Areas:

Dance, Film/Video

Bio:

‘In what parts of my body does the essence or projection of a certain image live? How am I fragmented inside?’ When attempting to answer these questions I experience a network that conveys ideas not just specific to dance. Often an image, thought or sensation comes to me in one medium and then I end up wanting to visualize it in another. I work around the performance of movement and the body experimenting with compositional and aesthetic strategies, dramaturgic approaches, non-conventional spaces, appropriating uses of the new technologies, crossing disciplinary boundaries and cultural hybridity.

I can’t dance in a vacuum; the world around me affects and inspires my feelings and thoughts and therefore also my art. My practice in photography and film can be perceived as an instantaneous reaction to myself in relation to my environment. I respond by putting myself in proximity, often crawling around and adapting my body as I would do in a contact dance. The camera, pressed against my face becomes an extension of whatever drives me. I tend to shoot video in real time or black and white stills in a space that is part of the character's (fictional or not) identity.

I often try to find a certain sense of lightness within the gravity of a subject, enjoying the accessibility of weighty topics when humor is present. It´s important to experiment to find doors for the audience which allow them to experience my work rather than being told exactly what to think about, or what to do with it. I am not as interested in a ‘public’ experience of my work as in how an image can speak to you in a very subjective manner, both charged with knowledge and with memory.

Laura Abadir: Dance, Film/Video, (Belgium/Vancouver)

Areas:

I am primarily interested in a twentieth and 21st century harmonic palette.  I am interested in composition primarily, but an essential tool for composition remains a study of music theory.  I am paying attention right now to the writings of György Sándor Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, and Karel Janecek.

Bio:

I am focusing on music composition within the MFA program.  After years of working with many different musical sounds, I think it is time to really spend time with notes, chords, melody, harmony, and musical form, all unadorned with timbral colours. As such, I am working with music for the piano. 

Areas:

I like to begin my process of creation by asking questions and by exploring my subject matter through my body and through basic materials and performance sites. I believe that more questions are raised and more discoveries are made by listening to what my body and what the outside world has to say. My dramaturgical practice often includes speaking with other people and hearing their stories or thoughts. I am interested in integrating video and sound into my live performance projects. Collaborative work, where creativity and energy is shared between artists, is also of interest to me.

Bio:

My name is Calla Churchward. I grew up in a small town in South Western Ontario and graduated from the drama program at the University of Waterloo. I am interested in new performance work that explores socially relevant issues. My undergraduate senior studies project, 29 Beats per Minute: Metaphors for Madness, was a one person performance written and performed by myself on the subject of mental illness. This performance explored questions of identity, the nature of mental illness, and how institutions are successful at hiding messes. Video work, soundscape and audience participation were integral to the piece.

Areas:

Dance, Performance, Video

Bio:

I am a Brazilian interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, Canada, since 2007. I have a passionate interest in the human body as a powerful art expression and also as a key element in other media. My work is very personal and grounded on my senses. The ideas I develop has as a starting point my individual way of filtering the world into my body.

The opportunity to explore the interplay between life and art is what excites me the most regarding performance art. This fine line between life-art is highlighted in my practice by the incorporation of dancing and acting for alternative performances venues, video and photography.

I have exhibited/performed in Canada, Brazil, Germany, UK and Poland and also attended art residencies programs such as Hammock Residency (Vancouver, Canada) and A Casa Como Convem (Recife, Brazil).

Luciana D'Aunciacao: Dance, Performance, Video, (Brazil/Vancouver)

Links: 

www.lucianaartwork.com

Areas:

Video, Visual Art, Performance

Bio:

Deborah Edmeades was born in the UK and lived in South Africa before moving to New York City, where she lived for 17 years. She currently lives in Vancouver.

Deborah’s performances, videos and photographs emerge from the often shameful intersection between the constructs of personal and cultural identity and embodied process of self. She utilizes acting, therapeutic and meditational techniques that privilege the body’s autonomic responses, to explore and expose notions of discrete selfhood and it’s inevitable narrative.

