Candice Hopkins is currently the Sobey curatorial resident at The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Hopkins is the former director and curator of the exhibitions program at the Western Front, Vancouver, and as an instructor in the Critical and Cultural Studies department at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver. She has an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, Bard College, New York, where she was awarded the Ramapo Curatorial Prize for the exhibition Every Stone Tells a Story: The Performance Work of David Hammons and Jimmie Durham (2004). Her writing has been published by MIT Press, BlackDog Publishing, New York University, Catriona Jeffries Gallery, and Banff Centre Press, among others. She has lectured at venues including Tate Modern, London, Tate Britain, London, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Hopkins is co-curator of the touring exhibitions Jimmie Durham: Knew Urk (2005), which originated at the Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland, and Shapeshifters, Timetravellers and Storytellers (2007), organized by the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.
cheyanne turions is an independent, Toronto-based curator and writer with formal training in philosophy. Conceptualizing curation and criticism as social gestures, she uses discourse as an entrance point to taking up art. She holds that the experience of art happens somewhere between perception and thought, as reading. As a curator, she seeks that moment of the verb, the vital and poetic occasion where meaning emerges from the meeting of the art object with the human eye and mind. By pointing back to the cultural, political and theoretical conditions that have informed the production of a work, her goal is to engage an audience in a discussion about these conditions, creating a forum for critical analysis. turions has realized curatorial projects for Gallery TPW, the Western Front, DIM Cinema, VIVO Media Arts Centre, and Cineworks. She is currently Curatorial Resident at Gallery TPW and the Images Festival, director of No Reading After the Internet (Toronto), and sits on the Board of Directors for Fillip magazine.
Chris Bose is a writer, multi-disciplinary artist, musician and filmmaker, who has read and performed at universities, theatres and coffeehouses at all points from Victoria to Montreal, as well as at the Talking Stick Aboriginal Arts Festival in Vancouver and the Word on the Street Festival in Toronto. Chris continues to create art and music on a daily basis, and is also a workshop facilitator of community arts events, digital storytelling, art workshops with people of all ages and backgrounds, curatorial work for First Nations art shows and projects, research and writing for periodicals across Canada, project management and coordination, mixed-media productions, film, audio and video recording and editing, and more. He is of the N’laka’pamux Nation in B.C., and currently spends his time in Kamloops, B.C.
Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. The Utne Reader has included Bök in its list of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” Bök is currently working on “The Xenotext Experiment”—a project that involves the creation of a “genetically engineered poem” for implantation into the genome of a bacterium. Bök teaches English at the University of Calgary.
Daina Warren is of the Montana Slavey Cree Nation, and is a contemporary artist and curator. She graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2003. From 2000 – 2002 she was in residence at the grunt gallery through Canada Council’s Assistance to Aboriginal Curators for Residencies in the Visual Arts. Warren is the current Canada Council Aboriginal curator‑in‑residence at the National Gallery of Canada. Her work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions at the Or Gallery, Vancouver; Campbell River Public Gallery; and Alternator, Kelowna.
Edgar Heap of Birds received his M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, his B.F.A. from The University of Kansas, and has undertaken graduate studies at The Royal College of Art, London, England. He has exhibited his works at The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, New York, New York, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, Documenta, Kassal, Germany, Orchard Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland, University Art Museum, Berkeley, California, Association for Visual Arts Museum, Cape Town, South Africa, Lewallen Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico and Hong Kong Art Center, China. He has received grants and awards from The National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Lila Wallace Foundation, Bonfil Stanton Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trust.
