Artspeak

• James Albers

  James Albers is an emerging artist, curator, writer, organizer, and performer based on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Sel̓íl̓witulh territories. Their practice often takes a collaborative and community oriented approach as they see this as a productive way to create new meaning from their lived experiences. James is concerned with exploring the queer potentials of revisionist histories and chooses to believe in the magic of fiction. Recently, James has been thinking through what  truth  a perfect lie may hold.

• Whess Harman

  Whess Harman is Carrier Wit’at, a nation amalgamated by the federal government under the Lake Babine Nation. They graduated from the emily carr university BFA program in 2014 and are currently living and working on the territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and səlilwətaɬ as the curator at grunt gallery. Their multidisciplinary practice includes beading, illustration, text, poetry and curation. As a mixed-race, trans/non-binary artist they work to find their way through a tasty plethora of some kind of undiagnosed attention deficit disorder, colonial bullshit and queer melancholy. To the best of their patience, they do this with humour and a carefully mediated cynicism that the galleries go hog wild for. 

• S F Ho

  S F Ho is an artist, writer, and facilitator. Their parents immigrated to Turtle Island from Hong Kong in the 1970s and they have been living as an uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples for the past eleven years. They are cultivating a practice of wary sociality, never finishing books, and being sort of boring. They wrote a novella about love and aliens called George the Parasite. They are the founder of Slow Wave Small Projects.

• Tiziana La Melia

  Tiziana La Melia currently lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and səlilwətaɬ Nations (Vancouver). Over the past year she has been preparing a new work titled The Simple Life: Country Mouse, City Mouse Hamster – mixing personal chronicles, Aesop’s fables and reality television. Her practice explores narrative, subjectivity, class, and ecology using a range of mediums and approaches. Forthcoming from Archive Books (Berlin/Milan) is a book of selected and new writing in English and translated into Italian. Solo and group exhibitions have included those at Mercer Union (Toronto), the Vancouver Art Gallery, Oakville Galleries, Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff), Damien and the Love Guru (Brussels), Unit 17 (Vancouver), and Galerie Anne Barrault (Paris). Tiziana was the winner of the 2014 RBC Canadian Painting Competition.

• Reed H. Reed

  Reed H. Reed is an artist who makes texts, editions, and other public projects. They live between Vancouver, BC on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and səlilwətaɬ territories, and Dawson City, YT on the traditional territories of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, where they teach foundation visual arts at Yukon School of Visual Art. Reed’s work has appeared at The Portland Art Museum (OR), The Dunlop Art Gallery (SK), Art League (TX), Dalhousie University Art Gallery (NS), The Vancouver Art Gallery (BC), The Power Plant (ON) and Flat Time House’s first issue of noit (UK). Reed frequently collaborates with their partner, Hannah Jickling. 

• Kiel Torres

  Kiel Torres is an emerging writer, editor and curator working and living on unceded xwməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ territories. She thinks a lot about friendship, reading, embodiment, and fandom as apparatuses to navigate social and emotional worlds. Her chapbook Swan Dives was published by Artspeak in 2018 during her residency in the Studio for Emerging Writers. She holds a BA in Art History from the University of British Columbia.