select works

sola(r)stalgia

(2023) Sola(r)stalgia explores “solastalgia,” a neologism that describes emotional distress resulting from negatively perceived environmental change. The work mirrors the sun’s movement across the sky, reflecting the amount of time each pose was held in stillness beneath the sun. The cotton rests across plinths built to the height of the artist’s shoulder, hip, and knee.

Performance Photos: Sarah Bodri

Movement Artists: sarah koekkoek, Susannah Haight

Curated By: Na’ama Freeman

soil study (aluminium)

(2024) Dinner and a Show, a two-course exhibition which brought emerging artists throughout London together, to the heart of Leyton, in celebration of their collective beginnings and budding relationships. Held at the advent of Spring, Dinner and A Show, placed the resonant practices and personalities of the artists in conversation with each other over the course of two evenings.

Curated by: Marina Neves, Liam Mullen, Dougal Verinder Gedge

Postures

(2024)

3D prints

Restructured Landscapes

(2023) In the Rhubarb brought together 7 artists and 7 writers making an exhibition of 14 voices, Between Pheasants Contemporary's largest to date.

Words in response by: Steacy Easton

Oniatarí:io in Kanien’kehá:ka means lake of shining water, in Ojibwe it is gichigami, or roughly a large sea or lake. Thinking about the system of lakes, when I am standing in Chicago, or Buffalo or Toronto or Hamilton (western names, I am still western, colonial names, I am still a settler), the line between the lake and the sky disappears, is absent, there is not really one lake or one sky, but the sky reflects the lake and the lake reflects the sky.

I think about them as one lake, as not five great lakes, but as a system that elides borders, a system that is best understood as an inland sea. How the lake and the sky erase each other, and how the lake erases geographic interventions, an interlacing, a different kind of geography.

Thinking of this erasure and thinking about how we create works about landscape, thinking about the idea of this inland ocean, sarah koekkoek’s collages, dismantling the hierarchy of sea and sky, upsetting that horizon line, gives me a similar feeling—one of expansiveness, even despite their modest size.

https://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/main-entry/gichigami-ni (https://decolonialatlas.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/ny20.png)

simbī’.dik

(2022) The artist, interested in exploring mediums beyond that of her own body, has birthed what is known as kombucha leather. This is a bio leather made of a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. Once dried, the leather can be used to make clothing, shoes or even a book cover.

Caring for and cultivating a more than human collaborator has been a tender practice. Patience, failure, precision, trust and timing all play vital roles in the process. These portraits are the first test shots of this human to more than human collaboration. Future iterations include experimenting with different photographic printing practices and growing a large-scale piece of leather that will be featured in an installation performance. Working with this more than human collaborator is my way of bringing and utilizing the ideas of a circular economy to the field of dance and performance art.

Published in The Dance Current Summer 2022 Issue

Stranger in the Destination

(2022) Video 6mins

Motivated by the quest for authenticity, a tourist in Hawaii experiences the parallels of being a tourist of place and a tourist inside their own body. This passage is not always a place of pleasure nor a point of interest.

Aligning the places that exist outside and inside oneself, the performer utilizes movement to negotiate the very real effects that consumption, waste, neo-colonialism and development has on place. While also examining the more abstract effects that observing, consuming and creating has on the human internal and external self. The performer questions where the tourist (observer, consumer, and creator) and the self (culture, caregiver and provider) begin and end.

Technical Assistance: Brendan George Ko

Screened at Screen Moves, RT Collective, October 2022

Cryphasi

(2021) Video 6mins

Scientists have found signature indications of the Cryphasi, a deep soil insect, previously thought to be extinct. Unusual changes in soil chemistry, as well as unique tree bark gallery patterns lead experts to believe it’s preparing to emerge. Known in entomology circles as an urban legend, any sighting has been highly anticipated and much debated. If it does emerge the questions remain; Why now? What does it have to tell us? What or Who is it emerging for?

Wardrobe by: Angela Cabra

From One Realm To Another

(2020) An immersive 360 performance video work as part of the show Moving Either Way for Trinity Square Video

Carrying this work is Cootes Paradise, a marsh located in Hamilton ON. Beginning in 2014 a 4 year 24 billion litre sewage spill threatened the already battered wetlands and frustrated communities that care for the marsh. This performance brings forward the fractures and severance modern (water) systems have pitched between the life of water and the lives of humans. Calling into question our current methods for managing sewage, stormwater runoff, and the long term effects of dated water treatments. Recognizing the resiliency of this marsh, the performer carries out an indulgence in a post anthropocentric world where the emotional weight and power of water is honoured from one realm to another.

Curated by: Holly Chang & Karina Iskandarsjah

Photo: Holly Chang

Self Portraits

(2020) Created during Artscape Gibraltar Winter Residency

Island Moves

(2020) Created on Toronto island with the support of Artscape Gibraltar Winter Residency Program.

Island Moves is a movement score/lexicon that can be utilized by anyone anywhere to deepen their connection with the land through embodied movement. To see ourselves not as separate objects, but rather a communion of subjects, a vast self-regulating system. 

Anda Residency

(2019) Anda Artist Residency.

Dissecting the disappearance of rooming houses in Toronto and the housing crisis worldwide. This work in process was explored in partnership with dance artist Nyda Kwasowsky.

We brought our experience into the space, using the environment and our relationship to it as our guide. What arose were sensations and feelings of disjointedness, discomfort and uncertainty. Our physical explorations were specific to the home, capturing the trace essence of community, weaving the stories of peoples, the interconnectedness of home within the self, and more broadly the spaces we inhabited through the residency and beyond. It is important to us that when embodying the complexities of this emotional topography, we also represent an internal and external perspective. Sensorially, we felt drawn to the periphery of the space and as guests felt sensitive and uncomfortable opening into them. This was and is someone's home, there is history here but the history of our bodies is not directly affected or connected to it. While being guests in the home, we hold value in creating space to offer movement as a grounding, healing, act of solidarity in a time/place of uncertainty and instability. We have created a movement work in progress to share as a means of conversation, support, inspiration, and hope for the future!

Relations.

(2018) Relations

This short film Relations is a product of my ever present social anxiety. A lot of the times feeling watched, seen and judged in conversations with peers, friends and academics. In the creation process along with dancers Lauren Runions and Amanda Pye, we explored embodied interpretations of; reaction vs response, repetition, conversation structure, gestures and expressions found in conversations. Using these explorations as an attempt to demonstrate, examine and possibly understand as a means to release the weighing anxiety these interactions hold for me and others. With the film providing insight to the forming of a conversation, its inner workings and afterthoughts, this may be a cocktail of nostalgia, anxiety, intrigue and interest. Through the film the viewer gets to see both sides of the conversation through the eyes of the interpreters. How they experience of the same moment in time may differ, mirror or match. The words, written and spoken by Sidney Masuga guide us reflectively through this brief interaction.