Artspeak

• Rebecca Belmore

  Born in Upsala, Ontario, Rebecca Belmore is an artist currently living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Since 1987, her multi-disciplinary work has addressed history, place and identity through the media of sculpture, installation, video and performance. She is internationally recognized for her performance and installation art, and was Canada’s official representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale.

• Ken Gonzales-Day

  Ken Gonzales-Day’s interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded projects consider the history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational systems ranging from the lynching photograph to museum display. Gonzales-Day lives in Los Angeles and is Chair of the Art Department at Scripps College.

• Francisco-Fernando Granados

  Francisco-Fernando Granados is a Guatemalan-born, Toronto-based artist, writer and educator working in performance, video, drawing, cultural criticism, teaching, and  curatorial practice. He currently contributes as a member of the Editorial Committee for FUSE magazine. He is also a member of the 7a11d International Performance Festival Collective in Toronto.

• Marianne Nicolson

  Nicolson is a member of the Dzawada’enuxw Tribe of the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations who reside on the coastal mainland of British Columbia. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and a MFA in Visual Art from the University of Victoria. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2008), Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2007), Artspeak (2006), Thunder Bay Art Gallery (2002), and the National Indian Art Centre (2001). She has also participated in group exhibitions at Equinox Gallery (2011), 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010), Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver (2010), the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the Olympic Museum, Lausanne (2009), Museum of Arts & Design, New York (2005), and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (1999), among others. Her artworks are contemporary expressions of traditional Kwakwaka’wakw concepts. Due to an emerging belief that these concepts could be better understood through comprehension of the Kwak’wala language and a growing concern over the endangered status of this indigenous language, she engaged in linguistic and anthropological study at the University of Victoria where she completed an Interdisciplinary MA in 2005. In 2012, she completed her PhD research involving the conceptualization of space and time in Kwakwaka’wakw language and art and the importance of indigenous language to indigenous worldview.

• Louise Noguchi

  Louise Noguchi challenges her audience with themes that pose psychological questions. Using photography, sculpture, video and other media, Noguchi’s concepts confront the spectator’s notions of identity, perception and reality. She is a professor in the Art and Art History program, a collaborative joint program between Sheridan Institute and the University of Toronto Mississauga where she teaches photography and performance-based art.

• Liz Park

  Liz Park is a curator and writer committed to creating discursive spaces and generating forums to engage an audience with discussions of contemporary political and social realities. She received a Masters of Arts in Art History Curatorial Studies at the University of British Columbia. In 2011/2012, she was Helena Rubinstein Fellow in the Curatorial Program at the Whitney Independent Study Program.