Photography and video installations by:
Bianca McDonald
Bianca McDonald is co-curator of the shapeD & sh.IF.ted festival. She is presenting to be desired (2023) which took place in a gallery loading dock, where the artist showered in a cotton candy bathtub as the audience watched from above. The artist recounted experiences of objectification in an accusatory tone, before gradually shifting to an inquisitive and desirable recollection of this fetishization; delineating their desire to be desired, to be /sensual, to be consumed. This piece explored ideas of objectification, voyeurism, fetishization, desire, consumption, and the subversion of power dynamics in the face of sexual desire.
Colleen Arcturus MacIsaac
Colleen Arcturus MacIsaac (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist, performer, and creator.
A looping video documentation of Colleen’s ongoing performance project WINTER BREAKS which explores their relationship to rest, to cold, to discomfort, to the climate crisis, to the housing crisis, to their changing nonbinary postpartum body, and more. This work is iterative and long-term, and has both an in-person performative element and a second life in its documented form.
Daria Herashchenko
Daria Herashchenko is a painter and multidisciplinary artist interested in mimicry, parody, and how identities are made and performed. Her work draws from pop culture, shifting personas, and the blur between sincerity and play.
Lana: VERY Unreleased (2004) is a parody video that imagines an alternate version of Lana Del Rey before her image was set in stone. Blending “West Coast” with an unexpected cover of a rock musician Aviv Geffen, the piece plays with the idea of identity in flux: when you’re not yet a brand, how many directions can you go in?
Laura Silva
Laura Silva is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the experiences that shape her identity and connect her to her surroundings.
Masks and Cover Story explore how society and industries shape and control our bodies through beauty standards, creating superficial pressures and external expectations that impact our everyday lives.
Matthew Downey
Matthew Downey is a Digital artist originally from St. John’s Newfoundland, with a background in theatre and photography. Their artistic practice primarily focuses on our relationships with our bodies, grounded in exploration of queer identities thru a lens of neurodivergence..
The video installation presented at the Anna Leonowens Gallery is an ongoing and growing exploration of how our hands relate, engage with and discover the world around them. A macro focus on simple acts of creation, curiosity and care.
Mikiki
Mikiki’s work has been presented throughout Canada and internationally in self-produced interventions, artist-run centres, performance art festivals and public galleries.
Their identity as an artist is informed and intrinsically linked to their history of work as a sexual health educator and harm reduction worker. Mikiki’s creative themes often address safety and responsibility, disclosure and self-determination, community building and reckoning with trauma and loss.
Mikiki will present six archival photographs of his performance work.
Nadine Sures
Nadine Sures is a transdisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance, installation, and pedagogy. With over 20 years experience both in Canada and abroad, Nadine has developed a nuanced approach to embodied performance, producing work that engages with themes of memory, gender and hysteria.
So Far Away (Lebanon, 2018). Inspired by the exquisite and ghostly remnants of the Grand Sawfar Hotel, this performance archive explores patriarchal relationships within the context of family and place; memory, history and death weave through deconstructed narratives.
Uriel Guerrero-Aconcha
Uriel Guerrero-Aconcha is a transdisciplinary Latin American artist working across multiple media. His work examines how colonial histories, migration, and power infrastructures shape the way bodies are seen, controlled, and experienced.
Migrant Body, Colonized Body is a performance series in which the artist, through a series of embodied actions that explore friction, containment, and erasure, questions what does it mean to inhabit a land that does not recognize you? What weight do we carry when we migrate? Do we, unintentionally, replicate the role of the colonizer?
Nadine Sures 