Deborah has shown work in the US, Canada, UK, Europe, Mexico, Brazil and Korea and has received grants form Franklin Furnace Archive (New York) as well as serving on their peer review panel. She was also a guest lecturer of performance art at the University of Texas at Austin.

A current project: Looking for God is based on the practice of eye-gazing utilizing modified teleprompters. There is a fascination with the complete re-orientation of perception of self this practice (among others) gives rise to; the transgression of a localized and sealed sense gives way to a spatially expanded perception that affectively includes the other as self.

Deborah Edmeades: Video, Visual Art, Performance (NYC/Vancouver)

Areas:

Bio:

I graduated from Tehran University of Art in Iran in Painting. I will join to MFA program for fall 2011. Due to my tendency toward Literature, History, Religion and Politics in Iran, these elements have always been gradually developing in my works. I execute Installation beside Painting and Sculpture, being free from any kind of traditional constraint and limitation in Visual Arts. I am interested in New Media and making more interaction with the viewer. In some experiences I use a team of ordinarypeople beside amateur and self-taught artists in different fields such as animation, music, doll making, hair styling and tailoring. Working with self-educated artists and ordinary people with no experience will generally result in formation of Installations which are samples of Raw Creation in my works. Approach New Media and Current Contemporary Directions in the Visual Arts has effectively and attractively expressed my concerns in terms of form as well as concept. Concepts such as the effect of religious prejudice on political and social liberties and feminism, not only in Middle East (my homeland) but also in many other parts of the world. My concerns does not mean that I make political art. I am just making art politically. I believe by visiting new friends and artists in SFU I will be able to explore the common grounds between East and West to compare and mix them to create new Ideas.

Areas:

I am interested in the ways in which human cognitive systems work to create fluid realities, and how these systems can be manipulated to introduce new meaning. Specifically, I want to ask questions about pattern and form recognition, rhythm synchronization, signal detection, and the historical uses of patterns and geometry. I hope to do this using installation and sculpture (which will probably feature fiber and sound as mediums).

Bio:

I have a diverse background, which includes formal training in neuroscience and psychology as well as informal experience with experimental music and fiber arts.

I currently live in Vancouver, BC and have studied at both the University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada) and Duke University (Durham, North Carolina, USA). I have been published in several academic peer-reviewed journals in the field of neuroscience, and have given talks and presentations about my work at various international conferences.

Areas:

Film/Video

Bio:

I was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario. My family moved out of the city when I was six years old, and I grew up spending long hours exploring acres of farmland and forest. I was educated in Ottawa and Vancouver where I studied history, art history, and filmmaking. I later got a degree in education. I have had my work screened in Switzerland, Holland, Ireland and Canada.

My art practice has, roughly speaking, two threads running through it: an interest in representations of place using video, and a desire to work with time as a material.

In describing or evoking place using video, I am drawn to locations that are at the margins of the city—places where urban and rural meet. I am also interested in the potential for banal landscapes to be a source of the sublime.

A consistent drive in my practice is toward creating work that foregrounds a sense of present time. I am interested in the “slow time” of waiting, of contemplation, of reverie.

In the MFA program I want to contextualize my art practice from the theoretical perspective of phenomenology, including ideas related to embodiment and performativity.

Jeffrey Langille: Film/Video (Vancouver/BC)

Areas:

Performance Art, Visual Art, Performance Studies

Bio:

The focus of my artistic practice lies in willess acts of self-affirmation around space (public and private), duration, repetition, endurance, identity and ‘otherness’. I explore the physical and emotional boundaries of my corporeal matter. I push my body through painless strain to ultimate failure, extending it beyond its natural capacity through irregular acts of unconventional gesture and exertion. Working at the edges of discomfort and vulnerability, I continuously re-evaluate its threshold as it breaks down and rebuilds to become a site for change and exchange.

