Participating Artists

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