Biographies
Featured Artist: 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.
Featured Artist: Jessica Karuhanga
Jessica Karuhanga is a first-generation Canadian artist of British-Ugandan
heritage whose work addresses issues of cultural politics of identity and
Black diasporic concerns through lens-based technologies, writing,
drawing and performances. Through her practice she explores individual
and collective concerns of Black subjectivity: illness, rage, grief, desire and
longing within the context of Black embodiment.
She was the 2020 - 2021 recipient of Concordia University's SpokenWeb
Artist/Curator In Residence Fellowship. Karuhanga has presented her work
at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (2021), SummerWorks Lab (Toronto,
2020), The Bentway (Toronto, 2019), Nuit Blanche (Toronto, 2018), Onsite
Gallery (Toronto, 2018) and Goldsmiths University (London, UK, 2017).
Karuhanga's writing has been published by C Magazine, BlackFlash,
Susan Hobbs Gallery and Fonderie Darling.
Workshop Facilitator: Elian Mikkola
Elian Mikkola is a Finnish Moving Image Artist (of Karelian descent), and a white settler currently based between Treaty 4, Regina, and Montréal (Tiohtià:ke), Canada. Originally from Turku, Finland, Mikkola holds a BA in Journalism from Tampere University. They completed their MFA in Media Production in 2019 at the University of Regina. Mikkola works closely with both analog and digital images and their hybrid extensions. Their work explores themes such as memory, spatial dependences and queer belonging. Mikkola’s work has been showcased in several film festivals in Canada and
internationally. Their debut film SAARI (2016) was selected to TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten
Film Festival student program in 2017 and their latest two films premiered at
International Film Festival Rotterdam 2020 and Hong Kong International Film Festival in
2021.