6 Scott Mallory

Scott Mallory combines video, 3D animation and visual effects, compositing, virtual reality, sound design, music and performance to create experiences exploring the nature of perception. His works involve paradox, metaphysics, the subconscious and psycho-emotional oddity. He focuses on logic’s failure to lead to universal meaning, such as in infinite regress, and looks for alternate modes of perception where meaning can continue to be pursued. His current work examines infinite regress in cosmology (uncaused cause), and applies physics ideas of multiple dimensions to his idea of multiple dimensions of perception.

Recent shows include the TED2016 “Dream” Conference, Smithsonian NMAAHC inaugural exhibit, Museum of Israeli Cinema at Jerusalem Hamshushalayim Festival, and a special edition feature in ACS Magazine. Scott participates in TED Conferences throughout the year, and is Founder and Lead Organizer of TEDxECUAD. He teaches media arts, and has worked in the visual effects for film industry including at Side Effects Software Inc. His media studies include Emily Carr University of Art + Design, London Film Academy, Prague Film School, Vancouver Institute of Media Arts, and University of Maryland College Park. iscottm.com

A7 David Spriggs

The work of David Spriggs lies in the space between 2 and 3 dimensions. In his work he explores the representation and strategies of power, the symbolic meanings of colour, and the thresholds of form and perception. Spriggs uses a technique he pioneered in 1999 using multiple painted layered images in space to create unique 3D ephemeral-like installation artworks on grand scales.

David Spriggs is currently based in Vancouver, BC. He was born in 1978 in Manchester, England, and immigrated to Canada in 1992. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University, Montreal, and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University in Vancouver. He undertook student residencies at Central St. Martin’s College of Art in London, England (1999) and the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany (2006). He has recently exhibited work at the Prague Biennial 5, the Louis Vuitton Gallery in Macau, and at the Sharjah Biennal 9 in the UAE. Spriggs has had numerous solo exhibitions in Canada such as at the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke , Arsenal Montreal, Galerie de l’UQAM and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. His artwork is in many private collections and the permanent collections of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and the Musee national des beaux-arts du Quebec. www.davidspriggs.com

A8 Natalie Purschwitz

Natalie Purschwitz ‘s work seeks out spaces between art and design, performance and daily life. Her visual art practice is materially motivated and driven by curiosities in anthropology/archaeology, human/nature relationships and formal arrangements/morphologies. Clothing is sometimes a starting point for her work. She is interested in how clothing functions as a language and a form of cultural production. Her work incorporates a range of media including sculptural installation, video, performance, photography and works on paper. She has shown her work nationally and internationally at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Japanese Canadian National Museum, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the Prince Takamato Gallery in Tokyo, Japan and most recently Canada House in London, England. Natalie has a parallel practice designing costumes and sets for contemporary dance and theatre. www.nataliepurschwitz.com

A9 Kate Metten

Kate Metten is a Vancouver based artist who is motivated by the desire to re-imagine our perception of craft. While exploring the hybridization of ceramics and painting, Metten investigates the hierarchy of objects, the character of objects, and our phenomenological understanding of them. Rooted in object oriented ontology and phenomenological theory, she is interested in pushing the boundaries between what is real and what is imagined by abstracting historical ceramic forms and inverting function to create objects that break away from their anthropocentric roots. Beginning at the potter’s wheel by throwing simple shapes, Metten creates absurd ceramic forms through a process of darting, adding and subtracting. She collages different elements together to create irrational forms that refer to function but exist as compositions. With regards to painting, Metten approaches the canvas automatically, permitting the material to reveal itself spontaneously as informed by the emergence of the subconscious. Metten is also interested in the way colour changes based on our perception and the objectness of the painting. By playing with the physical and material qualities of oil paint and clay, these histories may come together to occupy the world of both art and craft. www.katemetten.com