Emily Fedoruk recently left New Westminster, B.C. for Minneapolis, where she is working on a Ph.D. in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society at the University of Minnesota. Her interdisciplinary research tests strategies for producing and representing social space, taking sites of contemporary economic activity as foundations for examining spatial articulations across art forms. Exploring cultural practices that generate relationships to place and reconfigure everyday exchanges, retail and shoppers are frequent concerns. She is the author of three chapbooks, street still (2007), still building (2008) and still more / more and mall (2010) and her first collection of poetry, All Still, was published by LINEbooks in 2008. Other poems have appeared in West Coast Line and Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century Vol. 2 and she has been involved with organizing publications and events in Vancouver with The Society of August 23rd and the Kootenay School of Writing. Current creative projects include an interview-based series that monitors gestural repetition in poems and video and a long poem character study about rappers.
Henry Tsang is a visual and media artist and occasional curator whose work has been exhibited internationally. Henry’s projects incorporate digital media, video, photography, language and sculptural elements in the exploration of the relationship between the public, community and identity in the new global order. He has worked in the public sphere, producing public art that ranges from community-based projects to permanent commissioned installations. Video installations such as Orange County, 2004, and Olympus, 2006, shot in California, Beijing, Torino and Vancouver, examine overlapping urban and socio-political spaces; and Napa North, 2008, looks at the relationship between wine, real estate and cultural translation in BC’s Okanagan Valley. His current project, Maraya with Glen Lowry, M. Simon Levin et al, will create a real-time interactive public artwork that connects Vancouver’s False Creek with the Dubai Marina in the UAE. Henry received the VIVA Award in 1993.
Jeff Derksen works with an interdisciplinary view of culture and globalization in the 20th century. It deals with the relationship of cultural production (what Raymond Williams called “creative practices”) and the nexus of social, political, economic and cultural forces that constitute globalization. His areas of special interest are national cultures and the role of the state in the era of globalization; cultural imperialism and the politics of aesthetics; the poetry and poetics of globalized cities; the emergent global cultural front (in a general cultural context and in avant-gardes); culture and gentrification in global-urban spaces; architecture and urbanism; cultural poetics, cultural studies, & cultural geography. His works include Until (Tsunami, 1987), Downtime (Talon, 1991), Dwell (Talonbooks, 1993), Transnational Muscle Cars (Talonbooks, 2003) and Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics (Talonbooks, 2009). He collaborates with Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber on visual art and research projects with the collective Urban Subjects: they are the editors of Autogestion, or Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade (Fillip/Sternberg 2009).
Larissa Lai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at The University of British Columbia. She holds a PhD from the University of Calgary. Her first novel, When Fox Is a Thousand (Press Gang 1995, Arsenal Pulp 2004) was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her second novel, Salt Fish Girl (Thomas Allen Publishers 2002) was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award, the Tiptree Award and the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Award. In 2004, West Coast Line published a special issue focussed on her work. She has been the Markin-Flanagan Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary (1997-8), and Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at Simon Fraser University (2006). sybil unrest, her collaborative long poem with Rita Wong, was published by Line Books in 2009. Eggs in the Basement, a long poem based on a vocabulary exhaustion exercise, surprised its writer by telling the story of Moses and Monotheism. It was published by Nomados, also in 2009, and has just been shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Lai’s first solo full-length poetry book, Automaton Biographies (Arsenal Pulp), was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.
Lisa Robertson was born in Toronto and lived for many years in Vancouver, where she worked with several artist-run organizations, including Kootenay School of Writing and Artspeak Gallery. Her first book, XEclogue, was published in 1993 by Tsunami Editions; Debbie: An Epic, and The Weather followed, from New Star (both co-published by Reality Street in the UK); then The Men (Bookthug, 2006) and Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (Coach House 2009). R’s Boat was published by University of California Press in Spring 2010. A book of essays, Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, was published by Clearcut (USA, 2003) and Coach House (2006, 2010). She has been the recipient of the Relit Award and the bp Nichol Chapbook Award, and was nominated for a Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1998. She has worked as an editor of poetry, a freelance arts and architectural critic, and a teacher, since leaving the bookselling business in 1995, and has taught and held residencies at California College of the Arts, University of Cambridge, Capilano College, University of California Berkeley, University of California San Diego, American University of Paris and the Naropa Institute. During Fall 2010 she is writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University. She is currently working collaboratively on translation, sound and video-based projects.
