Platforms: The Teachers Among Us

Artist statement

It is evening and red and grey rolling clouds are forming and dissolving over the Arbutus Walkway Gardens. They are unexpected.  I am more accustomed to skies that leave me wide-eyed and alert in Saskatchewan.  I pull over in a parking lot and take out my camera, breathing in the sky as I photograph. 

I am aware of the reciprocity between the land-sky-scape and myself.  The dialogue is one of presence and story. The inner landscape that so readily awakes in me as I photograph small plants in earth is what author Barry Lopez called a kind of projection within a person of a part the exterior landscape. He said, “We are profoundly influenced in ways we think by where on this earth one goes, what one touches---the patterns one observes in nature, the intricate history of one’s life in the land, the wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf ---are known.” We are immersed in dialogue with two landscapes, an inner landscape that follows us and an outer which is changing. 

Nomination statement - Jesse Birch

From her earliest work as an artist and photographer, Sandra Semchuk made space for the perspectives of others. From children, to Elders, to animals, and through her 15-year long collaboration with James Nicolas, she actively considered what she could share, and what she could learn. Sandra brought this openness and curiosity to her practice as an educator as well.

I was lucky to have Sandra as a teacher in the photography program at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in the late 1990s. She led by example, encouraging learners to follow their own paths, reflect on their worldviews, and develop their artistic voices. She guided classes with questions about the responsibility of image making and queried if photographs could be created in a way that is both thoughtful and empathetic.

Sandra’s openness as both an artist and educator was contagious and nourishing. I still think about her work and approach to teaching, and I know that countless students benefited from her perspective. 

Artist statement

The Dreamers (Enter the Grotto) is inspired by the aesthetic tradition of the grotesque, the mythic Waqwaq/Jinmenju tree, the notion of the axis mundi, and the western phylogenetic tree of life that traces out evolutionary relationships between biological life forms. The encyclopedic illustration aesthetic of the outermost panels combines natural life forms with human/human-made forms (our hybrid world of nature-culture). These forms might evoke a kind of “standing reserve” of figures that could be added to the central panel of the tree, which is giving birth to myriad life forms. The work also points to how dreams might be constructed within the unconscious.

I cut vinyl sheets to make the forms. Their rough-cut aspect draws attention to them being cut by hand, as well as to vinyl being a material from the petrochemical industry. Imperfections in form speak to the fragility of our biosphere, subject to stress and destruction, driven by the logic of capitalist profit which encourages untenable resource extraction and capricious consumption.

Nomination statement - Jesse Birch

I first encountered Marina Roy's artwork at Vancouver’s Or Gallery in 2003. Her video animation Errant included surreal and sketchy looping images of meat grinders, mouths, floating liquor bottles, and sinking ships, morphing into one another, rendering it impossible to discern their boundaries. In a city known for hard-edged cinematic images and ultra-high production values, this work felt refreshingly alive and urgent. It was made by drawing and erasing chalk on slate, materials that evoke a kind of anachronistic pedagogy.

This piece was made the year Marina started working at the University of British Columbia. If there was a link to her teaching practice it wasn't the chalkboard, but rather the disruption of binaries and the power structures that enforce them. In classrooms or crit sessions, Marina met students where they were, facilitating critical peer-to-peer dialogue while paying careful attention to how they expressed their worldviews. She encouraged students to not only be attuned to cultural and historical contexts, but also to the ways that their materials speak.

While I was a student in the MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies program at UBC, Marina was my Grad advisor and I had the great privilege of participating in her MFA Visual Arts seminar. I learned much from both her careful feedback, and by observing the ways that she led group discussions with attentiveness and humour. Marina’s empowering approach to mentorship had a profound impact on my cohort, and myself.

Artist's statement

A Transdisciplinary project on Turtle Island, presenting the turtle as a metaphor to explore ecological grief, interspecies kinship/Interbeing, and humanity’s slow-motion response to climate collapse.  