A10 Evann Siebens

Evann Siebens makes media with movement. She has exhibited her projects at galleries such as Eyebeam and Centre Pompidou, while her documentaries have been screened at MOMA and on PBS. A former dancer with the National Ballet of Canada and Bonn Ballet, Evann graduated magna cum laude in film production from New York University. She shot dancers in New York for over 15 years including Lucinda Childs, Bill T. Jones and Baryshnikov. Now based in Vancouver, Evann has participated in residencies at the Banff Centre, NIPAD, Dance Theater Workshop, UNIT/PITT and ACME/UK with Keith Doyle, and received funding from the Canada Council, NEA, NYSCA and ITVS. Recent exhibitions include MediaArtLab/Urban Screen, Russia; ISEA2015, Vancouver; dc3 Art Projects, Edmonton; Burrard Arts Foundation, Wil Aballe Art Projects, Thru the Trap Door and Gallery 295, Vancouver. Evann recently won the ID/Identities Istanbul Best Video Prize, and performed ‘Translating the Archive’ at the Western Front, Vancouver. Upcoming projects include a screening at the Lincoln Centre Film Society, New York, as part of Dance on Camera’s Experimental Shorts program. She is represented by Wil Aballe Art Projects. evannsiebens.com

A11 Elizabeth MacKenzie

Elizabeth MacKenzie draws the same thing over and over again. She uses drawing to explore the productive aspects of uncertainty through the use of repetition, interrogations of portraiture and considerations of intersubjective experience. She’s lived and worked in a number of Canadian cities, including Toronto, Saskatoon, Edmonton and currently, Vancouver.

MacKenzie’s drawing installations have been shown across Canada, including exhibitions at the Mount Saint Vincent Art Gallery (Halifax), the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston), the Glenbow Museum (Calgary), the Mackenzie Art Gallery (Regina) and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Her videos have been presented in numerous screenings, festivals and exhibitions across Canada, United States and Europe. She maintains an ongoing commitment to collaborative and community-engaged art practices, critical writing and teaching. www.elizabeth-mackenzie.com

A12 Alana McFarlane

Alana McFarlane, born in Vancouver, Canada, is a visual and sound artist, performer and writer. Her investigation of sensory experience in extreme environments has led her to remote locations around the world. She experiments with high contrast relationships between elements in her work to look at behavioural responses in the body and mind over time, both in the artist while in the process of creation and in the artwork’s reception by others. She often uses binary oppositions as a strategic engagement device for audiences. Through her work, she is interested in eliciting people’s innate knowledge towards something like a truthful experience.

She currently holds a BA, Philosophy from the University of British Columbia, and is completing a BFA, Film, Video + Integrated Media at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She trained extensively in Meisner technique, participated in the Syntonics and Embodied Practice Masterclass, and is an alumni of Canada’s National Voice Intensive. alanamcfarlane.com

A13 Laura Piasta

Laura Piasta is a Vancouver-based artist whose practice explores the agency of objects through a conceptually driven exploration of materials. Her work often approaches the subject of landscape through alternative applications where natural occurring phenomena and material become subjects and or participants in the production and reading of the work. Her practice is not bound to one medium or discipline, blurring the boundaries between craft, concept, sound and vision. www.laurapiasta.com

A14 Chris Jones

Chris’s research interests extend from the histories of the image as an aesthetic and political discourse. He writes and lectures on the concept of methodology in art as a step toward a non-disciplinary epistemology that recognizes art knowledge. Chris’s art practice is rooted in photography. Addressing the medium as a primary form of technical image-making, he explores its inherent questions about time and space by composing performative lectures that guide audiences through a sequence of “deep-res” pictures. Vignettes of video, music, and spoken word are combined in a narrative form that appeals to poem, essay, and film. His work has been exhibited internationally. www.connect.ecuad.ca/people/profile/14315

