2023 Award

Bomi Yook

K-COSMOSIS, 2023 
Animation, 15:50 minutes

K-COSMOSIS explores the blended nature of cosmologies within Korean metaphysics. The work brings together multiple narratives across time and space, celebrating a multifaceted understanding of history, identity, ideology, and mythology. Informed by feminist and queer philosophies of quantum physics, Yook uses procedurally generated particle systems to weave an intricate tale of relationality where perceived boundaries are blurred. The piece invites viewers to see the world through osmosis rather than duality to reveal a profound connection. 

Bomi Yook is a Korean-Canadian artist working in computer-generated immersive media, experimental animation, and video performance. Her practice deals with ideas of loss, longing, becoming and belonging within the Korean diaspora, while exploring the paradox of indigeneity and futurity at the heart of immigrant identity. 

Jasmine Liaw

xīn nī 廖芯妮, 2022 
Video, 7:26 minutes

xīn nī 廖芯妮  is an intimate auto-ethnographic portrait expressed through dance and digital technologies. Liaw engages in intergenerational conversations with her family and community to transform the linguistic divide between her Chinese name and its Hakka translation into a space for healing. Drawing on methods of decolonizing queerness to emphasize self-love and self-curiosity, the work explores both physical and technological attachments. Bodies made up of 3D-rendered cultural objects hold space for the stories of Liaw’s elders while expanding the growing web of her ancestral knowledge.   

Jasmine Liaw is a queer, emerging Chinese-Canadian artist. Working in dance performance, new media, and experimental film, her practice explores her Hakka diaspora, queerness, and environmental anxiety. She is the Artistic Associate of Chimerik 似不像 Collective and a member of the research group, Dias:Stories.

Melissa Johns

Here I Stand, Still Guarded, 2022  
Virtual Reality

Here I Stand, Still Guarded uses virtual reality as an experimental means of preserving the lived experiences of French Canadian and Kanien’keha:ka diaspora. Set in the intimate space of a living room, the simulation is filled with multigenerational voices and shifting temporalities. By translating sentimental belongings into 3D assets, Johns continues to add to the work as a living archive. As “guests” in this constructed home, viewers are invited to explore a range of continually shifting objects and furniture pieces, listen to family stories, and reflect on their own relationships with Canadian culture.

Melissa Johns is a Toronto-born and –based visual artist and educator from a mixed Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk, Turtle Clan) and French-Canadian background. Specializing in virtual reality installations, digital painting, and video, Melissa’s work centers on investigating the narrative potential of these emergent channels to collect, preserve, and transform fragments of the stories around her.

Santiago Tamayo Soler

Retornar, 2021 
Video, 20:00 minutes

Structured as a video game, Retornar (Spanish: “to return”) follows the last nine humans on Earth and their journey towards a global reset. The work is set in the Andes in the year 2222 after a catastrophic war driven by extreme resource exploitation has ravaged the landscape. The surviving characters must engage in a series of tedious puzzles, interspersed with lengthy loading screens, until they are summoned to fulfill their destiny as seeds for a new generation. Tamayo Soler builds a multilayered world that includes a digital celestial, drawing from early 8-bit video games, life simulation games, and video chat universes. 

Santiago Tamayo Soler is a Colombia-born, Montreal based multidisciplinary artist. Working in video with a background in performance art and film, Santiago is interested in world-building and juxtaposing digitally constructed locations with archival footage. His practice proposes an eco-political examination of Latin America from a diasporic perspective, giving home to immigrant and queer stories. 

Sophia Oppel

I’m sorry, I’m having trouble with the connection, 2023 
Video, 10:14 minutes

This 3D-rendered video features Claudia, an embodied AI assistant who considers her complicity within a hostile system of surveillance capitalism. In a pitch-corrected monologue written and vocalized by the artist, she ruminates on feminized labour and deferred desire as she glitches between poetic speculation, generic auto-responses, and a failure to perform basic commands. The work mimics the response style of AI assistants such as Siri and Alexa to reveal the ways in which our intelligent machines reaffirm uneven power distribution and mirror our expectations back to us as subjects within a late-capitalist system.  

Sophia Oppel is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Toronto. She is interested in examining digital interfaces and physical architectures as parallel sites of power. Oppel uses transparent substrates–glass, mirror, and the screen–as a framework to consider the paradoxes of being human within surveillance capitalism. 

Ivetta Sunyoung Kang

Proposition 3: String Figure, 2022
Video, 37:31

Marissa Sean Cruz

BILLED-A-BEAR ʕ´•ᴥ•`ʔ, 2021
Video, 6:29 minutes

Sarah Imrisek

Frequency Flower, 2022
Video

Dallas Fellini

Dallas Fellini is a curator, writer, and artist living and working in Toronto. They are a member of Crocus Collective and a co-founder of Silverfish, an arts publication devoted to interdisciplinary collaboration, skill-sharing, non-institutional pedagogy, and cultivating sustained dialogue between contemporary artists and writers. Dallas is pursuing a Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies at the University of Toronto. Their current curatorial research is situated at the intersection of trans studies and archival studies.

Ekrem Serdar

Ekrem Serdar (he, him) is a curator, writer, and arts administrator. As the curator at Squeaky Wheel, he is responsible for the organizations’ exhibitions, public programming, and residency programs. He is the recipient of a Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. He is from Ankara, Turkey. 

Shaheer Zazai

Shaheer Zazai is an Afghan-Canadian artist with a current studio practice both in painting and digital media. Zazai’s practice focuses on exploring and attempting to investigate the development of cultural identity in the present geopolitical climate and diaspora. Zazai received a BFA from OCAD University in 2011 and was artist in residence at OCAD University as part of the Digital Painting Atelier in 2015. 

Driftnote