A forest frames curving trunks that meet at the centre. Suspended in this portal, a green sea turtle occupies an unstable space. Interrupting the sentimental image of the endangered environment, the turtle returns the viewer’s gaze as a question. SD Holman deploys Queer ecologies to reanimate Barbara Kruger’s famous 1981 critique of spectatorship beyond the male gaze to include the Human Gaze. Drawing on Kruger’s use of direct address and confrontational text, the phrase “Your Gaze hits the side of my face” implicates the viewer in the politics of looking. The turtle is not a mute object for consumption, but rather a subject who looks back at our human gaze, refusing complete availability.  

The human gaze is an anthropocentrism: the habit of treating the nonhuman world as object, resource, scenery and passive recipient of our human attention. The turtle does not merely appear before us. It addresses us. Its apparent expression makes visible the violence of being seen without being heard. Turtles vocalize, they sing; they are not silent, the problem is our refusal to listen. 
Turtles are unimaginably ancient. In their 230-million-year history, turtles have outlived three mass extinctions—including the one that preceded the dinosaurs. Yet turtles may not survive this sixth, human-caused, mass extinction. The magnificent Pacific Leatherback —Earth's largest and second fastest reptile is the most pelagic of sea turtles and diving as deep as whales—will be extinct in our lifetime. 
Music for Turtles is a love song to our multi-species siblings, a series of works inviting us to shift from the Anthropocene to the Symbiocene: a futurity reviving the old knowledge of kindred beyond the human, reflecting our interdependence with all life.  

Nominators statement -  Rachel Iwaasa

SD Holman (pronoun art/art/art’s) has been blazing a trail for queer artists since the 1990s. Holman was the first out lesbian actor to portray an openly lesbian recurring role on network television—on Global TV’s Madison, 3 years before Ellen DeGeneres’ coming out and decade-long blacklisting. Holman started the Queer Arts Festival (QAF) and SUM Gallery in Vancouver because, as art said, “There was no place for me as an artist, so I wanted to make that place for other artists." Under Holman’s leadership 2006-2021, QAF + SUM instigated and presented thousands of works by other artists of all disciplines. Observing Holman’s career for a quarter century, I’ve noticed repeatedly how concepts and techniques in Holman’s work gain popularity 10 years later in other artists’ hands. As Holman turns art’s attention to the Symbiocene, I only hope the rest of us take less than a decade to catch up.

Artist's statement

The large south-facing expanse of windows of Olympic Village Station are covered with a field of black-framed hexagonal shapes. Sunlight shines through the hexes to reveal richly coloured imagery of plants native to the area—berries, mosses, great conifers, the reeds and rushes of the Skwachàys salt marsh—creating an effect that resembles stained glass whose imagery is a representation and reminder of the original flora, land and water of the area. The hexagons are arranged to suggest a vast, abstracted map of the original terrain of False Creek South, viewed in the same orientation as would have appeared from the vantage point of the station, looking uphill and south, including the many streams that used to run down the areas known today as Mount Pleasant and Fairview Slopes and drain into False Creek. The waters are the most transparent areas of the map, revealing glimpses of the streets, traffic, and human movements that now shape this entire area. While being a naturally occurring and efficient way of covering an area, hexagons also evoke board games that use repeated tiling to create the field of play. Some of these games, such as Catan, have mechanics related to territorial expansion and resource trading, narratives that have also shaped this region. 

Nominator statement – Sol Hashemi

For Germaine Koh, every project becomes an opportunity to DIY, to roll up her sleeves and teach herself how to weld, to program, to lobby, to build. Koh actively plants this mindset across communities through her project League, in which she convenes groups to invent the rules for new games, and through her teaching at the University of British Columbia.

