Protected: Imagining new systems of exchange
Research Initiative
2020/2021
Contributors
- Zachary Ayotte, Contributor
- Althea Balmes, Contributor
- Oliver Barnes, Contributor
- Christina Battle, Researcher
- Michelle Campos Castillo, Contributor
- Soloman Chiniquay, Contributor
- Patrick Cruz, Contributor
- Lanny DeVuono, Contributor
- Tao Fei, Contributor
- oualie frost, Contributor
- Rosemary Heather, Contributor
- Valeen Jules, Contributor
- Jesse McKee, Contributor
- Riaz Mehmood, Audio Mixing Engineer
- Rehab Nazzal, Contributor
- Eugenio Salas, Contributor
- Daniella Sanader, Copy Editor
- Aram Han Sifuentes, Contributor
- Becca Taylor, Contributor
- Leila Timmins, Contributor
- Stephanie Wakefield, Contributor
- Nicole Kelly Westman, Contributor
- jaz whitford, Contributor
- Alize Zorlutuna, Contributor
Archived Activities
Contributors
- Zachary Ayotte works with words and images. He lives in Edmonton, AB.
- Althea Balmes is an award winning multidisciplinary visual storyteller, arts educator and UX Designer. Her practice is grounded in anti-oppressive framework, decolonization and community building. Through curiosity, wonder and play, she creates visuals and stories exploring themes of migration, labour, ancestral knowledge, technology and personhood. Her comics, illustrations and films have been published/ shown across Canada and internationally.
- Oli is an activist, musician, community worker, neighbourhood explorer and avid collaborator currently based on the Unceded Territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. He is not interested in occupying the center and finds value in the often invisible labour of supporting, assisting, and building with those he cares for. As a musician and bandmate, he has toured across Turtle Island and Europe and has performed at festivals such as SXSW, NXNE, CMJ, POP Montreal and Slut Island. Barnes is of mixed Malagasy, Chinese & European ancestry.
- Christina Battle (Edmonton, Amiskwaciy Wâskahikan ᐊᒥᐢᑲᐧᒋᕀ ᐋᐧᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ, Canada) holds a B.Sc. with specialization in Environmental Biology from the University of Alberta, a certificate in Film Studies from Ryerson University, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a PhD in Art & Visual Culture from the University of Western Ontario. Her research and artistic work consider the parameters of disaster; looking to it as action, as more than mere event and instead as a framework operating within larger systems of power. Through this research she imagines how disaster could be utilized as a tactic for social change and as a tool for reimagining how dominant systems might radically shift. She collaborates with Serena Lee as SHATTERED MOON ALLIANCE and has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries as both artist and curator, most recently at: The Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba (Brandon), The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Colorado), Latitude 53 (Edmonton), The John & Maggie Mitchell Gallery (Edmonton), Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver); Forum Expanded at the Berlinale (Berlin), Blackwood Gallery (Mississagua), Trinity Square Video (Toronto), Untitled Art Society (Calgary), 8-11 (Toronto), Nuit Blanche Toronto, Galveston Artist Residency (Texas); Studio XX (Montreal), Le Centre des arts actuels Skol as part of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal (Montreal), Thames Art Gallery (Chatham, ON), Casa Maauad (Mexico City); and SOMArts (San Francisco).
- Michelle Campos Castillo is a Salvadoran visual artist living in Edmonton. She has been the recipient of several public art commissions from the City of Edmonton, including Platanos, a set of three sculptures on permanent display at Belvedere Transit Centre, and is currently producing artwork for the LRT Valley Line in the west end of the city. Michelle is a frequent collaborator with artist Vivek Shraya; she has provided art direction and photography for Vivek's Trisha photo series, graphic design for her Lambda Literary Award-nominated book, What I LOVE about being QUEER, and VS. Books, the artist's imprint with Arsenal Pulp Press.
- Sol is a documentary photographer and filmmaker living between xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səl̓ilwətaɁɬ territory and his homelands of Treaty 7 territory. His lens-based work explores the ways he is welcomed to witness expressions of Indigeneity, creating imagery that attempts to show, in sometimes raw ways, the land and the people on it, the ways they use and connect to the land, and the artifacts they leave on it.
- Patrick Cruz is an interdisciplinary Filipino-Canadian artist, organizer and educator born and raised in Quezon City, Philippines currently living and working on the unceded land of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Cruz studied painting at the University of The Philippines Diliman, holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Guelph and a certificate in Pochinko clowning. Cruz is a co-founding member of Kamias Special Projects (KSP) a curatorial collective that hosts the Kamias Triennial in his hometown of Quezon City.
