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.
Photo: Alejandro Rizzo Nervo
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.
Photo: Helen Lin and Yola Monakhov
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
Omar David Rivero, also known as Driftnote, is a musician and multimedia artist born in Venezuela and currently based out of Tkaronto whose work is centered around improvisation, interactivity, audio and visual installations as well as 3D imaging. Rivero explores questions of materiality and embodiment when looking at systems, cultural erasure, and identity in the african/indigenous diaspora. Their research is situated in reassessing methodologies of image-making, archives, and self-portraiture.
