Talysha Bujold-Abu
Talysha Bujold-Abu holds a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of Windsor (2018) and is recipient of the Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award – Excellence in Scholarship, Research and Creative Activity (2018). She also holds a BFA(H) in Visual Arts with a minor in English and Cultural Studies, from McMaster University (2016). Bujold-Abu is currently the Gallery Manager & Membership Coordinator with Arts Council Windsor & Region, a non-profit organization that programs and supports all disciplines of the creative arts in partnership with local artists, and arts-organizations.
Currently, Bujold-Abu is examining the cross-border relationship between the black communities of Windsor ON, and Detroit USA (1930 -1950s) during The International Miss Sepia Contests held as part of the Emancipation Parade and Freedom Celebrations of Windsor, ON. This work builds on her artistic practice which explores the liminal space of mixed heritage. Using pattern as visual narrative, Bujold-Abu addresses shifting interpretations of racialized identity. Blackness, as both label and a state of being, is central to these considerations, and she interrogates both implicit and explicit racism, acting as participant and witness to shifting interpretations of racial hierarchies.
Within the past three years, she has completed an artist-residency at NZ Pacific Studios in New Zealand (2016), spoken and exhibited at Intersections | Cross Sections Conference in Toronto ON (2018) and presented/participated in the Buoyant Cartographies – a research symposium in Windsor ON (2018). Exhibitions include: Art is a Living Thing in Masterton NZ, Flock Fest; Incubation in Leamington ON, The Truth Has Legs; and The Living River Project: Art, Water and Possible Worlds in Windsor ON.
Craig Campbell
Craig Campbell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin.
I am fascinated with the way that making things, making art, curating exhibitions, and organizing workshops can function as devices for thinking. I was grateful when Erin Manning and Brian Massumi articulated this in their book Thought in the Act. They gave me some language to describe something I’d been doing my whole life.
I am a founding member of the Ethnographic Terminalia curatorial collective (www.ethnographicterminalia.org) and have been involved in many different making- and curating-based initiatives. Aside from creative endeavors as well as arranging for groups of people to meet and travel together to do, make, say and think stuff, I have a persistent desire to experiment with and theorize modes of description and evocation.
My book Agitating Images: Photography Against History in Indigenous Siberia was published by the University of Minnesota Press in the fall of 2014. Current projects include the cultural history of an unbuilt hydro-electric dam in Central Siberia, the weird time of a shadow, re-mediations of socialist encounters, and the aesthetics of damaged, degraded, and manipulated photographs. I am is also involved in an initiative called Writing with Light, to explore the persistent mattering of photography and photo-essays to cultural anthropology.
Personal website: www.metafactory.ca
Imogen Clendinning
Imogen Clendinning is a video artist who hails from the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, comprised of the Ojibway, the Odawa, and the Potawatomie, what is now referred, in a colonial context, to be Windsor, ON. Clendinning identifies as a cisgender femme maker whose found-footage videos deconstruct tropes and signifiers used in cult cinema. Her process uses sexploitation films and antiquated technologies to investigate how media images can shape identities and one’s relationship to the lived world. Clendinning’s video-works incorporate themes such as sexuality, violence, femininity, and the inherent anti-capitalism of degraded images. Clendinning recently completed an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Windsor. Within the year Clendinning participated in the University of Windsor’s Noiseborder festival, and worked collaboratively with the IN/TERMINUS Research Group. Clendinning is currently the Programming Coordinator at Artcite Inc., an artist-run centre focused on community building and bringing contemporary arts to the Windsor-Essex region.
Photo credit: Sigi Torinus, courtesy of Noiseborder
Fiona Couillard
Fiona Couillard is a Calgary based visual artist holding a BFA with distinction from the Alberta University of the Arts (formerly ACAD). Her practice explores abstraction in a continuing dialog between conceptualization and the formal aspects of paint and materials. She has received many awards and scholarships for merit, academics, and involvement. Her work was recently featured at the Marion Nicoll Gallery (Arts Common, Calgary) and the Brightside Exhibition (ATB Calgary). You can also find her work included in numerous private collections and the permanent collections of the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede, Northpoint School for Boys and the Shaw Family collection.
Karen Engle
Karen Engle (PhD): I am an associate professor of Media Arts and Culture in the School of Creative Arts, at the University of Windsor. Research interests include visual culture (especially photo-based work), theories of affect, memory, and modernity. Having spent time in various disciplines (English literature, Sociology, and Visual Arts). I am a committed inter-disciplinarian. Writing is my primary medium, although I am exploring pinhole photography for this event.
