Maria Simmons
Maria Simmons is a hybrid artist from Hamilton, ON. She investigates potentialized environments through the creation of multidisciplinary sculpture and installation. Her work embraces contamination as an act of collaboration. She holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo and a BFA from McMaster University. She has recently exhibited at Xpace, The Plumb, Platform, Ed Video Media Art Centre, and the Hamilton Artist Inc.
Our conversation was recorded in Ohròn:wakon, or so-called Hamilton, Ontario, within Treaty 3 territory, on the land of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe.
Welcome to this bonus episode of the podcast. Today’s episode features an ambient recording of Maria’s 2021 installation of her work Rat Plastic Wood. Enjoy!
Rebecca Payne
Rebecca Payne is a queer rural artist who is trained in painting, drawing and printmaking. They have an appreciation for banal and liminal spaces and practice sitting with fleeting moments that—in one year, one day, one minute—will pass and may never happen again the same way. Their current work explores transitional themes of experiencing loneliness, awkwardness, and the atmospheres within banal spaces.
Maya Ben David
Maya Ben David (MBD) is a Toronto-based Jewish-Iranian artist. Working in video, installation and performance, she creates worlds and characters that aid her ongoing exploration of anthropomorphism, cosplay and performative personas.
Daura Campos
Daura Campos is a Latinx, self-taught, lens-based artist and curator based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Her photographic practice challenges traditional image-making processes, revealing itself as more than a meta-commentary with a subtext that prompts broader conversations on the implications of existing in a dissident body.
Her What the Luck series was awarded by Adolescent and exhibited in Experimental Photo Festival, Visual Space, Make Room and has been displayed on billboards in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Toronto. Earlier works have been published globally on Curated by Girls, Container Love, The Soon Project, and others.
Xiao Han
Xiao Han is an artist and curator based in Wuhan and Saskatoon. Using photography, Han’s research-creation projects investigate diaspora, identity, gender issues and cross-cultural interpretation. As an independent curator, Han has curated numerous exhibitions collectively (via Kyuubi Culture - Artist Collective) with artists and art institutions in Canada and China. Han’s Han's public photography "Yee Clun '' was permanently installed, in the summer of 2017, in Regina Arts Park. This project reflects the lost story of immigrant and restaurant owner Yee Clun in Regina in 1924 when he challenged the racist "Saskatchewan's White Women's Labour Law ''.
Jocelyne Junker
Jocelyne Junker is a Métis artist born in Saskatchewan. Her practice explores how photography and painting can become entangled in performative gestures that affect the formulation of self-identity. Through photography, she questions representation and engages with constructions of identity in the public sphere by creating a visual language that co-opts media and challenges its original context. She received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, in 2018. She’s currently on the board of Access Gallery and resides in the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəyəm (Musqueam), Sḵwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil- Waututh) Nations.
Adrien Crossman
Adrienne Crossman is a queer and non-binary white settler artist, educator and curator currently residing on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples in Hamilton, Ontario. Crossman holds an MFA in Visual Art from the University of Windsor (2018), and a BFA in Integrated Media from OCAD University (2012). Their practice explores the affective qualities of queerness, and they are interested in the liminality between the digital and the physical, considering how the terms trans* and non-binary apply to media as well as gender. Crossman is a co-founder and co-runs the online arts publication off centre and is an Assistant Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University.
Lucia Wallace
Lucia Wallace is a queer artist/writer from Toronto, Ontario and is a recent graduate of OCAD University’s CADN program. With a BFA in Drawing & Painting (2018), her studio and research practices span textiles, contemporary ceramics, creative writing, and painting. Focusing on tactility and materiality, she strives to intertwine her making and writing processes.
Maddie Lychek
Madeleine Lychek is a queer Filipino-Canadian performance and video artist. She uses social media as a digital playground to engage with conversations surrounding power and play, exploring how a body and its consumption can be used as a radical act of self-discovery.