Germaine Koh’s art does its work through play. Games, rules, theatre, concertos: conduct-it-yourself, be your own conductor, conduct together to co-develop civic initiatives, community-invented sports, research clusters. When other artists need studio space, Koh rewrites the rules, deploying a FLEET of micro-studio sculptures. In Koh’s ongoing Knitwork, hundreds of old unraveled garments join into one, the sweaters frogged to make something new, something unexpected. Her Fabric of Campus Fibre Garden plots a public space for creating super-local textiles and dyes. Koh teaches us that, to update a line attributed to Plato, you can discover more about a person society in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

Artist's statement

Wolf is a large-scale photograph of a carved tool handle. The image highlights the deep connection between Coast Salish artistry and the tools that sustain it. The identifying information—my name, the title, and description—appears directly on the photograph, integrating context into the artwork itself. In this way, the piece speaks both visually and textually, affirming that Musqueam art is inseparable from its makers, stories, and traditions.

Nominated by Mack Paul

Artist's statement

As one of the greatest spiritual and political leaders of the Lakota people – I am forever grateful for Sitting Bull’s wisdom and spiritual practice. He was deeply committed to Lakota people living and continuing culture under great duress during his lifetime. He scarified so the people may live. This work situates his nobility, striking appearance and fortitude within an urban setting. I have rearticulated a few sentences from his public speeches to hopefully inspire all to hear and see deeply and in the profundity of seeing and hearing, may we hear and see each other in good ways that inspire each other to walk gently. 

Nominator’s statement — Jayce Salloum

"I had known of Dana Claxton's work - perhaps even we'd met - and immediately was taken by her clarity of vision. A deftness, a path that seemed to be carved out of history, rooted through the present and seeded into possible futures. A difficult one, engaged, but defined enough to create/lay a path/to walk on, into the decades ahead. This striving for a justice embedded in visual arts is rare but foundational to a justness far beyond its borders, or, on the other hand, closer than that, an internal, coming from within itself where art is one indicator, one element, one piece of a total life reaching for a better place.

Dana makes objects while weaving worlds. The ostensible threads are tentacles, overlaid ways of being, an ontological weft and existential warp. Her objects have meaningful lives - palimpsests, collapsing epochs, expanding experiences, connecting viewer and viewed, object and subject(s). Imbued in them, a living sense of spirit, of connections in creation and voicing...  casting a voice, fissures for meaning to be expressed and heard. Not a call into the void, this is a recognition of communities, a specific commons of sorts, of histories, a rhizomatic web of inquiries, routes to acknowledge and propel us along, this integral, an essential path of life."

Artist's statement

The banners and zine that make up the work Blanketing are reflections on an abundance of textile hand work.

In this project the term “blanketing” describes the active nature of making and using blankets. There is intention and creativity in both the creating and the long-term maintenance of blankets (quilts, comforters, duvets, throws, crib blankets, and more).

As objects with organic and inorganic components, blankets lead active lives, warming bodies and then carrying evidence of those lives in their:

• Shape
• Smells
• Stains
• Mends
• Eventually discarded fibers

The 6 banners show blankets that are part of the material and creative legacy of my mother, who passed last year, my late grandmothers, and other known and unknown textile workers, sewists, and makers. I have sewn some of them, but mostly they are gifted blankets that I have mended or transformed into clothing.

Every blanket shown in the banners includes the silhouette drawings of a bed with stacked blankets. These images are also on the cover of the zine Blanketing that accompanies the banners. It is available in the VPL Zine collection near the entrance to the library (level 2).

The ink print on fabric found in the photos is a legacy of a long-running social art project, Comforter Art Action, that I led from 2001 to 2018. I first designed and silk screened the images for an installation at The Glenbow Museum in 2009 (“Sew City”, Calgary, Alberta) and later gifted them to participants who helped to sew or knot blankets. Comforter Art Action produced and distributed over 100 tied patchwork blankets to shelters at the Mexican/US border, in Vancouver’s DTES, and at other international sites of refuge. The prints acknowledge the abundance of care and creativity in acts of making blankets. The zine series, Comforters, Comforters, Comforters (2003-07), documented the Comforter Art Action project and is still available in the VPL’s Zine collection. 

