Alison S. M. Kobayashi is an artist working in video, performance, installation, and drawing. She was born in Mississauga, where she received a BA from the University of Toronto. She now lives in Brooklyn where she is the Special Projects Director at UnionDocs, a Center for Documentary Art. In her work, Kobayashi performs a variety of characters that are both studiously and playfully rendered. These personas are inspired by Kobayashi’s extensive collection of lost, discarded, and donated objects, ranging from answering machine tapes purchased at a secondhand shop, to a love letter left on a sidewalk. Through repeated interaction with the objects (listening, transcribing, re-enacting, playing), narratives and imagery begin to manifest themselves and inspire performances, videos, installations, and drawings. The results are humorous, low-fi artifacts of an artist embodying the lives of others. Kobayashi’s short videos have been exhibited and screened widely in Canada, the United States, and overseas. She was a guest artist at the 2008 Flaherty Film Seminar, and her body of work was a Spotlight Presentation at Video Out, Jakarta International Film Festival, Indonesia. In 2012, she was commissioned by Les Subsistances in Lyon, France, to produce her first live performance, Defense Mechanism. She is currently developing her second live performance.
Ryan Park’s interdisciplinary practice results in videos, photographs, and manipulations of found materials that suggest presences and absences, urges and constraints. Themes of time, distances, and the body expressed through the material of everyday life produce works that oscillate between serious and playful, clinical and poetic. His work has been exhibited across Canada, in the United States, and in Europe. He received an MFA from the University of Guelph and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Park lives and works in Toronto.
Roula Partheniou’s practice explores the replica and how the remaking of a familiar object can shift our perception and perspective. Her projects take the form of sculptural installations that make use of material puns, context, colour cues, and various degrees of trompe l'oeil to deconstruct the familiar and trigger a reconsideration of common forms. Her work questions how we see and read objects and challenges the viewer to negotiate between the perceived and the actual. She has exhibited throughout Canada and internationally, with recent exhibitions at Oakville Galleries (Oakville); The Art Gallery of Peterborough (Peterborough); Owens Art Gallery (Sackville, NB); Blackwood Gallery (Mississauga); The Power Plant (Toronto); Museum of Bat Yam (Bat Yam, Israel); Plug In ICA (Winnipeg) and MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA). Forthcoming exhibitions include Tanya Bonakdar (New York); Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran (Montreal); UWAG (Waterloo); MKG127 (Toronto) and The Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina). She is represented by MKG127 in Toronto.
Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist Jon Sasaki's work has been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions in galleries, including the Ottawa Art Gallery (Ottawa); the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge, AB); and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Recent group exhibitions include Platform Art Spaces (Melbourne); Nihonbashi Institute of Contemporary Art (Tokyo); and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto). In fall of 2014, he completed an outdoor public installation at Sheridan College (Oakville, ON) as part of their Temporary Contemporary commissioning program. He is the recipient of the 2015 Canadian Glenfiddich Artists in Residence Prize (Dufftown, Scotland) and will participate in the Canadian Residency (Detroit) in the fall of 2015. Sasaki holds a BFA from Mount Allison University (Sackville, NB). He is represented by Jessica Bradley Gallery in Toronto
Joshua Thorpe is an artist and writer living in Toronto. He has a Master’s in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto, and he teaches and consults on writing and rhetoric, in both academic and private contexts. He is the author of Dan Graham Pavilions: A Guide (Art Metropole), as well as several other published works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Recent and/or upcoming exhibitions of Thorpe’s paintings, drawings, prints, and installations include group and solo shows at Diaz Contemporary (Toronto); CSA Space (Vancouver); 3A Gallery (New York); Museo Napoleonico (Rome); and Open City (Lublin, Poland).
Julia Abraham is a Toronto-based curator. She is currently the Exhibitions and Outreach Coordinator at the Doris McCarthy Gallery. Recent work includes curatorial projects at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design (Toronto), the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Toronto), the Freie Kunstakademie (Stuttgart, Germany), the Barber Institute of Fine Arts (Birmingham, UK), and Gallery 44 (Sydney). Julia has published texts in the Munich-based Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon on artists including Gordon Lebredt, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Kelly Mark, and Suzy Lake. Julia has attended the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales (Australia), and she holds a Master of Philosophy from the University of Birmingham (UK), and a Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies from the University of Toronto.
