Jordan Bennett
Jordan Bennett's ongoing practice utilizes painting, sculpture, video, installation and sound to explore land, language, the act of visiting, familial histories and challenging colonial perceptions of indigenous histories, stereotypes and presence with a focus on exploring Mi’kmaq and Beothuk visual culture of Ktaqamkuk. Jordan has participated in over 50 group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally in venues such as the National Museum of the American Indian, NYC; MAC-VAL, Paris; The Museum of Art and Design, NYC, NY; Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM; Project Space Gallery, RMIT, Melbourne, AUS; The Winnipeg Art Gallery, The Power Plant, Toronto, ON; Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal, QC; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France and was one of two artists to represent Newfoundland and Labrador in the 2015 Venice Biennial at Galleria Ca’Rezzonico, Venice, Italy as part of the official Collateral Events. He has been the recipient of several awards and honours most notably long listed for the 2016 and 2015 Sobey Art Award, a Hnatyshan Foundation REVEAL award, presented with the 2014 Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Councils Artist of the Year and named as one of the artists in the 2014 Blouin ARTINFO's Top 30 under 30 in Canada.
Ursula Johnson
Ursula Johnson is a multidisciplinary Mi’kmaq artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Her work combines the Mi’kmaq tradition of basket weaving with sculpture, installation, and performance art. In all its manifestations her work operates as didactic intervention, seeking to both confront and educate her viewers about issues of identity, colonial history, tradition, and cultural practice.
Eleanor King
Eleanor King is a Halifax based artist. She received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2001, and is currently a Fulbright Fellow and MFA candidate at Purchase College in New York. She has participated in residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, SOMA Mexico, and The Banff Centre among others. King has received numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Arts Nova Scotia, and was short-listed for the 2012 Sobey Art Award. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably at Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Nuit Blanche Toronto, and Galleri F15 in Norway. Her solo exhibition Dark Utopian at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (2015), was highlighted in a feature-length cover article for Canadian Art magazine. Previously, King was an instructor at NSCAD University, and a Director at Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is represented by Diaz Contemporary in Toronto.
Amish Morrell
Amish Morrell is Editor of C Magazine and Director of Programs at C The Visual Art Foundation. He has taught the History of Photography, Photo Theory and Criticism, and the History of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at both the University of Toronto Mississauga and at Ryerson University. He currently teaches in the graduate Criticism & Curatorial Practice MFA program at OCAD University. He has curated numerous public projects and exhibitions in Atlantic Canada, including The Frontier is Here, Nightwalks with Teenagers and Doing Our Own Thing: Back-to-the-Land in Eastern Canada During the 1970s. He has also written for publications including Art Papers, Ciel Variable, Fuse Magazine, History of Photography and Prefix Photo and for various artist catalogues.
He is currently working on a curatorial project titled Outdoor School, which will feature contemporary artist projects that explore the landscape and natural areas surrounding the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto. The exhibition will be presented at the Doris McCarthy Gallery in the fall of 2016.
Peta Rake
Peta Rake is the Curator of Walter Phillips Gallery and the Banff International Curatorial Institute. She has curated exhibitions at International Studio and Curatorial Program ISCP (New York), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art (San Francisco), Oakland Museum of California (Oakland), Luggage Store Gallery (San Francisco), Playspace (San Francisco), and Live Worms Gallery (San Francisco). She had previously worked at institutions that include California College of the Arts (San Francisco) and Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane, Australia) as well as the former Archivist at Steven Leiber Basement, a Fluxus and artists’ book archive in San Francisco. She writes regularly for C Magazine and her texts have appeared in Canadian Art, Fillip, San Francisco Arts Quarterly, Rearviews, Institutions by Artists, On Apology and ElevenEleven Journal. She holds a Masters in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and was the recipient of the 2014 Curator Award from ISCP in New York. Rake is the co-curator of the 2017 Alberta Biennial.
Lou Sheppard
Lou Sheppard is an artist and educator working in video, audio, and installation practices. Of settler ancestry, Sheppard was raised on unceded Mi'Kmaq territory in Nova Scotia, and currently lives in K'jiputuk (Halifax). Sheppard graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2006, then Mount Saint Vincent University’s Bachelor of Education as an art teacher in 2013. Their work has been exhibited both in Canada and internationally, and was included in the first Antarctic Biennale and in the Antarctic Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennial. Sheppard was awarded the Emerging Atlantic Artist Residency Award in 2017 to complete a project that composes music based on shifting ice masses in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. In 2018 Sheppard will be an artist in residence at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and at the Khyber Centre for the Arts in Nova Scotia.
Stefan St-Laurent
Stefan St-Laurent, multidisciplinary artist and curator, was born in Moncton, New-Brunswick, lives and works in Ottawa. He was the invited curator for the Biennale d’art performatif de Rouyn-Noranda in 2008, and for the 28th and 29th Symposium international d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul in 2010 and 2011. From 2002 to 2011, he worked as Curator of Galerie SAW Gallery, and has been an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa since 2010. His performance and video work has been presented in numerous galleries and institutions, including the Centre national de la photographie in Paris, Edsvik Konst och Kultur in Sollentuna (Sweden), YYZ in Toronto, Western Front in Vancouver and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. He has been a curator and programmer for a number of artistic organizations and festivals, including the Lux Centre in London, the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montréal, Festival international du cinéma francophone in Acadie, Les Rencontres internationales Vidéo Arts Plastiques in Basse-Normandie (France), Festival international du cinéma francophone en Acadie (Moncton), as well as Pleasure Dome, Images Festival of Independent Film and Video and Vtape in Toronto. He is currently Director of the artist-run centre AXENÉO7 in Gatineau.