A15 Giorgio Magnanensi

Described by acclaimed composer Franco Donatoni as “a composer, musician and conductor of great talent and one of the most interesting personalities of the Italian generation”, Giorgio Magnanensi (b. 1960) has gained an international reputation winning numerous composition awards and serving as conductor for a number of esteemed Canadian and international new music ensembles. He taught composition in Italy (1984–1999), at the School of Music of the University of British Columbia (2000–09) and currently he is lecturer the School of Music of the Vancouver Community College. Besides his renowned work as artistic director of Vancouver New Music where he has been programming and producing innovative music events, concert series, and festivals fostering a wide and experimental curatorial approach, he has become “an increasingly influential figure in Vancouver’s developing classical/jazz crossover culture” (Alex Varty). From 2005 he has been regularly invited as Faculty member at the Music & Sound Department of the Banff Centre, and in 2009 he was the recipient of the prestigious Paul D. Fleck Fellowship. In 2007 he founded the LABORATORIO Arts Society to actively engage in creative work within and for the communities of the Sunshine Coast where he resides with his family. giorgiomagnanensi.com

A16 Marina Roy

Marina Roy is a Vancouver-based artist working across a variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, animation, video, and writing. Roy investigates the intersection between materials, form and meaning in her artworks through research into materiality, ecology, post-humanism, and psychoanalysis. She is interested in creating new visual languages in which human, animal, plant, mineral and microbial life coalesce into new formations, challenging the way industrialized countries think about the natural world we inhabit. In 2016 she completed an ambitious mural-fountain installation for Offsite (a temporary public art space), which broached ecological issues through using tar, bitumen, and plastics (paint).

Writing is an important element of Roy’s practice, and in 2001 she published Sign after the X (Artspeak/Arsenal Pulp), a book that revolves around the letter X and its multiple meanings in Western culture. She recently completed a new book, Queuejumping, which investigates the origins of sovereignty, human-animal distinction and the letter Q.

Roy has participated in exhibitions across Canada, as well as in Europe, India, and the US. She is Associate Professor of visual arts in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. In 2010 she was recipient of the VIVA Award. www.marinaroy.ca

A17 Mimi Gellman

Mimi Gellman is an Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi (Ojibway-Jewish Métis) visual artist and educator with a multi-streamed practice in architectural glass and conceptual installation. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Culture and Community at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada and is completing her research praxis PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University on the metaphysics of Indigenous mapping. Mimi’s interdisciplinary work explores her interests in phenomenology and technologies of intuition through an embodied practice of walking and mapping and through works and installations that point to the existence of the animacy and agency of objects. The cross-cultural dialogue exemplified in her work suggests a pre-existing connection to the other-than-human worlds. It is her cosmological orientation, in other words, her Ojibwe/Métis worldview and the language that expresses it that predisposes her to be open to the reality of the spirit and life of objects and their ability to communicate across diverse thresholds. She continues to exhibit internationally, with recent exhibitions in France, Germany and Tokyo and was included in the seminal exhibition, “On line” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2011. Her work can be found in the collections of Price-Waterhouse, Kraft/General Foods Corporation, the Toronto Transit Commission and Rogers Stadium, among others.

A18 Kat Wadel

Kathryn Wadel is an emerging artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She is currently pursuing her BFA degree at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, majoring in Visual Arts with a minor in Social Practice and Community Engagement. Kathryn works within an interdisciplinary mixed media practice (combining forms of painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, and sound) to explore the rhizomatic relationships between art, science and social-engagement. In her current studio practice, Kathryn is drawing from her lived experiences and interest in physics-philosophy to create mixed-media self-portraits: Eurasian aEsTHetICS. In this series, she is bringing visibility to the entanglements between the observable, social/cultural constructs and embodied multiplicity of her bi-cultural identity and implications of situational realities. Exhibiting in 2017, Kathryn is the lead curator and participating artist in the group exhibition S.P.A.C.E. (Spatial Perception And Creative Entropy); which investigates parallels between scientific and artistic explorations to challenge the material constructs of reality. In her pedagogical practice at the DeSerres Studio, Kathryn works as the studio coordinator and instructor. She facilitates and encourages art-making as a creative process through socially-engaged material play. kwadel.wixsite.com/kathrynwadel

