Art Metropole

Rosa Aiello is a Canadian artist and writer. Recent exhibitions include Museo Casa Masaccio (San Giovanni Valdarno ), Galleria Federico Vavassori (Milan), Bureau de Réalites (Brussels) e Kunste-werke (Berlin). Recent group exhibitions include: The Forecast, Croy Nielsen (Vienna),Take me (I’m Yours), Pirelli HangarBicocca (Milan), Cul-De-Sac, Antenna Space (Shanghai), Artists’ Film Club: Hollis and Money, ICA (London) and InPractice, SculptureCenter (New York). Her writing but has been published in various art publications including Triple Canopy, Art Papers, and (forthcoming) Canadian Art. Her work is part of the public collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and of the Centre George Pompidou (Paris).

Basil AlZeri is a visual artist working in performance, video, installation, food, and public art interventions. His work is grounded in his role as an art educator and community worker. He is engaged with the intersection of everyday actions and life necessities with art. His practice strives to interact with the public through gestures of generosity in social interactions and exchanges in a site-specific context. AlZeri’s work has been presented in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Mexico City, and Santiago. Some of his upcoming projects include 7a11d in Toronto, The Owens Art Gallery in New Brunswick and the City of Ottawa / Ottawa Art Gallery.

Maya Ben David (MBD) is a Toronto based video performance Jewish-Iranian Anthro Plane. Ben David creates worlds and characters that explore concepts such as anthropomorphism, cosplay and performative personas. Ben David’s characters origin stories are established via video performance and are performed on a ongoing basis through her online presence.

Vida Beyer is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice incorporates sculpture, drawing, writing, performance and set design. Her work has been exhibited at XPACE Cultural Center, The Khyber, as a part of Doored (a comedy art variety show hosted by Life of a Craphead 2012-2017) and The Rhubarb Theatre Festival.

Diane Borsato is a visual artist working in performance, intervention, video, installation, and photography. She has exhibited in galleries and museums across Canada and internationally including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, the Art Gallery of York University, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and The Power Plant.

Diane Borsato is currently Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of Guelph, and lives in Toronto.

Erica Conly makes useful objects for everyday life. She works on projects that reflect her interests in stories, systematization, sustainability, and ecology. She has a keen interest in community engagement, informal learning, and skill building. Erica grew up on the prairies in Regina, Saskatchewan and now lives in Hamilton, ON.

Sean Procyk is an artist, architect and playground designer. His works respond to regional context, with a particular focus on the economies that exist between landscape, community and ecology. He draws upon the vernaculars of land art and multimedia installation to engage with the senses. Sean lives in Hamilton, ON.

Connor Crawford is a multidisciplinary visual artist working in Toronto ON. He received his BFA from Ryerson University in 2014 where he studied New Media.

Janis Demkiw is a Toronto-based artist who uses found objects and materials to stage spatial disruptions, absurd shifts in scale, and approaches to display ranging from strategic to ridiculous. She gets along well alone and in groups.

Recent projects include 11:11 at the AGO’s Young Gallery (in collaboration with Christine Swintak, Olia Mishchenko, Sandy Plotnikoff & Sebastian Butt), as well as implication in the shenanigans of Terrarea (with Emily Hogg & Olia Mishchenko). She holds a BFA from York University with general fondness.

Formed in 1979, FASTWURMS is the cultural project, trademark, and shared authorhsip of Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse.

FASTWURMS creates poly-disciplinary artworks that mix performance and performative events into the context of immersive installations, collective making and social exchange projects.

FASTWURMS artwork is characterized by a determined DIY sensibility, Witch Nation identity politics, and a keen allegiance towards working class, queer alliance, and artist collaborations.

FASTWURMS is a Witch polity and epistemology, creating and circulating aesthetic knowledge as a shared emancipation and liberation narrative.

Mike Goldby is an artist based in Toronto. He holds a BFA from OCAD University in Integrated Media and has shown both locally and internationally. Goldby’s work deals with everyday urban space as a site where the sublime can occur without warning.

Francisco-Fernando Granados is a Toronto-based artist and writer. His multidisciplinary critical practice spans performance, installation, cultural theory, digital media, public art, and community-based projects. He has presented work in galleries, museums, theatres, artist-run centres and non-traditional sites since 2005 including Art Gallery of Ontario, Vancouver Art Gallery, Darling Foundry, Ex Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City, Kulturhuset in Stockholm, and Theatre Academy at the University of the Arts in Helsinki. He completed a Masters of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto in 2012.

Kara Hamilton studied architecture at the University of British Columbia and art at Concordia University and Yale. She has shown at spaces like: Salon 94, EFA Project Space, Kate Werble Gallery, New York; Siegel House, Marfa, USA; Taut and Tame, Berlin, Germany; Kunstverein Amsterdam; Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg; G Gallery, Cooper Cole and the AGO in Toronto, Canada. She is also the director of Kunstverein Toronto. Hamilton currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Sidney Masuga’s practice utilizes organizational data software to synthesize cultural material into art objects. These works find form in writing, painting, print and sculpture. Some of the themes that guide this research are communication, metaphysics and the paradoxical duality of the female identity through history.

