Broad Topics
Saturday April 28, 2018 – Friday June 7, 2019
LOMAA’s Resounding Peripheries: Sound Art Across Regional Ontario
re-envisions London’s recent designation as a UNESCO city of music. Echoing this desire to look beyond conventional sites of cultural production, this series explores alternative sonic possibilities from our regional area as a well as others within the province. Serving as a celebration of practices hard-hit by the global pandemic, Resounding Peripheries provides an exciting opportunity for practitioners to reconnect with audiences and present new works that foreground the vitality of off-centre praxis.
Championing innovative and diverse approaches to contemporary sound art, LOMAA has invited five artists whose cutting-edge practices engage the nexus of sound art and performance, expanded sonic interactivity, sound aesthetics, and embodied listening. Through a series of live performances, in-person installations, and hybrid online presentations the works collectively underscore the significance of relationality. Overall, Resounding Peripheries resonates that the contributions of regional Ontario media practitioners are crucial in paving the future of sonic arts within Canada.
Maya Ben David (MBD) is a Toronto based video performance Jewish-Iranian Anthro Plane. Ben David creates worlds and characters that explore concepts such as anthropomorphism, cosplay and performative personas. Ben David’s characters origin stories are established via video performance and are performed on a ongoing basis through her online presence. Her characters inhabit alternate universes but also interact with each other and already established nostalgic universes such as Pokemon and Spider-Man. In addition to this, Ben David is also a character know as “MBD” who feuds with the many manifestations of herself and the art world. Most infamously, MBD is known for inciting online feuds with other artists such as Jon Rafman and Ajay Kurian.
Nathalie Bujold joined the Oeil de Poisson artist center in 1985. After a few years with the collective, she began her studies in fine arts. In 1992, she completed a Bachelor’s degree at Université Laval and won the Prix René-Richard. Her work on moving images began in 1989 with a few short super 8 films including Simple, rapide et délicieux and Le Sheik Brun acquired by the Cinémathèque de l’Université Laval. Some fifteen videos followed, including Les trains où vont les choses which earned her the Prix à la création artistique du CALQ in 2008 and Emporium which was included as part of the prestigious Magnetic North: Canadian Experimental Video. Les trains où vont les choses was selected by three composers at the 2010 NEM Forum, generating three pieces of original music for the work, including a composition by Taylor Brook. Bujold further collaborated with Brook to create Musique de chambre (noire) (with improvisations by The Bozzini Quartet) which was presented at La Cinémathèque québécoise for the Akousma Festival in 2015. This collaboration further resulted in a three-channel video installation called Études vidéographiques pour instruments à cordes presented for the FIFA at La Cinémathèque québécoise, the Festival International de musique de Victoriaville (FIMAV) and at l’Oeil de Poisson. In 2016, she completed her master’s degree in « arts visuels et médiatiques from l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and the same year, Vidéochroniques (Marseille) presented Ménage/montage, a solo exhibition of interdisciplinary work curated by Édouard Monnet.
Based out of Lethbridge and Edmonton, Alberta, Cindy Baker’s practice is informed by a fierce commitment to ethical community engagement and critical social inquiry, drawing from queer, gender, race, disability, fat, and art theories. Baker’s research-based practice moves fluently between the arts, humanities, and social sciences, considering context her primary medium. She works with diverse materials and techniques from the low-craft to digital fabrication and performance, emphasizing the theoretical, conceptual and ephemeral aspects of her work. Baker’s practice draws from two decades of experience in community-based art, as well as extensive volunteer work in art and queer communities; she has worked in non-profits throughout Western Canada, including AKA Gallery (Saskatoon).
Baker holds an MFA from the University of Lethbridge where she received a SSHRC grant for her research in performance and the body. She has exhibited and performed across Canada from Open Space in Victoria, BC to Eastern Edge in St. John’s, NF, and internationally in cities including Los Angeles, CA, Minneapolis, MN, Richmond, VA, and Kuopio, Finland. Baker is represented by Dc3 Projects in Edmonton.