Born and raised in Montreal, I am presently completing a Master of Arts – one-year program - at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. I have delivered a paper on my Walking through Walls project at a conference at the Blackwood Gallery in May 2012. I am working on two projects for the fall of 2012: a performance celebrating 100 years of John Cage and a 12-hour performance where I will attempt to walk through a wall during Toronto Nuit Blanche 2012. At the School for Contemporary Arts, I will continue my research/exploration of identity and belonging - juggling with my opposing roots as a bilingual and bicultural Québécois in a predominantly English speaking country as well as an interdisciplinary artist/researcher/human being in an increasingly homogenized society.

Didier Morelli: Performance Art, Visual Art, Performance Studies (Montreal)

Areas:

Music/Performance

Bio:

My name is Corbin Murdoch and I am a songwriter and performance maker with a professional practice focused on merging the conventions and tools of contemporary theatre with those of musical performance. The last five years of my practice have been occupied primarily with the mounting of theatricalized song cycles; collections of songs that are meant to be experienced from start to finish such that the audience can take in the full sweep of their narrative and dramaturgical arcs.

These projects are often realized over the course of several years and
involve intensive research periods, verbatim text generation, collaborative composition, and conceptual staging. My songmaking explores and subverts the narrative power of song, interweaving narrative fragments to create intertextual representations of moments, people and places.

My professional practice has seen the release of four studio albums,tours across Canada and in Europe, showcases at major industry conferences including the Canadian Folk Alliance (2005) and the Western Canadian Music Awards (2010), and performances at internationally recognized performing arts festivals such as The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (2011), The Isle of Wight Festival (2008), and The Vancouver International Jazz Festival (2010). CBC Radio has twice recorded my work for national broadcast, in 2008 and 2009.

Corbin Murdoch: Music/Performance (Vancouver)

Links:

Year in Song project here: http://corbinmurdoch.wordpress.com/

Areas:

Visual Art

Bio:

I live and work in Vancouver, BC. I graduated in 2009 from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Along with an organic sculpture practice I have worked on collaborative public artworks and installations within the gallery. Working with Jenipher Hur these mainly included collaborations with the former Helen Pitt Gallery (now UNIT/PITT projects) and its curator Paul Kajander. My most recent exhibition was a group show at the Shudder Gallery entitled Psychic Plaza in 2011. My practice uses installation, intervention, and sculpture to investigate the everyday aspects of looking at and using spaces. While at SCA I am interested in continuing a public art practice especially in relationship to research as to the function of public art and the role it plays in the urban environment, as well as continuing to invest in and investigate the role the studio plays in my own art practice.

Avery Nabata: Visual Art (Vancouver)

Areas:

Gabriel Mindel Saloman's current projects include the Lower Mainland Painting Co. - a group of artists researching and engaging in questions of Art, Labour and Art Labourers; and The STAG - a gallery run out of the Strathcona home of he and his partner Aja Rose Bond. During his time at SFU Saloman hopes to explicitly merge the trajectories of his work in Sound and Social Practices, demonstrating that the resistant potential of noise can be brought to a critical state of praxis.

Bio:

Gabriel Mindel Saloman is an American born artist living and working in Vancouver, BC. As a musician he has spent nearly a decade touring internationally and has released over 50 recordings as a part of the experimental music group Yellow Swans. He has performed at numerous international music festivals including Sonar (ES), Open Circuit (BE), Sonic Protest (FR) and was invited to join Art Council England’s Free Noise Tour in 2007. Simultaneously he has collaborated in a variety of relational artworks, most notably with Red76 where he has exhibited or been in residence at the Walker Art Center (US), CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art (US), Creative Time NY (US) and the San Jose Zero1 (US) and Manifesta 8 (ES) Biennials. 

Areas:

During the past years I have been working producing and directing my own films, even I also work as a cinematographer for some others.