A19 Rebecca Ramsey

Born in Vernon B.C, Rebecca Ramsey currently resides in Vancouver where she received her BFA from Emily Carr University. She has spent time living abroad in an artist warehouse in London, UK, and in Amsterdam where she attended Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Ramsey has written for Maclean’s Magazine and exhibited work in shows such as Artists in the Garden (Prince George), Door Loop (Gerrit Rietveld) and Home: The Exchange Show (ECUAD).
 Her practice involves installations which bring together clay, drawing, animation and sound. These assemblages explore the dimensionality of the line in regards to the process of drawing, coil-building and the unfolding of film. Her work often reflects on experiences in the studio, as well as natural and evolutionary cycles and their relationship to notions of becoming and time. rebeccaramseyart.tumblr.com

A20 Garvin Chinnia

Garvin Chinnia is a painter working most of the year in Vancouver where he attends Emily Carr University, working out of Edmonton for the summers. A veteran of the Whyte Avenue Art Walk, an event that puts Edmonton artists in the eyes of the community, he has also done mural work for that city’s South East Community League Association, and has shown at the Lotus Gallery.

His work is a healthy mix of figuration and abstract, both languages sharing the same surface. His interests lie in the natural world, and his subjects reflect this; birds, fish, lizards, even Pleistocene megafauna have been known to grace the walls of his studio. The human figure is no stranger here as well. Often, the subjects reside in an abstract space that ranges from dour to chaotic. During his summer months in Edmonton, he changes gear a bit and focusses on found object sculpture. These are often gessoed footwear that are then walked and located in out of the way places. The intent is to have them stumbled upon, in order to incite that ageless question: Why? To this date, they have all been taken from their secret spots, and the artist hopes they are being worn. www.facebook.com/Art-by-Garv

Tandem Stream

A21 Genevieve Robertson

Genevieve Robertson’s drawing-based interdisciplinary practice investigates the recuperative ecologies that are available through long-term place-based explorations. Her drawings map a visceral engagement with place and often occupy the edge: the interstice between micro and macro, plant and animal, biology and geology, territory and weather pattern. Presently, she is interested in rivers as both ecologic and economic thoroughfares, and forces with agency beyond their role as resources. Through research on the Fraser and Columbia, she has engaged with the complexities that are at stake when relating to land and water in the age of the Anthropocene and the context of settler-colonialism. Her work is informed by a personal and intergenerational history of resource labor in remote forestry camps on the West Coast of British Columbia.

Genevieve holds an MAA from Emily Carr University, a BFA from NSCAD University, and is presently the recipient of a BC Arts Council mentorship grant framed by the source region of the Fraser, Athabasca, Peace and Columbia rivers. Recent exhibitions include The New Gallery (Calgary), Dc3 Projects (Edmonton), Agent C Projects (Surrey), James May Gallery (Wisconsin) and Milk Glass Co. (Toronto). Genevieve is a sessional instructor at Emily Carr University. www.genevieverobertson.com

A22 Jeff Derksen

Jeff Derksen is a cultural critic and a poet who works at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His research resides at the intersection of geography, cultural studies and cultural practices with a focus on neoliberalism, urbanism, and aesthetics. His critical books include After Euphoria, Annihilated Time: Poetry and other Politics, and How High Is the City, How Deep Is Our Love. With the artists Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, he works in the research collective Urban Subjects on curatorial and editing projects: their bookworks include Autogestion, or Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade, Momentarily: Learning from Mega-events, and most recently The Militant Image Reader from Camera Austria Editions. HIs poetry books include The Vestiges, Transnational Muscle Cars, Dwell, Until, and Down Time. Derksen was a research fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics (CUNY Graduate Center) where he collaborated with the late geographer Neil Smith. urbansubjects.org

