Based in Toronto, Kelly Jazvac received a BA from the University of Guelph and MFA from the University of Victoria. She has exhibited across Canada, the USA, and abroad, with solo shows at Toronto’s YYZ Artists’ Outlet and Diaz Contemporary. She recently completed a residency at the Banff Centre for the Visual Arts, and is currently completing the Canada Council International Residency Program in London, UK.
Patricia Corcoran is an Associate Professor of Earth Sciences and the Director of the Centre for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Western Ontario. Her research focuses on natural and anthropogenic sedimentary deposits. One significant element of her research concerns the distribution, accumulation, and degradation of plastic debris in marine and fresh water shoreline and lake bottom sediments. Her work is supported by government and university grants, and her research has been featured in numerous media outlets, including National Geographic, Science Magazine, Science et Vie, The New York Times, and CBC's The National.
Miriam Diamond is a Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto. She is cross-appointed to the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry, the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, School of the Environment, and the Physical and Environmental Sciences Program at Scarborough College. The goal of Prof. Diamond’s multidisciplinary research program is to improve our understanding of chemical contaminants from emission, through to transport indoors and outdoors, and ultimately human and ecological exposure. This research has been published in over 100 articles and chapters in addition to receiving media attention. She is a Fellow of the Canadian Geographical Society and was named Canadian Environmental Scientist of the Year in 2007 by that society. She was Co-chair of the Ontario Ministry of the Environment’s Toxic Reduction Scientific Expert Panel that advised the Minister of the Environment on the Toxic Reduction Act that was proclaimed in 2009.
Winnipeg-based artist Sarah Anne Johnson was trained as a photographer but uses a variety of media including painting, sculpture, and performance. She received a BFA from the University of Manitoba and completed an MFA at the Yale School of Art. Earlier this year Johnson debuted her first mid-career retrospective, Sarah Anne Johnson: Wonderland, 2002-2014, at The Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh and unveiled a 144-foot photographic mural at the Westin Harbour Castle Conference Centre commissioned by Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival. She has been collected by several significant institutions including The Guggenheim Museum, The National Gallery of Canada, New York Library, and The Phillips Collection. She has participated in group exhibitions at The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, The Canadian Biennial at the National Gallery of Canada, The Guggenheim Museum, The National Gallery of Victoria, and La Fondation Cartier in Paris. In 2008 Johnson was the recipient of the inaugural Aimia Prize for Contemporary Photography and is a finalist for the 2015 Sobey Art Award. She is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto and Julie Saul Gallery in New York.
Stephen Morris is the J. Tuzo Wilson Professor of Geophysics, Department of Physics, at the University of Toronto, where he leads the Experimental Nonlinear Physics Research Group. His research involves experiments on emergent patterns in fluids, granular media, ice formations, and fracture. He is also interested in natural patterns, and in the history of physics.
Anna-Sophie Springer is a curator, writer, editor, and director of the publishing imprint K. Verlag in Berlin. She is the co-editor, with Etienne Turpin, of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series.
Alexandra Berceanu has an MA in Communications & Culture from Ryerson University. She attended the University of Toronto for her Bachelors degree in Arts & Architectural Studies with a major in International Relations, Architectural Design, and a double minor in Philosophy and History. Her research involves environmental politics, aesthetic philosophy, and investigating the relationship between curatorial strategies, mass surveillance, and algorithmic states of exception. She is also a graphic designer and (mostly) analog photographer, with work featured at the Gladstone Hotel and Ryerson University.
Francisco-Fernando Granados’ multidisciplinary critical practice spans performance, installation, cultural theory, digital media, public art, and community-based projects. He has presented work in venues including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Vancouver Art Gallery, Darling Foundry (Montreal), Hessel Museum of Art (NY), Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), and Theatre Academy at the University of the Arts (Helsinki). Awards and honours include the Governor General’s Silver Medal for academic achievement upon graduating from Emily Carr University in 2010, and being named as one of Canada's 30 Under 30 by BLOUIN ARTINFO in 2014. He completed a Masters of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto in 2012 and is a member of the 7a*11d International Performance Festival Collective.