The 6 banner images show handmade and altered blankets in rural settings of the Pacific Northwest. They were photographed by Carl Wiebe and I on Malcolm Island where we were artists in residence at the Sointula House. Malcolm Island is in the traditional Kwakwaka'wakw territories of the 'Namgis, Mamalilikala, and Kwakuitl Nations. While in residence I visited a Regalia Making Workshop at U’mista Cultural Centre, 'Namgis First Nation, Alert Bay. Sointula, the name of the island’s small town and ferry terminus, is a Finnish word meaning “place of the chord” or “place of harmony”, all of which recalls the legacy of Finnish settlers including their local textile tradition of gill net rug making. 

Additional credit – Carl Wiebe, photographer.

Nominator’s statement

I first met Lois Klassen when I was hired as a studio assistant for her publishing project Reading The Migration Library, a project committed to the publication of work about migration and displacement. Working with her, I became deeply inspired about the possibilities of small publishing and collaborative working models. She has always shared her skills, knowledge, and encouragement generously, invaluably contributing to my confidence and growth as an artist.  

Across all mediums, Lois’s work is grounded in her commitment to her community. While working on RML, I was moved by the participation of not only artists and writers involved in the series, but many of Lois’s past collaborators, friends, and colleagues. Through her actions as artist and publisher, she has created a community of artists and writers who share commitment to collaboration and the open exchange of their work.  

In Lois’s latest work Blanketing (from the series Practices of Everyday Ethics) she brings a focus to her textile practice with poignant meditations on:

• Grief
• Mutual aid
• Sustainability
• Ethical production
• The inherited legacy of women’s work

Lois expresses her gratitude for her ancestors and mentors, shedding light on her position in a muti-generational practice of artistry and community care. She caretakes the resulting heirlooms – both physical and incorporeal – preserving them for the future, mending where needed. 

– Ruby Lewis

Sandra Semchuk, born in 1948 in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan is of Ukrainian and Polish descent. In 1971 she married Richard Holden. As two founding members of The Photographers Gallery in Saskatoon the two artists asserted their photography was not peripheral to major cities but central to their lives. Daughter, Rowenna, was born in 1974.

Sandra created works grounded in empathetic insight, resistance to dominant cultures and respect for the wider-than-human context. Her study of Chinese calligraphy and performance art led to moving parallel to her subjects in multi-frame gestural works. These works, along with collaborations with Rowenna, her father, Martin, and her second partner, Rock Cree, James Nicholas, signaled her value to photographic practices embodying interrogation of the self, dialogue, and recognition of experience as the basis for stories including painful colonial histories.  

Awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal for significant contributions to arts, culture, and human rights advocacy (2025), SD Holman’s art is collected privately and exhibited internationally. Their work unfolds in the spaces between: between photograph and ritual, visibility and elision, grief and emergence, adopting the role of participant observer—a position that Judith Butler theorizes in social participation within the matrix of intelligibility, where gender, identity, and culture are continually produced through relational visibility. Holman enters this matrix to disturb it, to uncover the unseen, to dignify cultural subjects forced into erasure.

SD Holman  champions the Symbiocene as a counterpoint to the Anthropocene—leaving behind the current geological epoch characterized by human impact on the planet. Coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, the Symbiocene envisions a future where humanity re-integrates with natural systems and fosters mutualistic relationships rather than exploitation.

Holman's work reaches across performance and installations, and curls into itself a multitude of indecisive moments. Moments that entangle each of us everyday, embracing indeterminacy as an opening to joy, perversion, contradiction, chance, and unfinished thought. 

Germaine Koh is an artist and organizer whose work ranges widely across media. Her work adapts familiar objects, everyday actions, and common spaces to create situations that look at the significance of communal experiences and the connections between people, technology, and natural systems.

She served as the City of Vancouver’s first Engineering Artist in Residence in 2018-20. Koh was a 2023 laureate of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, a 2023-24 Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, and since 2024 she is Assistant Professor at University of British Columbia.

Marina Roy is a Vancouver-based artist and writer, and associate professor of visual art at the University of British Columbia. Her artwork investigates the grotesque, at the intersection of language, image, and materiality, and her research interests include ecology, posthumanism, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics. Humour is explored through a corporeal register: humans’ underlying animality and mortality. She has shown nationally and internationally.