- Lanny DeVuono is an artist and writer currently living in California. She has taught at UC Denver, EWU, NYU, William Paterson, Rangsit University in Thailand and Trivandrum College of Fine Art in India. Awards include: a Fulbright Fellowship, an Artist Trust Fellowship (WA), a GAP Grant, residency awards at Yaddo, Centrum, Jentel, RedLine, and Sitka. Her work is in public collections such as NW Museum of Art & Culture, Mills College Art Museum, Washington State Medical Center, Swedish Hospital, Jundt Art Museum, the Kent Justice Center, Great Western Bank, among others. DeVuono’s current series of drawings, Searching For Water on Mars, uses landscape imagery as a metaphor, connecting the environmental crises on earth and space research. She also writes on contemporary art under the name Frances DeVuono, currently for Third Text online; past publications include: Art News, New Art Examiner, Arts and Artweek.
- Tao Fei is the Program Producer at 221A. She is a cultural worker and writer with a background in interdisciplinary performance-based practice. She was previously Executive Producer of the POP Montreal International Music Festival, where she oversaw the expansion and integration of visual art, film, and public symposia programs alongside the festival's core music programming, and produced annual site-based commissions and artist-led youth projects. She has was in residence at the Banff Centre in 2018 as part of the Critical Art Writing Ensemble III, and currently sits on the Board of Directors of the newly-established Cinéma Public in Montreal. Born in Hong Kong, Tao is sixth-generation Chinese-Canadian with maternal family ties to Vancouver’s Chinatown. She moved back to Vancouver in 2019, after 20+ years away. tfei@221a.ca
- oualie frost is a writer and (anti?)artist currently living in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal with their codependent and impish cat. oualie is also a recent graduate from the Alberta University of the Arts, holding a BFA in Painting. Much of their art and writing centers around anti-racism/oppression, critique, and exploring their Nevisian roots and culture from a diasporic, queer, humorous, and mixed race perspective. oualie is a regular writer for Afros in tha City, where their writing often centers around Black existence and success in areas not stereotypically seen as Black or welcoming towards Black people.
- Rosemary Heather is a art journalist, curator, and researcher with a specialization in Blockchain. She writes about art, the moving image and digital culture for numerous publications, artist monographs, and related projects internationally. Recent interviews include Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Anna Khachiyan, Chris Kraus, Kent Monkman, Ursula Johnson, Dynasty Handbag, Ken Lum, Kerry Tribe, Hito Steyerl, Phil Collins and Candice Breitz. She is a co-author of the collectively written novel Philip, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2006). Exhibitions she has curated include: Screen and Decor (2013); Ron Giii: Hegel’s Salt Man (2006-2007); Serial Killers: Elements of Painting Multiplied by Six Artists (1999); and I beg to differ (1996). From 2003-2009, Rosemary Heather was the editor of C Magazine (Toronto). Since 2015, she has worked in the blockchain industry as a writer and researcher. Clients include: Wellpath.me (Brooklyn); BitBlox Technologies Inc. (Toronto); Pegasus Fintech (Toronto); Blockgeeks (Toronto); Bitcoin Magazine (Tennessee); Decentral (Toronto). An archive of her writing can be found at https://rosemheather.com/
- Valeen Jules is a queer former foster kid, former homeless youth, and first-year college dropout from the Nuu-chah-nulth and Kwakwaka'wakw nations. Valeen has been known to friends and colleagues as “the doula that never leaves”, “the eagle soaring above”, and “the only top at the table”. They value equally their labour in community, in birth work, in being both a mentor and mentee of ancestral teachings, in supporting their immediate family of 8, and in hyping up their QTBIPOC friends.