I am very interested in expanding my film practice trough interdisciplinary experimentation and theoretical development, advancing against the narrative inertia, toward the territory in which film becomes a way of thinking. Considering thinking as a critical process, but also as the suspension or absence of all of its means. A potential that is suspended and retracts toward its emptiness, toward its nothingness, to become contemplation and, based on that, to traverse the ineffable, the non visible, that which thought cannot host because it transcends it.

Bio:

I am a graduate of the National University of Mexico Film School, where I was specialized in Documentary Filmmaking. Before, I also study Language and Literature in the University of Salamanca, in Spain.

About some achievements in 2008 my first feature documentary “The Infinite Border,” was selected to participate in the Berlin International Film Festival and won the “Joris Ivens Award” in the “Cinema du Réel” Film Festival. In 2010 I worked as a cinematographer for the feature film “Leap Year”, winner of the “Caméra d’Or” at the Cannes Film Festival.

Areas:

Sound Installation

Bio:

I am a sound artist, a performer, an installation artist, and an aspiring technologist. I have an affinity for the homemade, the hand built, the simple and the minimal. I'm fascinated by technical innovation and modern digital systems, and equally intrigued by outdated technology or anything that was postulated to be the next big thing. I am interested in new music, aleatoric music, noise, sound art and performance explored in collaborations, large scale installations, and in non-traditional spaces. I have an undergraduate degree in digital media art from the University of Nevada in Reno, where I briefly worked as a computer tech, part time instructor, and black framed glasses wearer. I write and record music to perform on worthy floors and in the occasional venue. Recently, I recorded music for an award winning short film, I’ve collaborated and performed at Gallery Hijinks in San Francisco, I’ve toured the United States with indie rock bands, and I’ve been exhibiting and performing sound and video installations in Reno, Nevada. At SFU I plan to experiment with instruments, installations, new technologies and performances that invite a conversation about the place of the artist as a community builder.

Clint Sleeper: Sound Installation (Nevada)

Links:

vimeo.com/clintsleeper
soundcloud.com/prayingforgreaterportland

Areas:

Visual Art, Video

Bio:

My name is Cherry Smiley, and I am a Nlaka’pamux (Thompson) and Dine’ (Navajo) woman living, working, and studying on unceded Coast Salish Territories in Vancouver BC. I am a proud First Nations woman, radical feminist, prostitution abolitionist, activist, and artist. My art practice is one that is deeply passionate and inherently political. I see art as a necessary and conscious activist tool, one that is able to communicate ideas and beliefs in a way that is honest, powerful, and engaging. But I also see art as something that is beautiful and deeply embedded in my culture, traditions, and spirituality; it is a conscious and sometimes unconscious expression of who I am as an Aboriginal woman. My work is grounded in my personal experiences and in those of my sisters, in radical feminist theory, and in the teachings handed down to me from my Elders.

I have had the honour of speaking at conferences and forums on the issue of violence against Aboriginal women and girls in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, Prince Rupert, Edmonton, Montreal, Winnipeg, Ottawa, New York City, and various cities in Norway. In 2008 I curated Flesh Mapping: vancouver markets pacific women, a community art exhibit that was part of a larger international conference and that helped me to see the potential of art in creating social change. At SFU, I will continue to develop my sense of art as political resistance to colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and capitalism.

Cherry Smiley: Visual Art, Video (B.C.)

Areas:

Currently, I am developing an auto-ethnographic project that explores attachment associations and responses in children to parent and adult romantic relationships. This project, inspired by John Bolby’s attachment theory and Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation experiments, presents circumstances for the audience—participants—to question and re-evaluate ideas of attachment, transition, and departure. This ongoing project will take place throughout the summer of 2011 in Kitchener, Ontario in series of musical and theatrical experiences, performances, installations, and gatherings. Starting my MFA at Simon Fraser University in September 2011, I am excited to explore and study new areas of art making, particularly in the areas of performance study, the aural element of scenography, and physical theatre.