Roy was recipient of the VIVA award in 2010. She has published two books, sign after the x (Arsenal/Artspeak, 2001) and Queuejumping (Information Office/Art Metropole, 2022). She is associate professor of visual art at The University of British Columbia. 

The work of Christos Dikeakos investigates the archaeological and historical through photography. As a first-generation member of the Vancouver photo-conceptual group, he offers a critique of urban history, topography, depicting cultural aspects of inhabitation and the city in a state of flux. His Sites and Place Names series in Athens, Berlin, Saskatoon, and Vancouver track significant cultural shifts and open discussions around ideological contexts. In these pictures, a backdrop of contemporary habitations highlights the multi-linguistic narratives and memories of urban typologies.

Dikeakos produced a touring exhibition for the McMaster Museum of Art, unpacking 40 years’ worth of drawings, sculptures, and photography on the French American artist Marcel Duchamp. This was followed in 2014 with a solo show Nature Morte at the Kelowna Art Gallery, picturing the seasonal paradigms of his family’s apple orchard in the southern Okanagan Valley, and a solo exhibition showed in 2015 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. NEXT: Christos Dikeakos, a series of large-scale photographs of West Coast Pacifica, took on the idea that there exist conductive resonances in both cultural and natural spaces. His most recent solo show, Christos Dikeakos: The World as an Open Studio, was a survey exhibition curated by Hercules Papaioannou at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, in conjunction with the 8th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art in Greece.

Xwalacktun, O.B.C. is an internationally recognized Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) artist of Squamish and Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw ancestry.

Educated at Emily Carr University and Capilano College, Xwalacktun has built a distinguished career as a master carver, painter, and designer whose work draws upon Indigenous teachings, cultural traditions, and connections to community. Themes of healing, unity, environmental stewardship, and cultural continuity are central to his practice.

His artworks can be found in public, private, and institutional collections throughout Canada and internationally. Xwalacktun has received numerous honours for his artistic and cultural contributions, including the Order of British Columbia (2012), the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2013), the BC Achievement Foundation Award of Distinction for Lifetime Achievement (2016), and an Honorary Doctorate from Emily Carr University (2022).

Jin-me Yoon is a Korean-born, Vancouver-based artist whose work explores the entangled relations of tourism, militarism, and colonialism. Since the early ’90s, she has used photography, video, and performance to situate her personal experience of migration in relation to unfolding historical, political, and ecological conditions.

Through experimental cinematography and the performative gestures of family, friends, and community members, Yoon reconnects repressed pasts with damaged presents, creating the conditions for different futures. Staging her work in charged landscapes, Yoon finds specific points of reference across multiple geopolitical contexts. In so doing, she brings worlds together, affirming the value of difference.

Over the last 3 decades, Jin-me Yoon’s work has been presented internationally in hundreds of exhibitions, and she has mentored many students over the years while teaching at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. In 2018, she was elected as a Fellow into the Royal Society of Canada in 2018; and in 2022, she won the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award (SPA). In 2025, she received one of Canada’s highest artistic honours, the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, as well as the inaugural Kim Byung-Jong Art Award in South Korea.

Recent monographs include: Jin-me Yoon (SPA/Steidl), About Time (Vancouver Art Gallery/Hirmer) and Jin-me Yoon: Life & Work (Art Canada Institute).

Brigitte Potter-Mael was born in the south of Germany in 1943 and immigrated to Canada in 1977. Her artistic practice includes drawing, papermaking, analogue printmaking, ink-making, and site-specific installation art. Her works are guided by strong interests in botany, philosophy, languages, and community-building activities. 

With a BFA in 1983 from Concordia University, and many years of explorations, Brigitte has also been active in performative art, interdisciplinary collaborations, and community outreach projects. In addition, she earned a TESOL Diploma (2003) and became an active ESL instructor at Vancouver’s MOSAIC Language Centre during the years 2003 to 2018.  