Eeva Siivonen’s moving image practice engages with strategies of documentary, essay, and found footage film practices and employs these strategies to construct immersive moving image installations and single-channel works. Her practice describes subjective experience in ways that resist separation between self and other, interior and exterior, human and nonhuman, and living and nonliving. The ethos of her practice is to create space for empathy by embracing the impossibility of gaining knowledge of ourselves and others, and our place in the world.
Her work has been shown internationally at various film festivals and gallery exhibitions. Recent screenings include San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads Festival, DOBRA International Festival of Experimental Cinema in Rio de Janeiro, and Transient Visions Festival of Moving Image in Johnson City, NY. She has also received multiple international artist residency fellowships, including Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico, Goetemann Artist Residency in Gloucester Massachusetts, Terra Foundation in Giverny, France, and Munson Arts Institute in Utica, NY. She currently resides in London, Ontario.
Patrice James holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Film Studies from Carleton University. Ms. James is presently the Executive Director of the Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa Inc. (IFCO). She has extensive training in several aspects of film, television and video production, and is herself a practicing filmmaker with nine film credits and two digital credits to date. Ms. James has contributed to the cultural life of Ottawa for over 18 years as a strong advocate for the media arts both locally and at the national level. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Independent Media Arts Alliance (IMAA) and the Media Arts Network of Ontario/Réseau des arts médiatiques de l’Ontario (MANO/RAMO); she has been a past juror for the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Ottawa Arts Council. Patrice James was one of three finalists in 2012 vying to receive Ottawa’s top annual arts prize; the Victor Tolgesy Award, which is given annually to an individual who has “contributed substantially” to culture in Ottawa. Ms. James continues to live and work in Ottawa.
Curated by Lauren Fournier & Daniella Sanader
An Intuitive List
Works by Kim Kielhofner, Calla Durose-Moya, Alize Zorlutuna, Zinnia Naqvi, Annie MacDonell, Nicole Kelly Westman and Christine Negus
2013-2017
Lauren Fournier is a writer, curator, and artist from Treaty 4 lands (Regina) who is currently based in Toronto. She holds a SSHRC-funded PhD in English literature from York University where she wrote a multidisciplinary history of “autotheory” as a post-1960s mode of feminist practice across media. She is currently the editorial resident at Canadian Art. Her research takes the form of publications, exhibitions, artists’ books, video, installations, and collaboration. www.laurenfournier.net
Daniella Sanader is a writer and reader living in Toronto, Ontario. She holds a SSHRC-funded MA in Art History and Gender and Feminist Studies from McGill University. Her reviews, essays, speculations, and oblique texts have been commissioned by a variety of publications, galleries, and artist-run spaces across Canada. She currently works as the Program and Publications Coordinator at Gallery TPW, an artist-run centre in Toronto. desanader.com
Calla Durose-Moya is an emerging video artist practicing in performance and hybrid media and currently living and working in Toronto, Ontario. Through using “obsolete” mediums such as Hi8 and MiniDV, she explores the (im)possibilities of her identity, and the understanding that being queer, racialized, disabled, and a woman systematically impacts the way she is seen or ‘read’. Her work is heavily influenced by early Canadian video art, finding inspiration through the aspects of personal identity and underlying political narrative found in much of this work. By predominantly using scripts in her work, she is interested in the interplay between text, language, and its foundations in personal vs. political dichotomies. Calla holds a BA in Cultural Studies from Trent University. Her work has been shown worldwide, including the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany; Artspace, Peterborough; and Vtape, Toronto. She was also nominated for the Peterborough Arts Awards’ Emerging Artist in 2017.
Kim Kielhofner is an artist living and working in Montreal. She works in video, drawing, and collage. Her work is marked by an interest in layered narrative, cinema, and literature. She holds a Master’s of Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (London, UK) and a Bachelor degree from Concordia University (Montreal, QC). Her work has been shown in numerous international festivals and she has participated in residencies in Vienna, Beijing, Wales, Gatineau, and Hamburg. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Vox, centre d’art contemporain (Montreal, 2015), Sporobole (Sherbrooke, 2017), LUX (London, 2017), and Dazibao (Montreal, 2017). She won the Hnatyshyn Foundation Charles Patcher Prize (for emerging artists) in 2013.