Alicia Nauta is an artist living and working in Toronto. All her work is part of Alicia’s Klassic Kool Shoppe: collage, screenprinting, installation, wallpaper, books and zines, and a growing collection of found oddities for a future museum. She is a member of Punchclock, a Toronto print studio, and has taught screenprinting and other DIY workshops at the Art Gallery of Ontario as part of the AGO Youth Free After Three program. Her work has been exhibited at Printed Matter (US), Kogenchecho (JP), the Art Gallery of Ontario, Burnaby Public Library, Katherine Mulherin, Artscape Youngplace, and Art Metropole, as well as permanent wallpaper installations in several Toronto venues.

Robert Anthony O’Halloran is an artist primarily working across the fields of sculpture, installation and performance. Recent solo exhibitions include [long pause] (Bunker 2, 2017) and often by inertia (Public Storage, 2016). O’Halloran has participated in group exhibitions at Little Sister (2017), LAUNDRY ROOM (2016), YTB (2016), AC Repair Co. (2016), Warner Gallery (2015) and The Island (www.puddling.info, 2017). Forthcoming exhibitions include a solo presentation at The Table in January 2018.

Philip Leonard Ocampo is a Toronto based artist and whose artworks examine personal desire. Primarily working in sculpture, installation and drawing, Ocampo uses mysticism and the nonphysical as tools for introspection. His work often engages with concepts in relation to privilege, queerness, love, family and the ways in which they intersect.

Ocampo also works in freelance animation, illustration and ceramic practices.

I explore issues of hybridity, sacrilege, irreverence, the indexical sciences, ethnography, gender, sexuality, popular culture, deities, monsters and dream worlds. All of these themes marry in a newly objectified realm of mythical symbioses. They are flattened on the medium and made to act as my personal record of impossible discoveries.

My approach to the deconstruction of the non-European, female body image, delving into the miniaturist aesthetic as in “The New Ethnology”, “The New Archaeology” and the “Yogini” series, manifests itself in the form of re-appropriated religious icons. Leveraging embellished photographic portraiture as in “Maharajas” and “Maharanis” challenges contemporary notions of masculinity viewed through the non-European, female lens.By painting these object-beings, I am engaging in a discussion with the viewing audience about the aesthetic treatment of gender and the non-European sacred and secular body in a popular culture context.

These saccharine women and stoic men, flaunting their blood, breasts and armor around and throughout the stretched paper surface, conceal violent stories and ideologies; a complex dichotomy that is not explored or discussed in internationally (or more particularly Western) circulated imagery of Hindu and Tantric gods and goddesses. It is much the same for the ethnic body image, as represented in print media and online or screen culture. The semiology becomes reduced, simplified and pared down to suit a blander ideological palette.

In my work, I seek to open and reveal the dynamism of these icons, both scripturally existent, self-invented and externally defined. I am creating a subversive aesthetic that counteracts antiquated, oppressive discourse, and acts as a restorative force through which people can move outdated, repressive modes of being towards reclaiming their power.

The practice of Celia Perrin Sidarous presents assemblages and arrangements, following a logic that is at once internal and associative. Referencing histories and the overarching structures of still life, interior arrangement and the placement of objects for display and exhibition, her photographs nonetheless confound the conditions through which everyday objects are usually interpreted and the ways we navigate the material world.

Celia Perrin Sidarous holds an MFA from Concordia University, Montréal, with a concentration in Photography. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Parisian Laundry (Montréal), the Esker Foundation (Calgary), Campbell House Museum (Toronto), the Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina), the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Montréal), The Banff Centre (Banff), WWTWO (Montréal), VU (Québec) and Gallery 44 (Toronto). Living and working in Montréal, she travels frequently as a generative artistic approach.

Chloe Seibert is alive and lives in New York. Past exhibitions include Cooper Cole, Toronto; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago; Kevin Space, Vienna; Queer Thoughts, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Balice Hertling, Paris.

Brittany Shepherd is a Toronto based artist whose interdisciplinary practice deals with perception, invisible networks and notions of public and private space through video, photo and site-specific sculptural installations. She has recently shown at 8-11 Gallery, Roberta Pelan, Motel and at NADA Miami at the DAD Digital pavilion on behalf of Cooper Cole Gallery. She is also the founder and director of the exhibition platform The Table in Toronto.

Beth Stuart is a local individual of blossoming repute with various attendant accolades. She makes things, whilst thinking about spirituality, non-binarism, embodiment, and disturbing the space time continuum.

Derek Sullivan was born in 1976 in Richmond Hill, Ontario. He received a BFA from York University and an MFA from the University of Guelph. His multiple National Gallery Catalogue 2004 was included in the exhibition Art Metropole The Top 100 at the National Gallery of Canada (2007). Recently his work was featured in the group exhibitions We Can Do This Now at The Power Plant in Toronto (2007) and Gasoline Rainbows at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (2007). He is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto.

Marlo Yarlo is a designer and artist based in Toronto. Marlo’s work explores the representation and function of the image related to consumerism and materialism.

Shellie Zhang deconstructs notions of tradition, gender, identity, the body, and popular culture while calling attention to these subjects in the context and construction of a multicultural society. She is interested in exploring how multiculturalism, diversity and assimilation is implemented, how this relates to lived experiences, and how culture is learned/relearned.