MICHAEL TOPPPINGS
A language and text-based artist, Michael Topping's work is rendered through the visual, performing and literary arts. His themes are both dramatic and banal, referencing social realism while inverting popular culture. His interdisciplinary, multi-genre works are research into the architecture of language as it pertains to meaning and definition, what a thing means and what it does not - that is to say, all definition involves exclusion; in determining exactly what a thing is, we thereby implicitly determine what it is not. To define a concept is to declare by one and the same act what it does mean and what it does not mean (The Logical and the Translogical by Phillip Wheelwright). Aside from Michael's own word-centric productions, he is also a curator and programmer and is one of the founding members of Petri's Quadrille, a Saskatchewan-based art/science collective.
Since 2000, he has worked on 3 major bodies of work: The House Project, Approaching Zero and A Male Herd. Currently in production, Single Dwelling Monologues (June 2008).
PAUL HURLEY
Paul Hurley is an artist, writer and cultural animator. As well as making his own work - predominantly performance, but also occasionally video and photography - he has been involved in the curation of projects, exhibitions, and artists' residencies, in Wales, England and in Russia. His work has been shown in galleries and festivals in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Russia, and has been published and written about in books and journals internationally. Since 2003 Hurley has been making an ongoing series of becoming-animal performances, drawing from the theories of Deleuze and Guattari and exploring the idea of Ôthe animal' as a way of understanding humanity and approaching catharsis. He is currently doing a PhD at the University of Bristol, England, entitled "Reconfiguring the human: the becoming-other of performance art".
2boys.tv
Hailing from Montréal, 2boys.tv consists of the trans-disciplinary duo, Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard (also notoriously known in some circles as alter egos Gigi L'Amour and Pipi Douleur). Together they have created and toured, nationally and internationally, a wide repertoire of epic multimedia cabaret works, performances, videos and installations which aim to dazzle and provoke with their vigour, politics and poetics. Their full-length work, Zona Pellucida, an inimitable blend of clever lip-synch, cinematic scores and original video projections, has toured across Canada, to Buenos Aires, and will be presented next season for month long runs in San Francisco and Toronto. Individually and collectively their video art works and short cabaret performances have been presented in clubs, galleries, theatres and festivals across North America as well as in Europe.
» www.2boys.tv
» www.youtube.com/profile?user=gigiETpipi
TOBARON WAXMAN
Tobaron Waxman's work contextualizes gender, embodiment, and the physical experience of time as systems of inscription. His work includes elements of Diaspora experience and traditional Jewish texts, music, and philosophy, as well as politics and desire. Waxman also studies and performs Jewish liturgical music as a cantorial soloist. He has conducted mourning ceremonies, services on the high holy days of Yom Kippur, as well as provided spiritual support for the homeless, the sick and the dying. His live art practice is articulated through various time and lens based media: photography, video, voice, tissue engineering, internet, biofeedback processing, performance, social interventions - a conceptual, time based practice with a social justice commitment.
He is the recipient of awards including Franklin Furnace Award for Performance Art and Van Lier Fellowship at Harvestworks Digital Media NYC, and ACO Art and Culture Outreach Artist Residency, Hong Kong. His videos have screened in Berlin, Tel Aviv and Brazil and numerous locations in USA. His photography and texts published in Time Out Tel Aviv, LTTR, Fuse Magazine, GLQ, and Carte Blanche, Canada's first juried compendium of photography. Summer 2008: he will perform his biofeedback and live installation ÔBlock of Ice +1/60' at Peacock Digital Arts Center, Aberdeen, Scotland. An interview with images from his earlier work will be published by bBooks Berlin in Post Porn Politics, a volume including works by Lee Edelman, Annie Sprinkle, Bruce La Bruce, Terre Thaemlitz and others. His collaborative video performance work ÔStill Life: Israel Eats Itself' in 5.1 surround will screen at ViDance International Video Dance Festival, Tel Aviv.