Recent publications include: Feelings of Structure: Explorations in Affect, co-edited with Dr. Yoke-Sum Wong (2018, McGill-Queen’s University Press), “Fragments of Desire” with Trudi-Lynn Smith in Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, 7, no. 1 (2016), “The Boondoggle: Lee Miller and the Vicissitudes of Private Archives” in Photographies, 8, no. 1 (2015): 85-104)., I am also author of the book Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination (2009, McGill-Queen’s University Press)
Lindsey A. Freeman
Lindsey A. Freeman is a writer and sociologist interested in atomic culture, atmosphere, memory, and poetics. She is author of This Atom Bomb in Me (Redwood/Stanford Press) and Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia (UNC Press). Freeman is also co-editor of The Bohemian South: Creating Counter-Cultures from Poe to Punk (UNC Press). She is a member of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography, the Institute of Incoherent Geography, and an affiliated-researcher with the Espaces et Sociétés (Space and Society Center) at University of Caen-Normandy. She is currently at work on a series of essays about art, miniature, and disaster called The Tiny Uncanny and an ethnography of rain. Freeman teaches sociology on top of a sci-fi mountain in British Columbia at Simon Fraser University.
Website:www.lindseyfreeman.net
Twitter: @sociologybomb
Kristen Gallerneaux
Kristen Gallerneaux, MFA/PhD is an artist, curator, and sonic researcher. She has published on topics as diverse as mathematics in midcentury design, the visual history of telepathy research, the world’s first mouse pad, and car audio bass battles in Miami. Her recently published monograph, High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres & the Object Hereafter is available via Strange Attractor and MIT Press. Gallerneaux has most recently appeared as a speaker at Unsound Krakow, Moogfest, and Pop Kultur festivals and has written for the Barbican Center, ARTnews, and the Quietus. She is also Curator of Communications and Information Technology at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan, where she continues to build upon one of the largest historic technology collections in North America.
Faegheh ‘Vicki’ Kalantari
Faegheh ‘Vicki’ Kalantari is an international artist born in Tehran, Iran. She completed her Bachelor of Photography at Azad University in Tehran. Currently, Vicki is completing her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Windsor. As an Iranian native who was born and raised in an entirely different region from that of North America, she is still dependent on parts of her culture, arts, language, etc. Her work deals with her personal reflections on themes of memory, absence, nostalgia, adaptation, displacement. While her art engages with her personal experiences as an immigrant in a new country, she hopes to be able to convey these themes as universal and cross-cultural.
As an Iranian immigrant, Vicki moved to Windsor, and faced challenges reconciling her sense of identity in her new home. Using photography, text, video and audio, Vicki explores displacement and adaption, sometimes inviting viewers to identify with her experiences, and at other times challenging viewers to experience the feelings of not understanding, of not belonging.
Randy Lewis
Randy Lewis is Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses about contemporary culture and creativity. A former Contributing Writer for The Brooklyn Rail, he is most recently the author of Under Surveillance: Being Watched in Modern America (2017) as well as three books on documentary film and indigenous media. Among his creative projects are art installations, music videos, a full-length play, two documentary films, with a third in the works on apocalyptic fandom. Under the name Part Time Genius, he recently released an alt/electronic album with Monti Sigg. He is also the founder and editor of The End of Austin, a digital humanities project about urban transformation.
Andriko Lozowy
Andriko Lozowy: I am a Canadian Social Researcher and Photographer who incorporates collaborative methods in innovative ways. I currently use my Sociology Ph.D. to pay the bills by teaching in Edmonton at the UofA and Concordia. In the last few years I have taught in/at Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie, and the University of Lethbridge. I have extensive experience working with youth and other marginalized communities to create participatory and active research projects with social impacts. For example, previous research offered youth in Fort McMurray an opportunity to work together, learn photography and tarry with social and spatial questions. I like to use photography as a research practice that serves to document material impacts on social behaviour in everyday life. I often think of research as something that starts with a camera and images and then evolves into other forms of community-based discourse. I have curatorial and installation experience at a national and international level where my work has been showcased in uncommon venues as a means of spatial and social resignification. I am currently working on several writing projects and I look forward to sharing work in the coming years. For now, I point back at a few more recent efforts, such as an edited collection published in Imaginations Journal titled North By West (where some of the SofAnt participants also appear), and my editorial work with the relatively new Media Theory journal, and spaceandculture.com.