Onyeka Igwe is an artist filmmaker from London, UK, currently living and working in Toronto. She studied at Goldsmiths College for a Master’s in Non-fiction Filmmaking. She came to video from a radical political-activist experience, hoping to develop filmmaking practice as a way of doing politics. Igwe’s work has been screened in festivals and galleries across the UK, Europe, and North America such as the V&A, London Film Festival, and Internationale Kurtzfilmtage Wintherthur.
Julie Joosten is a poet, essayist, and editor who lives and works in Tkaronto. Her first book of poetry, Light Light (Book Thug, 2013), was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award. Her next book, For Nor, is forthcoming from Book Thug in the spring of 2019. It explores perceptual styles, affect, form, and politics.
a rawlings is the author of Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006) and Gibber (online, 2012). She holds a Masters in Environmental Ethics and Natural Resource Management (University of Iceland), and is currently a Kelvin/Smith PhD scholar researching performance, geochronology, and Scotland’s western seaboard (University of Glasgow). Shortlisted for the 2013 Leslie Scalapino Award, rawlings’ play Áfall / Trauma will be published in 2016 by Broken Dimanche Press.
John Paul Ricco is Professor of Art History, Comparative Literature, and Visual Culture, and Lead Curator of the Sexual Representation Collection, at the University of Toronto. Ricco works at the juncture of queer theory, contemporary art and literature, and continental philosophy—with a focus on sex, aesthetics, and ethics. He is currently developing a collection of essays, Queer Finitude: Intimacy, Anonymity, Solitude, that, along with his previous books, The Logic of the Lure, and The Decision Between Us: art and ethics in the time of scenes (both University of Chicago Press), will complete his trilogy on "the intimacy of the outside."
cheyanne turions is the curator at SFU Galleries (Burnaby and Vancouver). She volunteered this text in solidarity with her collaborator, Kara Ditte Hansen, as well as TILTING contributors and the Blackwood.
Etienne Turpin is a philosopher, founding director of anexact office, and research coordinator of User Group Inc. LLP, worker-owned cooperative building software for disaster response and environmental monitoring. With Anna-Sophie Springer, he is co-principal investigator of Reassembling the Natural.
Nicole Clouston explores the sublime nature of chemical and biological processes, as well as the value that can be found in these experiments when their ability to communicate specific information is stripped away through a sculptural practice. Nicole received her MFA from the University of Victoria and is currently completing her PhD in Visual Arts at York University. Her work has appeared in exhibitions in Victoria, Edmonton, Toronto, and Montreal. She was the recipient of a SSHRC Canada Graduate Research Scholarship, the Anne Lazare-Mirvish Award, as well as the Robert S. & Muriel A. Raguin Graduate Scholarship.
Quintin Teszeri is an artist and a writer. He has an MA in Art History from the University of Western Ontario where he is currently completing an MFA in Visual Arts. He has an interest in the inescapability of language, the tenuousness of truth, anarchy, bullshit, poetical embodiment, linguistic corruption, absurdity, skin, finding, taking, deprofessionalization, and recorporealization.
Karina Irvine is a freelance writer from Vancouver, BC. Her research engages in theories of temporality and how duration is made visible in contemporary art practices. She is currently completing a Masters in Art History and Curatorial Studies at York University in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Decoy, BlackFlash, and C Magazine, where she was the recipient of the New Critics Competition in 2013.