Annie MacDonell is a visual artist working across several mediums. Her practice begins from photography and the photographic impulse to frame and capture, but her output includes film, installation, sculpture, performance and writing. Her work questions the function and circulation of images in the 21st century. She received a BFA from Ryerson University in 2000, followed by graduate studies at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains, in France. Recent performances have been presented at Nuit Blanche Toronto, le Centre Pompidou and the Toronto International Film Festival. Recent solo shows have been held at the AGO, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Mulherin New York, and Mercer Union Gallery. She has participated in group exhibitions at la Bibliothèque National in Paris, The Power Plant, MOCA Cleveland, and the Daegu Photo Biennale. In 2012 she was short-listed for the AGO AMIA prize for photography, and she has been long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2012, 2015 and 2016. She is a founding member of EMILIA-AMALIA, a feminist research and writing group. She teaches at Ryerson University and lives in Toronto with her family.
Zinnia Naqvi is a visual artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto and Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her work uses a combination of photography, video, writings, archival footage and installation. Naqvi’s practice questions the relationship between authenticity and narrative while dealing with larger themes of post-colonialism, cultural translation, language, and gender. Her works often invite the viewer to question her process and working methods. Naqvi’s works have been shown across Canada and internationally. She recently received an honorable mention at the 2017 Karachi Biennale in Pakistan and was an Artist in Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario as part of EMILIA-AMALIA Working Group. She has a BFA in Photography Studies from Ryerson University and is currently an MFA Candidate in Studio Arts at Concordia University.
Christine Negus is a multidisciplinary artist and writer who received the National Film Board of Canada’s Best Emerging Canadian Video/Filmmaker award through Images Festival in 2008. Negus obtained her MFA in 2010 from Northwestern University in Chicago, IL and her BFA in 2008 from Western University in London, ON. Some of her notable exhibitions and screenings include: the8fest, CROSSROADS, Queer City Cinema, MIX NYC, Artists’ Television Access, Dunlop Gallery, AKA artist-run, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, Swedish Film Institute, Art Gallery of York University, Montreal Underground Film Festival, Microscope Gallery, and Kasseler Dokfest. She has had solo exhibitions at Forest City Gallery, Gallery TPW, gallerywest, Julius Caesar, The Pitch Project, and Modern Fuel. Negus has upcoming solo and group exhibitions at Tropical Contemporary, Land Line Chicago, Museum London, YYZ, and a program touring through Southeast Asia in Spring 2019. Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications, including The Globe and Mail and Modern Painters and an interview on Negus’ video practice appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of BlackFlash Magazine.
Nicole Kelly Westman is a visual artist of Métis and Icelandic descent. She grew up in a supportive home with strong-willed parents—her mother, a considerate woman with inventive creativity, and her father, an anonymous feminist. Her work culls from these formative years for insight and inspiration. Westman holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and is currently based in the parkland region of Alberta. Her writing has been published in Inuit Art Quarterly, C Magazine and Luma Quarterly.
Alize Zorlutuna is an artist, poet, experimental cook, curator, intersectional feminist, committed pedagogue, and life-long learner. Working across disciplines, she investigates issues concerning identity and power, settler-colonial relationships to land, culture and colonial violence, as well as intimacy with the non-human, and technology. Her practice is informed by a critical engagement with historical narratives and their present-day impacts. Drawing on archival, as well as practice-based research, the body and its sensorial capacities are central to her approach. She has presented her work in galleries and in artist-run centers across Turtle Island, including: Plug In ICA, Doris McCarthy Gallery, InterAccess, VIVO Media Arts Centre, Satellite Gallery, Audain Art Museum, Access Gallery, and Toronto Free Gallery, as well as internationally at The New School: Parsons (NY), Mind Art core (Chicago) and Club Cultural Matienzo (Argentina). She received her MFA from Simon Fraser University and her BFA from OCAD University. Alize has curated a number of exhibitions, most notably Restless Precinct (2014), a site-specific exhibition at Guildwood Park in Scarborough, ON in collaboration with Orev Katz, a.k.a. Radiodress. Her curatorial approach seeks to highlight voices and perspectives that storytell edges, in-betweens, and possible futures. She has been a sessional instructor at OCAD University since 2015 where she teaches a variety of courses in both the Sculpture/Installation and Integrated Media departments. She is currently the Curator in Residence at Humber Galleries.