Natalie King
Natalie King is a queer interdisciplinary Anishinaabe artist, facilitator and member of Timiskaming First Nation. King's arts practice ranges from video, painting, sculpture and installation as well as community engagement, curation and arts administration. King is currently a Programming Coordinator at Xpace Cultural Centre in Tkaronto.
Often involving portrayals of queer femmes, King’s works are about embracing the ambiguity and multiplicities of identity within the Indigenous queer femme experience. King's practice operates from a firmly critical,anti-colonial, non-oppressive, and future-bound perspective, reclaiming the realities of lived lives through frameworks of desire and survivance.
Claudia Slogar Rick
Claudia Slogar Rick is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto. They graduated from the University of Guelph in 2017, majoring in Studio Art. Their practice involves, drawing, sculpture, performance and the internet using the aesthetics of necessity and efficiency. Rick’s work is unapologetically low-brow, accessible, and community-based.
Emily Reimer
Emily Reimer is an interdisciplinary artist based in Guelph, Ontario. Her work uses performance, drawing, and video to think about her relationships to herself and the people around her, often working in close collaboration with family members.
B Wijshijer
B Wijshijer is a research-based artist working within digital media and video installation. Wijshijer utilizes online trends and subcultures to deconstruct mediated intimacies and personas on digital platforms. Informed by acceleration aesthetics, their work plays with excess and artifice to interrogate the ways in which late capitalism affects our digital lives. Wijshijer received their BFA in Printmaking from OCAD University in 2017 and an MFA from the University of Waterloo in 2020.
Chantal Hassard
Chantal Hassard is an artist and filmmaker interrogating the relationship between an artwork, the artist and its viewer which she views in parallel with law, policy and the body politic and often makes participatory paintings that embody this relationship.
She graduated from the University of Toronto in Political Science and Visual Studies and is currently wrapping up a MA degree in Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis on the cultural production of autonomous space in Amsterdam.
Her current body of work 'A(d)Just (the) City' performs the experimental role of artistic research by delivering a translation and analysis of the collective cultural production carried out by a decentralised assemblage of individual artists and activists working within the squatting scene and other autonomous spaces around Amsterdam. The ongoing self-documentation through visual, musical, poetic and other forms of cultural production emerging from autonomous cultural space is interpreted as part of a collaborative activistic and artistic urban process which has struggled to produce alternative/autonomous/free spaces as a force of resistance against capitalist logic and gentrification of Amsterdam as a hyper touristic city.
Suritah Wignall
Podcast Takeover by Honore
Emerging Caribbean Canadian artist Suritah Teresa Wignall is a passionate communicator; Suritah’s paintings are filled with exuberance, color and light. Her pieces pay homage to her African roots.
EA Douglas
EA Douglas is a writer and artist currently living in Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her work explores the intersection of creativity and mental health.
Jonah Strub
Jonah Strub is a painter, sculptor, performance artist, and ceramicist based out of Toronto. He graduated from the University of Guelph in 2019, with a double major in Studio Art and Psychology. Jonah finished off his degree at the University of the Arts (HFK) in Bremen. Since experimenting with ceramics in Germany, Jonah’s practice has pivoted from painting to include sculptural forms. One of his more recent works being a larger than life bust titled “Mz. Velveeta Creamcheese” made of paper maché and acrylic paint adorned with a feather boa.
Sonali Menezes
Sonali Menezes is an interdisciplinary artist based in Hamilton, ON. She holds an Honours BA in Studio Art from the University of Guelph and is the youngest of triplets. Sonali’s work uses performance, video, zines, sculpture, printmaking, poetry and sometimes-exorbitant amounts of Manwich tomato sauce. Her work reflects her resistance to the histories of colonialism and racialization within which she is interwoven.
Rachel Rozanski
Rachel Rozanski is an emerging Canadian visual artist. She is an MFA candidate studying at Ryerson University in the final stages of her degree. Her practice has evolved to include contact images and video documenting melting permafrost in the North of Canada. Rachel and her partner and cinematographer Parham, drove across the Yukon documenting the changing landscape of Canada’s north.