A recipient of grants and stipends from Canada Council for the Arts Ottawa; Ministry of cultural Affairs Quebec; Banff Centre for the Arts; Goethe Institute Vancouver; the Kulturamt Dresden; Rosa Luxemburg Institute, Berlin; Pinacoteca Vitulano, Italy; Altos de Chavon Artist Colony, Dominican Republic.

Solo and group-exhibitions in Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, Finland, Poland, Japan, and the USA since 1984. Works can be found in public collections of the Canada Council for the Arts Ottawa, Ministry of cultural Affairs Quebec, Camosun College in Victoria, University of British Columbia, Malaspina Printmakers Society Archives in Vancouver, Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, Esperanza Gallery and Concordia University in Montreal, Kulturamt in Dresden, Pinacoteca Vitulano in Italy, and in many private collections in Canada and abroad.

Ian Wallace was born in Shoreham, England, to Canadian parents, in 1943.  After completing his studies at the University of British Columbia and graduating with a Master’s Degree in Art History, he taught art history at UBC from 1967 to 1970 and at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design from 1972 to 1998. Wallace was granted an Honorary Doctorate at Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2007) and University of British Columbia (2010).

Wallace has been active as an exhibiting artist in the Vancouver region since 1965. Through his writing teaching and exhibitions, Wallace has been an influential figure in the creation, promotion, and appreciation of innovative processes in contemporary art and in the development of an internationally acknowledged photographic and conceptual art practice in Vancouver.

In 2004, he was the recipient of the Governor General’s Award for the Visual Arts and in 2013 appointed Officer of the Order of Canada. Also in 2013, he was honoured with The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal.  In 2014, Wallace was awarded the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. The Audain Art Prize was conferred to Wallace in 2022.

The work of Ian Wallace is represented by:

• Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver
• Galerie Greta Meert in Brussels
• Galeria Parra & Romero in Madrid

Carmen Rosen, artist, singer, and community organizer, is the Founding Artistic Director of Still Moon Arts Society. She holds Fine Arts degrees from UBC and Emily Carr University and has been recognized with the Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award, the Queen's Jubilee Award, and the BC Achievement Award for her community-engaged art practice. Her creative work centres on the Still Creek Watershed in her Renfrew-Collingwood neighbourhood, situated on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Her work is inspired by nature, environmental sustainability, and her love of working with people.

Through Still Moon Arts Society and in partnership with many community partners, Carmen founded the Renfrew Ravine Moon Festival (now in its 24th year), celebrating nature and intercultural community creativity.

Recent projects include:

• Joining the Indigenous-led Wild Salmon Caravan 3 times to honour and support wild salmon
• Serving as co-lead artist for Birds on Parade at the 2018 International Ornithological Congress and Vancouver Bird Festival
• A 2022–24 collaboration with artist and mycologist Willoughby Arévalo to create Beaver Pondering Lodging, a giant living-willow beaver and her "Dodge Lodge" RV — grown and woven on the banks of Still Creek as a commentary on habitat loss for both wildlife and people in the city
• A 2023–24 project with natural builder and Mud Girl Clare Kenny and community volunteers to construct a cob garden shed, exploring natural building techniques in support of the Colour-Me-Local Dye Garden

Visit the Still Moon Arts Society website External website, opens in new tab

Kayám̓ Richard Campbell Sr. is a respected Musqueam master carver and knowledge keeper. He has been carving since the 1970s and has created numerous commissioned works that carry forward Musqueam and Coast Salish traditions. His practice emphasizes hand-carving, where the relationship between artist and tool is central to the creative process.

Lois Klassen uses creative and collective methods in art and publishing to address issues such as migration failures and textile waste. She is the founder of Light Factory Publications (LFP), an itinerant publisher of artist books and ephemera, including Reading the Migration Library (with Deanne Achong and others), the mail art project Renegade Library, the zine series Practices of Everyday Ethics, and the Present Cartographers imprint (with Daisy Quezeda Ureña and Sylvia Arthur). Klassen has held artist residencies at Sointula House, Santa Fe Art Institute, Plug In ICA (Winnipeg), MAWA (Winnipeg), SOMA (Mexico City), McLoughlin Gardens (Comox Valley), and more.