Kimberly Mair
Kimberly Mair is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge. Her research is primarily concerned with the aesthetics of communication, social theory, and critique of biopolitics. Her book Guerrilla Aesthetics: Art, Memory, and the West German Urban Guerrilla (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016) emphasizes the sensorial aspects of 1970s guerrilla communications and their reverberations in artistic practice. Mair is currently writing about the activities of Mass Observation, an organization that studied mass feelings, beliefs, and behaviours in the 1930s and 40s and did some of this work under contract with Britain’s Ministry of Information during the Second World War, for instance, reporting on: what people did with the public information brochures that organized civil defence; fluctuations in public feeling; the circulation of rumours; how much sleep people were getting during the blitz, and so on. This project also concerns how the planning of Air Raid Precautions (ARPs) and the circulation of civil defence imperatives, public information brochures, slogans, and instructional posters indirectly endowed mundane spaces with discretionary deliberation over informal asylum in WWII Britain. The mobilization of civil defence is an anticipatory endeavour. Britain’s ARP initiatives were premised upon and intertwined with interwar fears concerning the rapid advancement of aeronautics, birthrate decline, and they were not necessarily conceived apart from the stark imaginings of speculative fiction writers who anticipated the end of civilization. Prior to the war, planners even consulted H.G. Wells, prompting him to anticipate what the next war would be like. Recreationally, Mair is interested in real and imagined organizations, secret operations, spies and other covert actors, ciphers, and obscure documents and artifacts. Whenever possible, her formal work will attempt to engage such subjects, therefore, she is looking forward to participating in Operation Anticipation… ahem…Structures of Anticipation in Windsor.
Brenda Francis Pelkey
Brenda Francis Pelkey was born in Kingston, Ontario, where her father served in the Canadian Armed Forces. While she was growing up the family moved almost every two years to cities across the country, and spent two years in Germany. In1980 she moved to Saskatchewan. Twenty-three years later in 2003 she moved to Windsor.
In Saskatoon she became involved with the art community through venues such as Blackflash and the Photographers Gallery. In 1994, she completed her MFA at the University of Saskatchewan where she worked as an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art. Brenda Francis Pelkey is now almost retired from the University of Windsor where she is a Professor at the School of Creative Arts.
Brenda Francis Pelkey has exhibited throughout Canada as well as Scotland, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Finland and England. Her works appear in numerous collections such as the MacKenzie Art Gallery, the Mendel Art Gallery, the Art Bank, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Dunlop Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Windsor, Confederation Centre for the Arts, and The National Gallery of Canada.
Since completing “…the great effect of the imagination on the world,” in 1989 she has had a number of solo exhibitions: “dreams of life and death” (1994), Momento Mori (1996), Oblivion (1999) , As if there were grace (2000), Haunts (2001), Hierophony (2003) and Spaces of Transformation (2004) and Threshold (2005) , From the Outside In (2013), and a exhibition toured by the AGW Brenda Francis Pelkey: A Retrospective (2016 – 2018).
Dominic Pinney
Dominic Pinney is a Canadian, Windsor-Based, Visual Artist who examines the seductive and ominous qualities of the city space through a variety of mediums including, light-based installation, video, sound, sculpture, and text. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Windsor (2019) where he was a recipient of the Joseph Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship awarded by SSHRC to assist in supporting his thesis exhibition and research. He also holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction in Painting from the Alberta College of Art + Design (2017). Pinney has exhibited works in both solo and curated group shows in both Alberta and Ontario. In partnership with Left Contemporary in Windsor ON he facilitates the VIDEOSTORE art festival.
By focusing on experience and perception, his work encourages viewers to form their own relationship with the visuals that he references to generate their own questions about their feelings towards the city environment. Within his practice, he is continually exploring the liminal qualities of city spaces; how encounters with those passing by around us, little snippets of conversation and moments, paired with the panoptic hum of commercial and industrial signage affect us as we pass from one place to the next. Our media seems to foretell of dark cities lit only by the holograms of advertisements and police-sirens, dystopian sci-fi acting as a grim oracle. However, he is not in search of a pre-ordained descent into these dark futures, rather, he is looking at this media and his work in relation to our own time as a warning, not a certainty.
Past exhibitions include: THE HOURS WE WAIT, in collaboration with Ryan Danny Owen, in Calgary AB, Once Removed in Windsor ON, and I Dream of Electric Streets in Windsor ON.