Bio:

My work is situated primarily in and around Toronto and the Kitchener-Waterloo area in Ontario. My undergraduate degree is in music composition and improvisation at Wilfrid Laurier University. Since 2008, I have been composing and performing with the Toronto based composer collective, the Toy Piano Composers. My compositions have been performed by Arraymusic (Toronto), TorQ (Toronto), Soundstreams Canada (Toronto, Montreal), Nextfest (Edmonton) and the K-W Symphony Orchestra (Kitchener-Waterloo).  Since July 2010, I have been collaborating closely with director Dr. Andrew Houston at the University of Waterloo on the multi-disciplinary production: DISSOCIA (February 2011, remounted at the Open Ears Sound and Music Festival in April 2011). For this production, I composed, improvised and performed music and movement.

Areas:

I am keen to explore collaboration with all the mediums on the course, however my curiosity keeps pointing towards visual art and site/public intervention. I am also keen for us to use each other as resources and make the absolute most of the facilities and our time together. I believe being a group and helping each other, gives us more strength for our personal goals, as well as potential for a continuing working relationship beyond the MFA.

Bio:

I’m from the UK and I have been working as a professional dancer, maker and teacher since graduating 3 years ago from Laban, London. During my short career to date, I have been lucky to be involved with some interesting and exciting projects/performance work. Most recently I was working at the Barbican Centre in London, performing Trisha Brown’s experimental work form the late 60’s early 70’s, ‘Walking on the Walls’, ‘Planes’, ‘Floor of the Forest’ and Gordon Matta-Clarks ‘Open House’. I have been immensely inspired by this and think it will feed my own interests and research at SFU.

Areas:

This past year she has been involved in several projects that include the carving of a series of 10’ tall cedar spears, the wrapping of  grasses in cloth and hair, and the creation of a clan of turtles.  Her exploratory works are moving into performance with her collaboration Vestige Vagabond, an improvisation with Maria Hupfield.  VV officially debuts at the Santa Fe Indian Art Market in August 2011 hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.  In addition, the grunt gallery will exhibit her work Diviners in September 2011.  Ms. Vickers plans to construct performance/video works and 3D sound installation to make personal history a political occupier of public spaces during her time at SFU.

Bio:

Charlene Vickers is Anishinabe Kwe (Ojibway Woman) living and working in Vancouver  BC.  Charlene’s cross-disciplinary work of painting, drawing and installation has been exhibited in Toronto, Vancouver, Amsterdam and across the United States and has received numerous grants from the BC Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.  

Links:

Website: http://charlenevickersvisualartist.blogspot.com

Areas:

Composition, Performance

Bio:

my name is huw i am from england i am cursed with being interested in everything which suffices as an explanation as to how i arrived in the world of interdisciplinary arts i have never been much good at separating the threads of my practise and so instead embraced the tangling into a big mess that suits me well my work is frequently tongue in cheek and political at its joyous heart everything has intrinsic worth and life is too absurd to demand justification i love collaboration and sharing food i have played drums for a very long time i make plushie dinosaurs i studied music composition and visual arts at dartington college of arts drifting toward a specialism in notation looking at the egalitarian nature of indeterminate scoring last summer i took part in a continuous thirty six hour improvisation at supernormal music festival which was one of the most and least fun experiences of my life more recently i was engaged in a three month residency at the banff centre in alberta where i spent some time investigating the potential of three and four dimensional scores for nonspecific realisationresponse and a lot of time learning to sustain anger during my time at sfu I plan to make the most of the blossoming relationship between the uni and the downtown east side moving toward facilitation and community arts with more emphasis on mischief public performance interventions street training civil disobedience collective growth cooperation adventures and games i like playing best of everything and look forward to playing together soon

Huw Webb: Composition, Performance, (U.K.)