Lori Emerson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She writes on and teaches electronic literature (especially digital poetry), experimental American and Canadian poetry from the 20th and 21st century, and media theory. Her essays have appeared in journals such as English Studies in Canada, Configurations, The Emily Dickinson Journal, and Postmodern Culture. In addition to curating The Archeological Media Lab and running a digital media reading series titled “Reading (With) the Machine,” she is also currently working on two book projects. The first is The Rematerialization of Poetry and is a deep-reaching account of what digital poetry is and what it does; it presents the reader with a historically and theoretically-based model for reading digital poetry by way of conceptualizations of space, time, and bodies within a limited scope of twentieth- and twenty-first century science and both “bookbound” and digital poems by American and Canadian writers. The second book project is An Encyclopaedia of Digital Textuality, co-edited with Marie-Laure Ryan and Benjamin Robertson. Finally, Emerson is also an Associate Editor for the Electronic Book Review.
From the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations, Marianne Nicolson has a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, a MFA from the University of Victoria, a MA in Linguistics and Anthropology from the University of Victoria, and is currently pursuing her PhD. She has had solo exhibitions at Thunder Bay Art Gallery; National Indian Art Centre, Hull; and Or Gallery, Vancouver. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver; International Museum of Film and Photography, New York; Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; National Museum of the American Indian, New York; Tapei Fine Arts Museum; Open Space, Victoria; McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, ON; and Vancouver Art Gallery.
Marie Annharte Baker also calls herself AKA – Anishinabe Kookum Activist. Born in 1942 in Winnipeg, she is from Little Saskatchewan First Nations, Manitoba. Her current work is Mirror Woman, poetry manuscript and a collection of critical essays, and her published books include Being on the Moon, Coyote Columbus Café, & Exercises in Lip Pointing. Her current projects includes a manuscript which explores Indigena silence from the special perspective of a senior and person with a disability. In her cultural studies approach to Indigenous literary criticism, performance and storytelling are primary focal interests. In ‘piecing together her life within a multi-disciplinary writing project’, life-story and contemporary storytelling are ways of making a metissage out of the identities formed and fragmented by Bill C-31, Little Saskatchewan First Nations ancestry and the celtic confusion of Irish-Scots descent.
Mercedes Eng explores racialized oppression in Canada – locally, on the West Coast, nationally, and internationally, in a global Canadian context – and how this oppression is underpinned by colonizing language and racist representation, from the perspective of a mixed-blood woman. Her first chapbook, February 2010, is a poem set in the context of the Vancouver Olympics and is a thinking through and responding to the media and advertising, censorship, art, nationalism, diversity of tactics, and issues of First Nation land rights. Her second chapbook, knuckle sandwich, uses documentary poetics to explore the language and discourse attending state violence against racialized women. Using local mainstream media text, she juxtaposes the coverage of the missing and murdered women of Vancouver to reportage of the Canadian liberation of women in Afghanistan. A current creative project considers her lived experience with sex-work in the Downtown Eastside, using non-standard English to explore and to resist the ways in which victimhood is constructed.
Michael Turner is an important Canadian writer and cultural figure who is well known for his novels, poetry, screen plays and art criticism. Through his distinct voice, his eye for the details of urban life, and through his tapping of cultural references that give a resonating sense of place and subcultures, Michael Turner has brought his writing into the national mainstream. His first book of poetry, Company Town (1991) was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Along with his 1995 book of poetry, Kingsway, Turner’s early work comes out of a tradition of the poetics of place and “work writing” that is influenced by a documentary exploration of the local and the everyday. With Hard Core Logo (1993) and American Whiskey Bar (1997)—both of which have been adapted to the screen—Turner moves into a mixed-genre practice, creating fragmentary narratives that combine aspects of the novel, poetry, and the film script. His 1999 novel The Pornographer’s Poem, published by Doubleday Canada, won the B.C. Book Prizes Ether Wilson Fiction Award. Turner has also written extensively on visual art, co-written film scripts with artist Stan Douglas, and published fiction and essays in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. His most recent novel, 8 x 10, sees him develop these interests into an experimental narrative of portraiture. Currently, he is beginning work on a new novel, Else, and a new poetry collection, 9 x 11, which focuses on the changes in Turner’s Vancouver neighbourhood.