Personal Website: www.dominicpinney.com
Kate Schneider
Kate Schneider is a photo-based artist, educator, and kayak instructor living in Toronto, Ontario. Since 2009, she has exhibited shows, presented at conferences, and published writing throughout Canada and the United States on the subjects of environmental sustainability and photographic discourse. In her works, land is more than a photographic subject – it is dynamic, durable, delicate, and marked by contested histories and desires. From the photographic and cartography trace to structures built or left on a landscape, Kate’s works are multimodal and experiential stories of place that question the mythology of a static environment and ask the viewer to consider the transitory and permanent marks we leave on the land, water, and sky surrounding us. Kate’s works have shown Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art (Toronto), Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), SoHo Photo (New York), and the Great Plains Art Museum (Lincoln, Nebraska). In 2014, Senator Barbara Boxer used Kate’s works as a visual testimony against the Keystone XL pipeline on the floor of the United States Senate. Her works have been published in numerous publications, such as Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward publication and PDN’s Photo Annual.
Monti Sigg
Monti Sigg is based in Austin, Texas. With her partner Randy Lewis, she has worked as a photographer on two Ex-Situ projects and is now gearing up to co-produce a documentary film on apocalyptic cosplay.
Sahar Te
Sahar Te is a Toronto-based artist and curator whose practice mobilizes methods that open up alternative realities and confront convention. Through exploring the role of narrativization of the past as it shapes the future, Te’s interventions range from language and semiotics, social dynamics and ethics, to media studies and oral histories. Te’s projects engage in geopolitical and socio-political discourses to understand hegemony within different power structures.
Te had obtained her BFA from Alberta College of Art and Design, and her MFA from the University of Toronto. Te’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at spaces including: The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, University of Toronto Art Museum, SBC Gallery in Montreal, Illingworth Kerr Galley in Alberta, Mohsen Gallery in Tehran, and the War Museum in Tehran. She is currently a sessional instructor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Toronto.
Website: www.saharte.com
Sarah Beveridge
Sarah Beveridge is an artist, curator, educator, writer and parent. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Western Ontario (2002) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Windsor (1997). As a sessional professor she has taught at the University of Western Ontario, Georgian College, and the University of Windsor. Her curatorial practice includes, Co-founder of Sis Boom Bah Gallery, Queen West, and Co-Director of I-Land Gallery, Morrow Ave, Toronto (1998-2000), SB Contemporary Art, Barrie, Ontario (2005-2007) and later the Curator of Exhibitions and Public Projects for the MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie, Ontario (2006 -2009). She has published writing on the work of contemporary Canadian artists; Sheila Butler, Jack Butler, Monica Tap, Patrick Mahon, Don Maynard, Vera Jacyk, Olexander Wlasenko and José Seoane.
Beveridge currently practices from her home studio and gallery in Windsor, Ontario. An old 1950’s pink portable typewriter has been the impetus to create her most recent series of work titled, Threading Thoughts. An exploration of narrative, a process of automatic writing; an intuitive response to making is intertwined with fragments of photographic imagery that hold mnemonic associations to specific locations, objects, and familial stories and a material combination of image, text and thread. A present exchange between what is publicly recorded, historically, and what is considered personal story is a space of intrigue, not viewed separately, but as interconnected.
She is the owner of SB Contemporary Art, Windsor, Ontario and has curated and operated a commercial gallery and studio for 10 years.
Derek Sayer
Derek Sayer, FRSC is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, where he held a Canada Research Chair in Social Theory and Cultural Studies. He has also taught in the universities of Glasgow and Lancaster in the UK. He currently lives in Calgary, Alberta. His earlier publications were in social theory (Marx’s Method, 1978; The Violence of Abstraction, 1987; Capitalism and Modernity, 1990) and historical sociology (The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution, with Philip Corrigan, 1985). The core of his later work has been a trilogy of books that take the city of Prague as an alternative vantage point for an exploration of modernity, loosely modeled on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, 1998; Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History, 2013; and Prague at the End of History: Postcards from Absurdistan (in progress), all published by Princeton University Press. His recent short book Making Trouble: Surrealism and the Human Sciences (Prickly Paradigm, 2017) argues the methodological importance of surrealism for research and writing in the social sciences. He is a founding editor of the Journal of Historical Sociology and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His website is is at coastsofbohemia.com. His page at academia.edu has downloadable copies of many of his writings.
Yoke-Sum Wong
Yoke-Sum Wong left UK higher academia after wasting too much time in it and returned to Canada in the summer of 2016. She is now teaching at AuArts (formerly ACAD). She is a historical sociologist and journal editor who became lost in multidisciplinary meanderings and experimentations. During the last few years she has devoted her energy into organizing/curating international workshops, and exhibitions that bring together artists, art practitioners and academics from all disciplines. These meetings have helped produced a book co-edited with Karen Engle (University of Windsor), called Feelings of Structure (2018, MQUP).
She gets bored easily.