Links:

http://soundcloud.com/alpinerecreation
http://alpinerecreation.tumblr.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5iPUsHXHDY

Areas:

Visual Art, Painting, Video, Music Performance, Sound

Bio:

Nathaniel Wong was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and has spent the past ten years in Vancouver studying music composition and visual art. He holds a BMus in Composition from UBC (2006) and a BFA (Honours) from SFU (2012). As a musician he has played a vital role in Vancouver’s Latino music scene playing the violin in the Mariachi band Los dorados, as well as also co-fronting and co-writing for the indie band Yes Nice. Nathaniel also free-lances as an orchestral violist and put himself through University for 8 years as a busker with the TransLink busking program. His career has taken him on tours across Canada, Cuba and Mexico and he has travelled, locating his ancestry, in Malaysia and England.

Nathaniel’s art practice can be thought of as a negotiation with history that desires to both destroy and mend. He employs a humourous tension through his acting in video works and humble gestures in sculptural forms, painting and sound, to investigate moments in history both for their obsolescence and earnestness. At the heart of his ambition is a celebratory pursuit of joy in the comedy of being all too human.

Nathaniel Wong: Visual Art, Painting, Video, Music Performance, Sound (Vancouver)

Areas:

At SFU, I am interested in exploring the design and use of technologies that foster new forms of collaboration, improvisation, and live performance. I am also looking forward to working with artists from other disciplines, and creating works that span both genre and medium.

Bio:

I am a musician focusing primarily on electronic music in its various forms. Most of my childhood was spent outside Seattle, Washington, and I received my Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History from the University of Oregon in 2004. After graduating, I spent three years living in Tokyo, and will be relocating to Vancouver from San Francisco, where I have lived since 2009.

Under the name Deceptikon, I have released four full-length albums and many 12” and 7” vinyl records since the late 1990s. This alias focuses on rhythmic dance music, frequently utilizing sampling, polyrhythms, and other contemporary electronic music techniques. Another alias of mine, Secret Palindromes, focuses primarily on abstract ambient music, usually ignoring rhythm entirely in favor of heavily processed and meditative drones. Though a good portion of the music recorded under these aliases has been commercially released, I am not interested in genre-based work. My goal is to create work that simultaneously challenges the accepted norms of the popular music world, while remaining compositionally interesting and worthy of analysis.

Links:

Secret Palindromes I - IV (46mb mp3 file) http://www.deceptikon.net/audio/Secret_PalindromesEP.mp3

My SoundCloud page: http://soundcloud.com/dkon

Areas:

I would like to continue my research concerning cross-cultural intersections between the “West” and the “Muslim world” in relation to the development of science, and visual arts. This research stems from my interest in disrupting pervasive narratives, which polarize perspectives and obscure ways in which knowledge and culture are influenced and transformed by encounters with difference. The history of material trade and colonialism figure into this interest heavily; I would like to continue to deepen my knowledge of these. In terms of the work, I tend to create from concept to material, never knowing which medium I will work with. Right now I am excited about moving close to the ocean and continuing video work I have been developing which plays with waves as a metaphor for communication. I am also exploring the possibilities of filo dough as a sculptural/ projection material, as well as continuing to work with poetry and performance.

Though I have set out particular research interests, I am excited to explore. I look forward to meeting, and getting to know my new colleagues at SFU, knowing I will be inspired and pushed to think in new ways.

Bio:

Alize Zorlutuna is a Toronto-based artist and writer who works with a diverse range of mediums. Incorporating textiles, found objects, wood, metal, performance, video projection, and audio, her work draws upon her experience as an individual living between cultures. Negotiating multiple perspectives simultaneously, this embodied liminality informs her creative practice; manifesting in explorations of interstices. The desire to activate interstices where differing perspectives, emotions, and physical entities meet, and the meanings created in those meetings rests at the heart of her work.

Alize graduated with distinction from the Sculpture and Installation Program at OCAD University, where she won multiple awards. She also has an honors degree in International Development Studies from Dalhousie University. Alize has shown work at Interaccess, Toronto Free Gallery and xpace as well as having participated in Nuit Blanche.