As a practicing artist and educator, Peter Morin’s work looks deeply into issues of First Nation’s identity, de-colonizing through relationship building and speaking one Indigenous language. His most recent visual and performance work includes Team Diversity Bannock and the World’s Largest Bannock attempt, 7 Suits for 7 Days of Colonialism, and A return to the place where God outstretched his hand, which took place at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2007. From 2005 to 2007, Peter spent time working in Lower Post BC and Watson Lake YT, organizing community art projects, a digital video camp, and a skate competition for some totally awesome youth. Peter Morin is of the Crow clan of the Tahltan Nation of Telegraph Creek, BC, and currently is living and working in Victoria BC.
Phillip Djwa is an award-winning composer for theatre, dance, and film and his work has received support from the Canada Council, BC, and Quebec. He has performed nationally, and internationally, in the late 80’s and early 90’s, from the Kitchen in NYC to the ‘Cultch in Vancouver. His work, primarily computer-based, involved installation and computer generated music including an interactive symphonic work with acclaimed saxophonist Anthony Braxton. He has studied with Martin Bartlett and George Lewis. A career-long social entrepreneur, Phillip has volunteered for many worthwhile community initiatives, including the First People’s Heritage Council, and the Friends of Chamber Music. Phillip has a BA from Simon Fraser University in Fine Arts with a concentration in electronic music, and an MFA in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York (1995). Since 2000, Phillip has led strategy, and completed innovative web projects, as part of his company Agentic Communications. Agentic was recently recognized as one of the top 100 fastest growing companies in Vancouver with its specialty in not-for-profit, Aboriginal and government organizations.His background is Chinese Indonesian and Newfoundland/Miq’maq making his national dress a sarong and a sou’wester.
Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary American Indian arts collective comprised of Raven Chacon (Navajo), Kade L. Twist (Cherokee), Steven Yazzie (Laguna/Navajo) and Nathan Young (Delaware/Kiowa/Pawnee). The collective was established in 2007 to function as a vehicle for artists to work outside of their individual art practices exploring innovative and collaborative scenarios resulting in work that is greater than the sum of its individual parts. Postcommodity works to forge new Indigenous metaphors capable of rationalizing our shared experiences within this increasingly challenging contemporary environment; promote a constructive discourse that challenges the social, political and economic processes that are destabilizing communities and geographies; and connect Indigenous narratives of cultural self-determination with the broader public sphere.
Rachel Zolf’s poetic practice explores interrelated materialist questions concerning memory, history, knowledge, subjectivity and the conceptual limits of language and meaning. She is particularly interested in how ethics founders on the shoals of the political. Her fourth full-length book, Neighbour Procedure, was released by Coach House Books in 2010. Previous collections include Human Resources (Coach House), which won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, Masque (The Mercury Press), Shoot & Weep (Nomados), and Her absence, this wanderer (BuschekBooks). Zolf’s poetry and essays have appeared in publications across North America, including Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, West Coast Line, Open Letter and Capilano Review. Her work has been translated into French, Spanish and Portuguese and been included in anthologies such as Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics (Coach House) and a forthcoming anthology of conceptual writing from Les Figues Press (Los Angeles). She was the founding poetry editor for The Walrus magazine and has also worked as a documentary producer and communications consultant. She was awarded a Chalmers Arts Fellowship and has received multiple grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.