A23 Vanessa Kwan

Vanessa Kwan is a Vancouver-based artist, writer and curator. Her work often involves the production of work in public space, and is often collaborative, site-specific and interdisciplinary. Recent projects include a large-scale permanent public artwork called Geyser for Hillcrest Park (with Erica Stocking), Sad Sack, a series of public events and collaborations on the subject of melancholy, and This Creeping Root, a moonlight garden. She is a founding member of the performance collective Norma, who were honoured with a City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Public Art in 2011. She has received numerous grants from local and national arts councils, and was selected for the Canada Council’s Asia Pacific Visual Arts Delegation in 2014. As performance curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, she produced FUSE, the gallery’s premiere performance event, from 2008 – 14. She currently works as Curator of Community Engagement with grunt gallery, where she produces socially-engaged work and special projects, and as Producer/ Curator with Other Sights for Artists Projects, an organization that commissions temporary artworks for the public realm. She writes and publishes regularly on art and visual culture and is currently at work on an artist book about sleeplessness, a telegraph station and twins. vanessakwan.com

A24 Etienne Zack

Born in Montreal in 1976, Etienne Zack lives and works in Point Roberts, WA and Los Angeles, CA. Since the early 2000s, his work has been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Canada), Bergen Kunsthall (Norway), Esker Foundation (Canada) and Surrey Art Gallery (Canada). Selected group exhibition of Zack’s work include: It Is What It Is (National Gallery of Canada, Canada); the Québec Triennial (Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Canada); Painted Past: A History of Canadian Painting from the Collection (Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada) Oh Canada (Mass MoCA, USA), Up the Walls; (The Model Museum, Ireland) and East International 2004 (Norwich, UK).

Etienne Zack’s paintings and collages connect and explore multiple facets, topics and motifs relating to institutional power, violence, technology, art and how language is intrinsic to enforcing these mechanisms. The motifs collected in Zack’s paintings connect multiple symbolic significances and consider the mutability of information — and how material is rendered to manufacture meaning. His interest is in the relationship between the notion of recording an idea as the process of accumulation, omission, and revision of intents, and the process and methodologies of thinking through painting itself. etiennezack.com

A25 Olivia de Fleuriot

Olivia de Fleuriot is an emerging artist and currently in the Master of Applied Arts program at Emily Carr University. Olivia’s material semiotic practice emerged in response to her fascination with the body and human perception. Olivia seeks to inform the complex interrelations of one’s bodily experience in relation to others, and hopes through this process to probe a deeper investigation of verbal and nonverbal interactions.

Originally from Durban, South Africa, Olivia de Fleuriot now lives and works in Vancouver, BC. Olivia has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, alternative spaces and multiple publications.

In 2014, Olivia exhibited in four group shows: Taster at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC; In Fieri: In Becoming, at the Jansen Arts Centre in WA, USA; Drain at The Reach Gallery Museum in Abbotsford, BC; and Menagerie at the Langley Centennial Museum in Fort Langley, BC. In 2015, Olivia’s series Cityscapes exhibited as a solo show at the Langley Centennial Museum and as a group show at TWU’s President’s Gallery, and as a two person show as part of Emerge at the Reach Gallery Museum. In 2016, Olivia donated work to The Reach Gallery Museum for the After Dark: Silent Auction event. In 2017, Olivia will be showing at the Concourse Gallery at Emily Carr University as part of the Master of Applied Arts’ interim thesis exhibition. oliviadefleuriot.com

A26 Diana Hanitzch

Diana’s work is concerned with psychological and physical phenomenon and explorations that help me navigate my world. By witnessing, exploring and provoking mental, physical, social and physiological activities she finds tools and strategies for survival. To a large extend Diana draw from her immediate experience as a human being and the different circumstances she find myself in. How can we establish active agency within ourselves and in our interactions with others and pursue what we need and what we want to see as an everyday practice? What are the social, psychological and systemic restrictions in establishing this agency? Her favourite materials at the moment are metal, humans and paint. She use the materials to visualize and abstract mental states and to find out more about the patterns of different situations we find ourselves in. Diana grew up in Eastern Germany and is currently based in Vancouver, Canada. www.dianahanitzsch.com