- Jesse McKee (b.1984) is a leader in the Culture Industries, a Curator of Contemporary Art and Design, and he is the Head of Strategy at 221A. 221A works with artists and designers to research and develop social, cultural and ecological infrastructure. There, he leads the Organization’s advancement, communications, research, and programming. The organization develops and operates 14 000 m2 of cultural-use commercial and residential real-estate across a portfolio of properties that are sub-tenanted according to a cost-recovery operating model. 221A’s artistic program hosts long-term Fellowships for artists and designers, as well as producing public realm art and design projects, and develops education and learning programs, which work with communities to improve the public amenities and reduce barriers at the organization's cultural infrastructures and beyond. From 2019-24, McKee is the lead investigator on 221A’s Blockchains & Cultural Padlocks Digital Strategy, which is developing a digitally cooperative culture by “recommoning” land, data and objects. From 2020-22, he is a member of the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association’s Policy Advisory Council, and he is challenged by rebooting cities and public culture venues in equitable, novel and progressive ways in the wake of the COVID-19 long-tail global pandemic. Previously, he was the Curator of The Banff Centre (2011-15), and has worked with leading cultural organizations such as Western Front, Vancouver; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; The Independent Studio & Curatorial Program, New York; The Barbican Centre, London; Things that can happen, Hong Kong and Tranzit.org, Romania. In 2017, he was the curator of Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures, the inaugural edition of a civic triennial exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. McKee has served as a juror for the Sobey Art Award, and was a member of the Canada Council for the Art's Asia Pacific Delegation. He has written essays and reviews for Canadian Art, C Magazine, Fillip, Border Crossings, Kaleidoscope, and Cura. A recent catalogue essay, Surreal Ghosts and Neuroplastic Ancestors correlates Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson’s filmmaking with the neuroplastic effects of Vancouver’s economic enclosure over the past decade; published by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia and Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. A recent monograph on the work of the artist Neïl Beloufa, People, Love, War, Data & Travels, includes an essay by McKee, Counting on People: How it Started… How it’s Going, and this text frames the productions of Beloufa’s films from the mid-2010s as they foretold a global pandemic all enacted through video calls, amid the consequences of social media’s unchecked narrative accelerants; edited by Myriam Ben Salah with Benjamin Thorel, and published by After 8 Books, Paris. jmckee@221a.ca
- Riaz Mehmood is a multidisciplinary artist who uses video, photography and computer programming as his primary means of expression. His practice often visits themes of multiple and fluid identities, military-industrial complex and the on-going ‘war on terror’ in the SWANA region. His ancestral home is a small village located between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Riaz immigrated to Canada in 2000 as a professional engineer and decided to pursue a career in the arts. He holds an MFA from the University of Windsor (2012) and completed the Integrated Media program at the Ontario College of Art and Design (2005). He recently completed an artist residency with The Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists (SNAP) in Edmonton. His works have been shown nationally and internationally.
- Rehab Nazzal is a Palestinian-born multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Canada. Her work deals with the effect of settler colonial violence on the bodies and minds of colonized peoples and on the land and other non-human life. Nazzal’s video, photography, and sound works have been exhibited across Canada and internationally in both solo and group exhibitions including at Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto; CONTACT Photography Festival, Toronto; Karsh-Masson Galley, Ottawa; The Spanish Institute of Art; Encounters Film Festival, UK; The 22nd Sydney Biennale, Australia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Foresight Gallery, Amman, Jordan; and Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Ramallah, Palestine. She was a resident at the 29e Symposium international d'art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul and AXENEO7 Gallery in Quebec. Nazzal holds a PhD in Art and Visual Culture from Western University (London, Ontario), an MFA from Ryerson University (Toronto), and a BFA from the University of Ottawa. She is the recipient of several awards including the Social Justice Award from Ryerson University and the Edmund and Isobel Ryan Visual Arts Award in Photography from the University of Ottawa. She received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral award and has held multiple grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Art Council.
- Eugenio Salas’s practice involves disrupting social roles and dynamics through process-based projects. Salas examines the symbolic places and social environments that unfold through artistic collaboration. He carries out participatory performative actions employing media, print, and cooking. Salas’ previous projects include Snack Pack, a doughnut-based stop-motion animation work reflecting on his first Canadian job as a new immigrant; Tunnel, an installation involving the construction of a tunnel inside an art gallery with a non-status construction worker and gallery curator; YYZGRU, a parcel delivery system designed to exchange personal objects between Brazilians in Toronto and their families back home; Social Plastics/Nail Party, a participatory performance in a nail salon in collaboration with an immigrant family of nail technicians; The Supercake, a 22-foot long edible sculpture in collaboration with immigrant women with whom he worked at a cake factory; Garage_____, a land art installation and impromptu art exhibition on a major artery in London (ON); Fogones – Weast Feast, a participatory performance with immigrant cooks, waste laborers, and food producers in Philadelphia.