Raymond Boisjoly is an Aboriginal artist of Haida and Québécois descent based in Vancouver, BC. Since completing his studies at Emily Carr Institute (now University) and The University of British Columbia, Boisjoly presented The Ever-Changing Light at Access Gallery (Vancouver, BC) and has participated in numerous group exhibitions and projects including How Soon Is Now at the Vancouver Art Gallery and House Systems: Fort Club at the Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University. Boisjoly was awarded a Fleck Fellowship from the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2010.
Rita Wong is the author of three books of poetry: sybil unrest, co-written with Larissa Lai (Line Books, 2008), forage (Nightwood, 2007), and monkeypuzzle (Press Gang, 1998). She received the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop Emerging Writer Award in 1997 for monkeypuzzle, and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2008 for forage. Wong teaches in Critical + Cultural Studies at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she has developed a humanities course focused on water, with the support of a fellowship from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. She is currently researching the poetics of water, supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wong serves on the boards of the journal West Coast Line, the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC, ASLE Canada), and the Asian Canadian Studies Society. Her poems have appeared in anthologies such as Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry, Visions of British Columbia (published for an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery), and Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature. In August 2010, she went on a healing walk through the Alberta Tar Sands, described in an article at rabble.ca.
Roger Farr is the author of SURPLUS (Line Books, 2006), co-author of the co-research project N 49 19. 47 – W 123 8.11 (Recomposition, 2008), and editor of Capilano University Editions. Sections from two forthcoming books, MEANS and IKMQ, have appeared or will appear in The Capilano Review, Canadian Literature, Islands of Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada (New Star, 2010), Matrix, The Poetic Front, PRECIPICe, and West Coast Line. Critical writing on autonomous social movements, tactical media, childhood, and the avant-garde appears in Anarchist Studies, Dandelion, Fifth Estate, Rad Dad, Social Anarchism, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. He teaches in the Creative Writing and Culture and Technology programs at Capilano University, where in Spring 2011 he will be carrying out institutional research into the role of affect in on-line writing pedagogies.
Sonny Assu is Laich-kwil-tach (Kwakwaka’wakw) of the Weka’yi First Nation (Cape Mudge), The artist has lived in Vancouver since 1999. Assu’s work has been featured in several group exhibits over the past years, notably How Soon is Now? at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Comic Relief at the National Gallery of Canada, Challenging Traditions: Contemporary First Nations Art of the Northwest Coast at the McMichael’s Canadian Art Collection and Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation Part 2 at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. Sonny’s first solo exhibit, Sonny Assu: As Defined Within the Indian Act, was held at the Belkin Satellite Gallery in Vancouver, in April 2006. Assu’s work has been accepted into the National Gallery in Ottawa (Breakfast Series and Death Blanket), the Seattle Art Museum (Breakfast Series), the Museum of Anthropology at UBC (Coke Salish) and in various other public and private collections across Canada and the United States.
Susan Roy is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of History, York University. Her book These Mysterious People: Shaping History and Archaeology in the Northwest Coast Community (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010) examines the history of the Musqueam First Nation and the Marpole Midden on the Fraser River. She also works as a historical research consultant for First Nations in Canada.
Tania Willard of Red Willow Designs is an artist, woodcutter and designer from the Secwepemc (Shuswap) Nation in the Interior of BC, who works with narrative and story in the arts, media and advocacy to share First Nations’ history and experiences in the struggle for social justice. Tania started breaking ground with Red Wire Magazine, one of the first independent Aboriginal youth run arts and media organizations. She participated as an artist and curator in Beat Nation, originally a website and online gallery curated by grunt gallery director Glenn Alteen, that expanded into a full fledged showcase and festival exhibition, including the artists Sista Hailstorm, the Starmakerz – Manik1derful and Magic Touch and festival exhibition.
