biographies
Jaye Kovach
Photo: Cat Haines
Jaye Kovach is a multimedia and performance artist who lives as a white Magyar/Scottish settler on Treaty 4 territory (Regina, Saskatchewan). Her work, which has received local and national attention, often engages their queer and trans community, taking as its starting point his positionality as a disabled and neurodivergent, butch trans woman. In 2019, she was featured in the spotlight section of Canadian Art’s FEMME issue. In 2020, they attended the Intergenerational LGBT Artist Residency. His performance work has been presented at Queer City Cinema/Performatorium, a queer media and performance art festival based in Regina that attracts international artists and filmmakers. Jaye is a current participant of Tender Container’s Peer Mentorship Platform, Do Trans People Dream of Non-binary Sheep?. She also facilitated the Capacitor project, a programming channel for Two Spirit, trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming artists with a connection to Saskatchewan, with the University of Saskatchewan (USask) Art Galleries and Collection. Most recently they have been named interim project director for Into The Streets,
Lou Sheppard
Lou Sheppard is a Canadian artist working in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation based practices. His work focuses on climate crisis, loss, queer ecologies and cosmologies, responding to the material and discursive histories of sites, bodies and environments. Lou’s research is evidenced through graphic notations, scripts and scores which are often performed in collaboration with other artists and in community gatherings. Lou’s work has been included in the Toronto Biennial, the Antarctic Biennial and numerous solo and collaborative exhibitions across Canada. He has participated in residencies at the International Studio Curatorial Program, La Cité des Arts, and as faculty at The Banff Centre. His recent work, Rights of Passage, commissioned by the Art Gallery of York University, was a three act drag and choral performance reflecting on the tension between the urban development in Toronto and local river systems. Other works, like A Strong Desire, asserted queer resistance to the DSMV diagnostic text for gender dysphoria by notating a dance work in the margins of the text.
Nic Wilson
Nic Wilson (he/they) is an artist and writer who was born in the Wolastoqiyik territory known as Fredericton, NB in 1988. He graduated with a BFA from Mount Allison University, Mi’kmaq territory, in 2012, and an MFA from the University of Regina, Treaty Four Territory, in 2019 where he was a SSHRC graduate fellow. In 2021 they were long listed for the Sobey Art Award as a representative of the Prairies and the North. Fluent across media, Wilson creates videos, performances and artist books, and writes essays and art criticism.Their work often engages time, queer lineage, decay, and the distance between art practice and literature. They were the 2022 writer in residence for G44 Centre for Contemporary Photography and their writing has appeared in publications such as BlackFlash Magazine, Peripheral Review, NORK, C Magazine, and Border Crossings.
Hannah Godfrey/hannah_g
Hannah Godfrey/hannah_g is an artist, curator, and writer. Her work is informed by queer echolocating, contemporary art, and recollection. She has exhibited, performed, and given readings in Canada, the US, and Europe. Kindness, mischief, and queerness underpin her practice. hannah is currently touring her book, Critical Fictions, a collection of interdisciplinary writing about five queer, Canadian artists published by ARP. Her forthcoming book, Oubliette, is a record of anticipatory grief and memories of her mum that creates a partial portrait of two people who loved one another wonderfully and irreplaceably. To be published by Nevermore Press, Autumn 2023.
Cat Haines
Photo: Jaye Kovach
Cat Haines is a genderqueer trans woman, dyke, and academic/artist weirdo, frequently working with an autotheoretical methodology, and mediums ranging from the videogame Minecraft, to film, watercolor portraiture and figurative painting. Cat graduated with an MA in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Regina in 2021, where she wrote her thesis “Transmisogyny and the Abjection of Girlcock.” In 2022 Cat released “Trans Feminist Self Help Zine: Volume 0” with the micropress Gravitron where she critically examines her post-surgically transitioned body and the industrial medical complex that allowed her surgically transition.