- Daniella Sanader is a writer and reader based in Toronto, where she is currently working as an independent editor. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Canadian Art, Artforum.com, C Magazine, BlackFlash, Little Joe, Border Crossings, Peripheral Review, Maclean's, and others. Her texts have also been published by a number of galleries and artist-run spaces across Canada and Europe. She holds an MA in Art History and Gender Studies from McGill University. She has curated projects for Vtape, Oakville Galleries, Gallery TPW, and others. She has held art writing and research residencies at the Banff Centre, Mercer Union (Toronto), and Rupert (Vilnius, forthcoming). desanader.com/
- Aram Han Sifuentes is a fiber and social practice artist, writer, and educator who works to claim spaces for immigrant and disenfranchised communities. Her work often revolves around skill sharing, specifically sewing techniques, to create multiethnic and intergenerational sewing circles, which become a place for empowerment, subversion and protest. Exhibitions of her work have been exhibited at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (Chicago, IL), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL), Chicago Cultural Center (Chicago, IL), Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis, MO), MCA Denver (Denver, CO), and Moody Center for the Arts (Houston, TX). Upcoming solo exhibitions include, Talking Back to Power: Projects by Aram Han Sifuentes, will open at the Skirball Cultural Center (Los Angeles, CA) in March 2022, and To Ward Off Authorities at moCa Cleveland (Cleveland, OH) in January 2022. Aram is a 2016 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, 2016 3Arts Awardee, and a 2020 Map Fund Grantee. Her project Protest Banner Lending Library was a finalist for the Beazley Design Awards at the Design Museum (London, UK) in 2016. She earned her BA in Art and Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an Associate Professor, Adjunct, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
- Becca Taylor is an artist and curator of Cree and Métis descent. Her practice involves investigations of Indigenous community building, through food sovereignty, gathering, deep listening, conversation and making. Notably, Becca co-curated the 4th iteration of La Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA) with Niki Little, entitled níchiwamiskwém | nimidet | my sister | ma sœur (2018), co-led land-based residency, Common Opulence (2018), in Northern Alberta and curated Mothering Spaces (2019) at the Mitchell Art Gallery. Becca is currently the Director of Ociciwan Contemporary at Centre in amiskwacîwâskahikan, AB.
- Leila Timmins is a Toronto-based curator and writer. She is currently the Senior Curator at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery and is a founding member of EMILIA-AMALIA.
- Stephanie Wakefield is an educator and researcher specializing in human-environment relations, urban resilience and sustainability, and social-ecological systems thinking. Wakefield is currently Director and Assistant Professor of the Human Ecology program at Life University (Marietta, GA), and holds a PhD in Human Geography from the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at The City University of New York Graduate Center. Wakefield’s books include Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space (Open Humanities Press) and Resilience in the Anthropocene: Governance and Politics at the End of the World (Routledge, co-edited with David Chandler and Kevin Grove). They frequently publish articles in academic and cultural journals including Political Geography, Geography Compass, Geoforum, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Place, and e-flux architecture. Along with scholarly publication and teaching, Wakefield frequently works with government organizations, community groups, art institutions and non-profits to explore experimental sustainability planning and community resilience design.
- Nicole Kelly Westman is the Education & Learning Programmer at 221A. Westman practices as a visual artist of Métis and Icelandic descent that recognizes with indebted gratitude the artists that have come before her and strenuously forged space, the curators that place care at the fore of their labour, the communities that foster confidence in her practice, and the institutions and organizations that implement policies prefacing relations of trust. As an artist, she enjoys practices of listening, watching, hosting, poeticizing, foraging, and sharing. Westman earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Emily Carr University (2012) and garnered invaluable experience through the practicum program in the Visual Arts department of the Banff Centre (2013-14). As a cultural worker, Westman was previously the Assistant Director (2014) and then Gallery Director (2015-18) of Stride Art Gallery, the Vice-President of the Board of M:ST Performative Art Festival (2014-18), and a Board Member at Untitled Art Society (2014-15), all Calgary/Mohkínstsis . Westman’s writing has been published as part of her own curatorial work, through the curatorial work of others with the essays rolling hills of prairie grasses as exquisite as rainforest and I am sorry I didn’t Call – A poem for a now – vacant site, as well as the periodicals C Magazine, Inuit Art Quarterly, Instudio Magazine, and Luma Quarterly. nkwestman@221a.ca
- jaz is a 2 spirit anti-professional, working as an interdisciplinary artist centering community care, ancestral connections and qtpoc relief. they live semi-nomadically, along the unceded west coast of turtle island as well as the interior of so-called british columbia. jaz’s ancestry ties them to unceded secwepemcúl’ecw in the southern interior of so-called british columbia and more distantly to scotland, though the bulk of their art practice blooms within the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (musqueam), skwxwú7mesh (squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔ/selilwitulh (tsleil-waututh) nations where they have been overwhelmed with the warmheartedness, generosity and support of the host nations and indigiqueer community.
- Alize Zorlutuna is a queer interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator whose work explores relationships to land, culture and the more-than-human, while thinking through settler-colonialism, history, and solidarity. Having moved between Tkarón:to and Anatolia (present-day Turkey) both physically and culturally throughout her life has informed her practice—making her attentive to spaces of encounter. She enlists poetics and a sensitivity to materials in works that span video, installation, printed matter, performance and sculpture. The body and its sensorial capacities are central to her work. Alize has presented her work across Turtle Island, and internationally. She is currently based in Tkarón:to, where she is an instructor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University.
Unceded Territory
221A acknowledges that the area called Vancouver is within the unceded Indigenous territories belonging to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. 221A recognizes that the colony of British Columbia was created through organized dispossession and colonial violence. 221A seeks to shift its organizational practices to work together with Indigenous people to end ongoing violence, dispossession and displacement.