Resounding Peripheries: Sound Art Across Regional Ontario
Saturday August 26, 2023
Presented live in London Ontario and across various platforms online
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.
Sheri Osden Nault is a Two-Spirit Michif artist, community activist, and Assistant Professor at the Western University. They utilize sculpture, performance, installation, and more; integrating cultural, social, and experimental creative processes to consider embodied connections between human and non-human beings, land-based relationships, and kinship sensibilities as an Indigenous Futurist framework.
Sheri currently lives and creates near the Deshkan Ziibing, on the lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lunaapéwak, and Chonnonton Nations, also known as ‘London, Ontario.’ They are colonially displaced Michif of the Charette, Bélanger, and Nault families. They have exhibited nationally and internationally, are a tattoo practitioner within the Indigenous Tattoo Revival movement in so-called Canada, and run the annual community project, Gifts for Two-Spirit Youth.
Czarina Mendoza (b. 1991) is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Windsor, ON. Born and raised in central Alberta, the rural landscape alongside her family’s settlement from the UK and Philippines deepened her interest around the construction of identity, looking specifically into what it means to preserve and reciprocate cultural legacy. Her material-based practice repurposes found objects and mass consumer goods that investigate the mediation of transnational ties. As a collector she documents through audio recordings, objects, black and white film photography, and ephemera building a personal archive as both reference and material for her work. The results are hybridized artifacts that seem fractured, yet negotiate both a recalled and constructed time and space.
She is currently enrolled at Wayne State University (Detroit) studying her Masters in Information Sciences specializing in archiving and obsolescent formats. In 2022, as the TD Curatorial Fellow, Mendoza curated a solo show and film screening of Shelley Niro’s work titled Boundless at Art Windsor-Essex. She sits on the Regional Committee of Media City Film Festival. Mendoza currently hosts an experimental radio program called Soft Reduction on CJAM 99.1 broadcasting crossborder in Windsor-Detroit and she is ¼ of the synth-pop band Olinda.
Debbie Ebanks Schlums is multidisciplinary artist, Vanier Scholar and PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. She has worked nationally and internationally on social practice projects addressing migration, materiality, and her Black/Chinese Caribbean identity. Exhibitions include the Mitchell Gallery, MacEwan University; the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery and the Museum of Dufferin; and collectively with the Odeimin Runners art collective, at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Nuit Blanche and Images Festival. Debbie is a recipient of numerous arts awards and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Art Council, Dufferin Arts Council, Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, California College of the Arts Impact Award, and the Susan and John Hunkin Award in Fine Arts.
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.
Anahí González (she/her) is a Mexican photographer based in London, ON. Her practice explores visual narratives about Mexican labour for/within Canada to decenter the United States narrative concerning Mexican migration. She is a Research Associate of The Creative Food Research Collaboratory, contributor editor of The Embassy Cultural House, and an Art and Visual Culture Ph.D. candidate at Western University. Her work has been included in exhibitions and screenings in Mexico, Canada, Norway, Spain, and France.