Curated by Aliya Pabani
Live Listen: Broad Domain
Works by Phoebe Wang, Veronica Simmonds and Katie McKay, Angela Shackel,
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Hildegard Westerkamp
1989-2018
Aliya Pabani is a Toronto-based artist and podcaster. Most recently, she was host/producer of CANADALAND’s arts and culture podcast The Imposter which was featured as one of the best podcasts of 2017 by CBC’s Podcast Playlist. Ben Cannon of the AV Club called it “…one of the finest, most compulsively listenable shows in the world of podcasts today.”
Aliya’s art practice deploys methods from design ethnography, tactical media and comedy to examine the ideological frameworks underpinning public systems and infrastructure. She performed with Public Recordings in CAPITALIST DUETS, and her work Corrections with Onyeka Igwe was exhibited as part of the 2018 Images Festival.
Located in John Labatt Visual Arts Centre at Western University, the Artlab Gallery is a vital part of the Department of Visual Arts. The Gallery is focused on projects that involve and respond to social and cultural issues, primarily supporting the research and practice of students and faculty. Each year approximately 14 projects and events are presented, exploring conceptual and experimental production that includes a wide range of mediums.
Katie McKay, co-founder of Part & Parcel, is a photographer, filmmaker and film producer. Her projects focus on the relationships people have with their place, often at the intersection of urban and natural worlds. This has manifested in various iterations of intermedia documentary, cross-continental film experiments, and environmental portraiture. She currently works at the award-winning documentary production company EyeSteelFilm in Montreal.
Angela Shackel is an artist and audio producer who lives and works in Toronto, ON. Shackel creates audio plays, audio walks, sound installations, and podcasts. She has produced audio works for arts organizations, museums, private galleries, arts publications, government divisions, universities, and not-for-profits. Many of her audio projects have a literary focus and she has worked with such writers as Anne Carson, Anne Michaels, and Michael Ondaatje, among others. Her podcast and radio productions have aired on Canadaland’s The Imposter, Monocle Radio, NTS radio, and KCRW’s The Organist. Beyond audio production, Shackel also has a visual arts practice as part of the collective CCC. Their audio and installation-based works have been shown across Canada and in the UK.
Veronica Simmonds is an award-winning radio/podcast producer and audio artist based in Toronto. She works at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where she's produced the critically acclaimed podcasts Sleepover, Alone: A Love Story, and Tai Asks Why. Described by THIS Magazine as a “Sonic Sorceress,” her documentaries have aired on CBC, ABC and BBC. Her work has been featured internationally at: Hearsay International Audio Festival, Third Coast International Radio Festival, Bivouac Radiophonique, and Megapolis Audio Art Festival as well as in a weather observatory in France, a hair dryer in Pittsburgh, and a grain silo in Norway. She is also the creator of Braidio, a show where she braided hair live on air.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg artist, musician, poet and writer, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Her work breaks open the boundaries between story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity.
Phoebe Wang is a multidisciplinary artist and works primarily in sculpture, installation, and sound. She has exhibited and curated work internationally at the Hearsay International Audio Festival, Tape Fest, and galleries such as Little Berlin, Grizzly Grizzly, and the Barbican Centre; her work has aired on shows including Short Cuts (BBC), The Heart (Radiotopia), Nancy (WNYC) and Constellations podcast. In 2018, Phoebe was named Best New Artist at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. phoebewang.com / @feebswang
Hildegard Westerkamp was born in Osnabrück, Germany in 1946 and emigrated to Canada in 1968. After completing her music studies at the University of British Columbia in the early seventies she joined the World Soundscape Project under the direction of R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University (SFU). Her involvement with this project not only activated deep concerns about noise and the general state of the acoustic environment in her, but it also changed her ways of thinking about music, listening and soundmaking. Vancouver Co-operative Radio – founded during the same time - provided an invaluable opportunity to learn much about broadcasting, and ultimately enabled her to produce and host her weekly program Soundwalking in 1978/79. One could say that her career in soundscape composition and acoustic ecology emerged from these two pivotal experiences and found support in the cultural and political vibrancy of Vancouver at that time. In addition, composers such as John Cage and Pauline Oliveros have had a significant influence on her work.