Lois Klassen is a Fulbright Alumni (University of Texas in El Paso), a former SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow (Critical Art Media Studio in the School of Interactive Art and Technology, SFU), and a research facilitator and ethics officer at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She lives and works on the traditional and unceded territory of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, in East Vancouver. 

Dana Claxton is a critically acclaimed artist who works with film, video, photography, single/multi-channel video installation, and performance art. Her practice investigates indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political and the spiritual. Her work has been shown internationally and is held in public, private, and corporate collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Mackenzie Art Gallery, Getty Museum, Modern Museum of Art, Eiteljorg Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Forge Project, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery. 

She is a Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory with the University of British Columbia. She is a member of Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations located in SW Saskatchewan and resides in Vancouver Canada.  

Dana comments, “I am grateful for all the support my artwork and cultural work has received. I am indebted to the sun and my sundance teachings – mni ki wakan - water is sacred.”

Lois Klassen uses creative and collective methods in art and publishing to address issues such as migration failures and textile waste. She is the founder of Light Factory Publications (LFP), an itinerant publisher of artist books and ephemera, including Reading the Migration Library (with Deanne Achong and others), the mail art project Renegade Library, the zine series Practices of Everyday Ethics, and the Present Cartographers imprint (with Daisy Quezeda Ureña and Sylvia Arthur).

Klassen has held artist residencies at Sointula House, Santa Fe Art Institute, Plug In ICA (Winnipeg), MAWA (Winnipeg), SOMA (Mexico City), McLoughlin Gardens (Comox Valley), and more. Lois Klassen is a Fulbright Alumni (University of Texas in El Paso), a former SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow (Critical Art Media Studio in the School of Interactive Art and Technology, SFU), and a research facilitator and ethics officer at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

She lives and works on the traditional and unceded territory of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, in East Vancouver.

Ken Lum was born and raised in Vancouver in 1956. He has a long exhibition history as an artist, dating back to the early 1980s, including Documenta, São Paolo Bienal, Whitney Biennial, and Istanbul Biennale.

He served as Director of the Or Gallery from 1982 to 1984. He is co-founder and founding editor of Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. A prolific writer, he has authored numerous essays for both academic and non-academic publications. He has delivered many keynote addresses, including at the World Museums Conference in Shanghai, the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics in Philadelphia, and the Annual Duldig Lecture on Sculpture in Melbourne. A collection of his writings titled Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life 1991 - 2018 was published in 2020 by Concordia University Press. He also authored 2 screenplays about Chinese indentured labourers set in 1868 and 1885, respectively.

Lum is the co-founder and Senior Curatorial Advisor at Monument Lab, a public art and history think tank in Philadelphia. He managed the influential exhibition, The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945 - 1994. He has co-curated several major exhibitions, including Sharjah Biennial 7 in the UAE, Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia, and Shanghai Modern: 1919 - 1945, which was shown in Munich. Since 2012, he has been the Marilyn Jordan Taylor Penn Presidential Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Deborah Edmeades lives and works in Vancouver and has shown her work internationally, including at:

• Afternoon Projects
• The Western Front
• Artspeak in Vancouver
• Participant Inc.
• The Pratt Manhattan Gallery in New York

She’s received support from the Canada Council for the Arts and Franklin Furnace Archive, among others.

Cheryl Hamilton is a visual artist living on the Coast Salish territories. Her artwork includes sculpture, painting, printmaking, and illustration. She graduated from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1990.

Her work has been influenced by her queer identity, satire, humour, surrealism, craft, and pop culture. Cheryl has a deep commitment to sharing her artwork in the public realm and has artwork in public and private collections across North America.

Hank Bull was born at Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary) in 1949 and lives with gratitude on the traditional and unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver). He is known for explorations in radio art, performance, shadow theatre, video, and telecommunications. He has also been active as a curator, administrator, and arts advocate.

Throughout a long career, he has continued to make art in a range of media, including painting, photography, video, music, and sound. Hank is represented by Wil Aballe Art Projects External website, opens in new tab.