Artspeak

• Colleen Brown

  Colleen Brown, born in Guelph, Ontario, slowly moved west and is now living in Vancouver. In an earlier rendition of herself Colleen received her B.A. Psyc. and a diploma in Electrophysiology. Later, she received a B.F.A. from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited in British Columbia and Quebec.

• Jeff Derksen

  Jeff Derksen, (b. 1958), is a cultural critic and a poet who works at Simon Fraser University. Derksen graduated with distinction from the David Thompson University Center in 1984 with a bachelor in Arts and Science. His writing on art and culture has appeared in Springerin, Hunch, C magazine, Open Letter, Poetics Journal, XCP, amongst others. He has two books of critical essays forthcoming: After Euphoria: art / space / neoliberalism (EC Press/JPR Ringier), and Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics (Talonbooks). Derksen was a research fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics (CUNY Graduate Center) and is a founding member of the Kootenay School of Writing. Under the name Urban Subjects, he collaborates with Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber on curatorial projects and visual research.

• Isabelle Hayeur

  Isabelle Hayeur lives and works in Montréal. She received her MFA from l’Université du Québec à Montréal in 2002 and works primarily in photography and video. Her work has been widely exhibited nationally, including exhibitions at the Ottawa Art Gallery; Gallery 44, Toronto; Skol, Montréal; the Rimouski Regional Museum and the Centre for the Photographic and Digital Arts, Winnipeg, as well as at the Hippolyte Gallery, Helsinki, Finland.

• Luis Jacob

  Toronto artist Luis Jacob gives character to the shapeless community of isolated individuals consuming waves of spam advertising that arrive at their computer terminals. His Spill contribution, Just Do It!, transposes the litany of failed transformations promised by products on the Internet into ‘worldly’ architecture. Jacob’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions across Canada and internationally including at the Khyber Centre, Halifax; Hippolyte Gallery, Helsinki; YYZ, Toronto; and Saidye Bronfman Centre, Montréal.

• Kelly Mark

  Toronto artist Kelly Mark uses her own “will to order” to investigate potential moments of individuation that leak out of the repetitive, obsessive tasks of the everyday.  Mark’s work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally in solo exhibitions at the IKON Gallery, Birmingham, UK; Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, Toronto; and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, among others.

• Scott Massey

  Scott Massey is a photo-based artist living in Vancouver. He completed a BFA (photography) at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2003 and has a background in furniture making and design. His work has been exhibited locally at Gallery 83 (2003) and at the Canadian Museum of Craft and Design (2000).

• Philip Kevin Paul

  Writer Philip Kevin Paul lives and works on Vancouver Island. He is author of Taking the Names Down from the Hill (Nightwood Editions, 2003) and his work is included in numerous anthologies including An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (Oxford, 1998) and Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets (Harbour, 1995). He was awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry in 2004.

• Ana Rewakowicz

  Ana Rewakowicz is an interdisciplinary artist born in Poland of Ukrainian origin; she now lives in Montréal. She works with inflatables and explores relationships between temporal, portable architecture, the body and the environment. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at YYZ, Toronto; Optica, Montréal; Khyber Centre, Halifax; Museé du Québec, Québec City; and Assembly Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland.

• Corin Sworn

  Vancouver artist Corin Sworn examines how contemporary popular culture showcases models of the private sphere rendering them symptoms of an ideal interiority.  She has a BA in Art and Design from Central Saint Martins College (2001). Sworn’s work, which is largely sculptural, has been included in exhibitions at Bauhaus, Dessau Germany; Gasworks, London, UK; Or Gallery, Vancouver; and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Bogata, Columbia, among others.

• Kara Uzelman

  Berlin based Canadian visual artist Kara Uzelman (b. 1978) is a graduate of Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver. Since 2002 she has shown work in numerous group and solo exhibitions including Artspeak, Vancouver; Vancouver Art Gallery; Justine M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto; Latitude 53, Edmonton; Sommer & Kohl, Berlin; Pari Nadimi, Toronto and has been highlighted in both national and local publications. Uzelman is also a member of the Vancouver based artist collective Norma. With an educational background based in urban planning, fine arts and archeology, Uzelman has developed process-based, site-specific sculpture and installation works focusing on the rehabilitation of objects and artifacts in her surrounding environment. This process began when she bought entire garage sales and transforming these collections into sculptures, installations, and performance props. In conjunction with a mentorship in Archaeology in 2006, she gathered a team of volunteers to conduct a four-month excavation of her back yard in Vancouver. This informed several exhibitions over the past three years and resulted in a series of performance props, tools, objects and documentary images. Uzelman’s work is based on an interest in the historical and imagined narratives inherent in the objects that surround her.