Madi Piller is a filmmaker, animator, programmer and independent curator currently living and working in Toronto, Canada. Her abstract, nonrepresentational and poetic images are drawn from film explorations in Super 8, 16mm and 35mm, as well as photography and video. The resulting imagery is strongly influenced by diverse animation techniques and styles. Madi’s films have been screened at film festivals, alternative spaces and contemporary art venues nationally and internationally including TIFF Wavelengths, the Festival du Cinema Jeune, Paris, France, Bienal de La Imagen Movimiento, Buenos Aires, Argentina and the Melbourne Animation Festival, Melbourne, Australia. Her work has been produced with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. She is a recipient of the Chalmers Arts Fellowship.
International residencies include Museum Quartier21 in Vienna, Austria, the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Yukon, NWT and the Independent Imaging Retreat in Durham, Ontario.
Vivek Shraya is an artist whose body of work crosses the boundaries of music, literature, visual art, and film. Her best-selling new book, I’m Afraid of Men, was heralded by Vanity Fair as “cultural rocket fuel,” and her album with Queer Songbook Orchestra, Part‑Time Woman, was included in CBC’s list of Best Canadian Albums of 2017. She is one half of the music duo Too Attached and the founder of the publishing imprint VS. Books.
A Polaris Music Prize nominee and four-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, Vivek was a 2016 Pride Toronto Grand Marshal, was featured on The Globe and Mail’s Best Dressed list, and has received honours from The Writers’ Trust of Canada and The Publishing Triangle. She is currently a director on the board of the Tegan and Sara Foundation and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Calgary.
Megan Arnold is a multidisciplinary artist and multifaceted human being living and working in London, Ontario. She has exhibited and performed at venues and festivals across Canada and Europe, including: Forest City Gallery (London, ON), Sled Island Festival (Calgary, AB), the Royal Vauxhall Tavern (London, UK), and Outvert Gallery (Ísafjörður, Iceland). In her work, Arnold employs humour as a coping mechanism to deal with the existential anxieties that come with facing the increasingly complex realities of everyday life. She is interested in essential facets of humanity and how they manifest in the 21st century: mortality, temporality, liveness, and community. Using a combination of drawing, printmaking, relational aesthetics, installation, drag, (failed attempts at) dance, video, music, and storytelling, she seeks to bridge the gaps between humour and pathos, art and entertainment, and fantasy and reality. By assuming the roles of both character and creator/curator in her work, she designs a “feel-your-fantasy” version of her reality that is a caricature of itself: an auto-poetic alternate reality that observes, critiques, and celebrates our strange existence as multifaceted human beings in the present moment.
Open House Video Screenings
A Museum for Future Fossils
Works by Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Abedar Kamgari and Aislinn Thomas
2010-2018
Vanessa Dion Fletcher graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 with an MFA in performance, she has exhibited across Canada and the US, at Art Mur in Montreal, Eastern Edge Gallery Newfoundland, The Queer Arts Festival Vancouver, Satellite Art show Miami. Her work is in the Indigenous Art Centre in Gatineau, Quebec, Joan Flasch Artist Book collection, Vtape and Seneca College. In 2019 Vanessa is supported by the City of Toronto Indigenous Arts & Culture Partnerships Fund to be an Artist in Residence at OCAD University.
Abedar Kamgari is an artist, independent curator, and arts administrator based in Hamilton and Toronto. Her research is rooted in exploring displacement in relation to the ongoing legacy of colonialism in the West. She often works site-responsively with video and performance, using embodied and relational methodologies to unpack the complexities of immigrant experience.
Aislinn Thomas is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes video, performance, installation and text-based work. She culls material from everyday experiences and relationships, exploring themes of vulnerability, possibility and failure. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has received several grants and awards including a Social Science and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Masters Scholarship, and grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Aislinn lives and works near the Grand River, on the traditional territory of the Attawandaron, Anishnaabeg, and Haudenosaunee.