Team
Curator Lorna Brown is a Vancouver-based artist, curator and writer. Working between studio practice, curation and writing she explores interests in the dynamics of public spaces, social phenomena such as boredom, and institutional structures and systems. Recent independent curatorial and editorial projects include Group Search: art in the library, a series of artists projects in the spaces and systems of the Vancouver Public Library and Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties, an extensive online digital archive of images, film, essays and artists’ projects (www.vancouverartinthesixties.com). Brown was the Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery from 1999 to 2004. Recent exhibitions of her visual art include The Chatter of Culture, Artspeak, Vancouver; Threshold (cont.) at the Koerner Library at UBC, and AdmIndex, an online artwork commissioned by the Audain Gallery at SFU Woodwards (http://audaingallery.ca/coming-soon). Her interview with Anne Pasternak, Director of New York’s Creative Time was published in Fillip 12, Fall 2010.
Curator Clint Burnham is a Vancouver-based poet and critic who teaches in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. His art criticism has appeared in magazines and catalogues in Canada, the U.S., and Europe, and he is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism. His most recent book of poetry, The Benjamin Sonnets (Bookthug, Toronto), is a homophonic translation of Walter Benjamin’s childhood reminiscences into English, taking a nostalgic materialist text and rendering it into a discordant, disjunctive panoply of pop culture and contemporary signifiers. In his writings on art he has long been interested in the social meaning of photography, and has more recently begun engaging with Lacanian psychoanalysis and the work of Slavoj Žižek. The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing will be published this fall by Arsenal Pulp. He also uses social media (Facebook, twitter) both as a form of textual intervention into public space and, in teaching, as genres of digital autobiography. Follow him on twitter.com/Prof_Clinty.
Barbara Cole is the Executive Director of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects Association, a practicing artist, independent curator, educator, and curatorial consultant in public art. She has led workshops, lectured widely, and published articles on the subject of art in public space. Barbara has worked with a range of artists on public art projects, including Liam Gillick, Ken Lum, Janet Echelman, Fiona Bowie, Alan Storey and Susan Point. Recent curatorial projects include The Games are Open by Kobberling & Kaltwasser, Last Chance by Eric Deis (2010), Vox Pop by Antonia Hirsch (2008) and Marble Infrastructure Project, (co-curated with Patrik Andersson) by Cameron Kerr (2006). She taught sessionally at Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design from 1983 to 1999, served as a trustee for the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Contemporary Art Gallery, and has participated as a jury member for numerous art initiatives.
Technical Director Colin Griffiths is a media arts specialist with a 30-year history of installation and technical expertise, exhibition management and development of cultural projects. Most recently he was the Installation Supervisor for the visual arts sector of the Cultural Olympiad at the 2010 Olympics. Based in Vancouver, Canada, he is sole proprietor of Contemporary Art Logistics. He also acts as an arts consultant to international institutions, in the areas of exhibition development, technical infrastructure and tour management. His primary activity is the design and installation of projected contemporary artworks. In collaboration with the artist, he coordinates autonomous exhibition systems that utilize diverse technologies, including synchronized 35mm slides, 16mm and 35mm film, video projection, 3D audio and acoustics, and virtual reality.
Webmistress Deanne Achong is an artist working in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice explores photographic and digital media in installations, net art, with a brief foray into robotics, following a residency at the Western Front, where “Sheryl:crowbot” was born. She has exhibited her work in Canada, the US and Europe. She has also been artist-in-residence in 2005 at Studio XX in Montreal, and La Chambre Blanche in Quebec City, and at the Caribbean Contemporay Arts in Trinidad in 2003, as part of a Canada Council international residency. She was a visiting artist at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College (Memorial University of Nfld) during the 2008/09 academic year. She is currently co-commissioned with artist Faith Moosang to create a public art project for the Richmond Olympic Oval. Originally from Montreal, she studied at NSCAD (BFA), and holds an MFA from UBC. An early net piece, “Excerpts from An Archive” was included in a publication on photography and the web – “L’Image Ramifiée” , published by VU, in Quebec City. She is currently considering the pros and cons of social media. Follow her on twitter.com/deanneachong.