Marc Laflamme is a paleontologist focusing on the Ediacara biota, the oldest large and complex organisms in the fossil record that dominated the oceans until their demise 540 million years ago. Where they fit in the tree of life is controversial, as some represent the oldest examples of primitive animals, while others were likely failed experiments in complex life that went extinct in competition with advanced animals. His research also focuses on the exceptional fossilization of soft-tissues. His search of the oldest fossil evidence of animals has taken him all around the world, including to Newfoundland, Australia, and Namibia. Laflamme is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical & Physical Sciences at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
Gwen MacGregor is a Toronto based installation artist who has exhibited extensively in Canada and internationally. She has artworks in collections such as The Art Gallery of Ontario, Oakville Galleries, and Artbank. She is represented in Toronto by MKG127. She received an Honours BA in Art History from York University, a Master's in Human Geography from the University of Toronto, and is currently in her second year of the PhD program.
Meghan Price is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto. She holds a degree in Textile Construction from The Montreal Centre for Contemporary Textiles (2003) and an MFA from Concordia University (2009). Her work has been exhibited internationally in venues including the Powerhouse Museum (Sydney, Australia), the Alba School of Fine Art (Holguin, Cuba) and the Centro Metropolitano de Diseno, (Buenos Aires, Argentina). Price has held residencies at Artspace Sydney, Open Studio, Toronto, and the Scottish Sculpture Workshop, and will be in residence at the Banff Centre during Running with Concepts: The Geologic Edition. Meghan Price teaches in the textile studios of OCAD University and Sheridan College and is represented by Katzman Contemporary, Toronto.
Jaclyn Quaresma is an artist and Master of Visual Studies student in Curatorial Studies at Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. Her work in both fields explores the tension between the survival of the environment as we know it and our own survival in the mediated environments we create for ourselves. Her work has been exhibited at the Peter MacKendrick Gallery, 47, Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, Blackwood Gallery, and Justina M. Barnicke Gallery. Jaclyn was once the co-director of the exhibition space 47 in Parkdale, Toronto.
Sean Smith is an artist, writer, and independent scholar in Toronto. He holds a PhD in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland and has exhibited and performed internationally as part of the Department of Biological Flow, an experimental collaboration in research-creation with Barbara Fornssler. He was the inaugural Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at Western University and is currently adjunct faculty in site-based studio practice at OCAD University. His latest project, Aqua Rara, weaves a practice of art-philosophistry with athletics and kairotic time to work as a performance-text between multiple water ecologies, swimming gestures, and watching the Aquarium Channel repeatedly on loop.
Aislinn Thomas (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes video, performance, sculpture, installation, and text. Many of her recent projects respond to disability and standard approaches to access–or the lack thereof. She gratefully works alongside and in the legacy of so many who treat access and survival as spaces for creative acts, experimentation, and pleasure. Aislinn lives in Unama’ki / Cape Breton, on ancestral and unceded Mi’kmaw territory.
Commissioned projects include A piece of cloth held taut curated by Crystal Mowry for the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery; As I am and as I become curated by Lauren Schell Dickens for the San José Museum of Art; and A distinct aggregation / A dynamic equivalent / A generous ethic of invention curated by Jacqueline Bell for the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. In 2023 she was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award.
Alice Man-Yin Tsang is a PhD student in Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto. She uses data from the International Ocean Discovery Project to model physical changes, chemical variations, and bacterial activities in marine sediments. Before coming to Toronto, she was a marine geophysicist who surveyed the seas in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Philippines.
Amanda White (she/her) is a white settler artist/scholar living and working on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Anishinaabe, Huron-Wendat, and Haudenosaunee peoples. Amanda is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Curating, Department of Visual Art at Western University. She has a PhD (Queen’s) and an MFA (Windsor). Amanda works across mediums with a focus on plants, food, and environmental justice, with recent exhibitions and projects for: McIntosh Gallery, Museum London, Cambridge Galleries, Koffler Digital and PUBLIC Journal. Current collaborative and solo projects include studio work, a co-edited book, and a graphic novel.
Generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Graduate Expansion Fund, and the Department of Visual Studies (UTM) through the Graduate Expansion Fund.
