Aylan Couchie (she/her) is a Nishnaabekwe interdisciplinary artist, curator and writer hailing from Nipissing First Nation. She is a NSCAD University alumna and received her M.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design at OCAD University where she focused her thesis on reconciliation and its relationship to monument and public art. She’s currently in her fourth year of study at Queen’s University where she’s working on her Ph.D in the Cultural Studies program researching areas of land+language+Indigenous placemaking through mapping, naming, digital public art and gaming. 

Her research-based practice explores the intersections of colonial/First Nations histories of place, culture and Indigenous erasure as well as issues of (mis)representation and cultural appropriation. She’s been the recipient of several awards including an “Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture” award through the International Sculpture Centre and a Premier’s Award through Ontario Colleges. Most recently, she was chosen by Queen’s University as their nominee for the 2023 SSHRC Talent Award. She previously taught at OCAD University in the School of Graduate Studies and the Indigenous Visual Culture (INVC) program. She splits her time living and working between her home community of Nipissing First Nation in Northern Ontario and Tsi Tkarón:to.

Couchie is an Assistant Professor in the Media and New Media Studies Program in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus and teaches in the Master of Visual Studies Program at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

aylan-couchie.com

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Emmanuel Osahor’s practice engages with beauty as a necessity for survival, and a precursor to thriving. Through a rigorously playful inquiry into materials and image making processes, his works depict garden spaces as complicated sanctuaries within which manifestations of beauty and care are present. His work has been presented in multiple solo and group exhibitions across Canada and can be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Guelph, Art Gallery of Alberta, Art Bank of Canada, RBC, and TD Bank.

Osahor is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus and teaches in the Master of Visual Studies Program at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

utsc.utoronto.ca/acm/emmanuel-osahor

Zach Blas (b. Point Pleasant, West Virginia, USA) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice spans moving image, computation, theory, performance, and science fiction.

Blas engages the materiality of digital technologies while also drawing out the philosophies and imaginaries lurking in artificial intelligence, biometric recognition, predictive policing, airport security, the internet, and biological warfare. The Doors (2019) is an immersive environment that imagines a new psychedelic age fueled by AI, nootropics, and tech culture. SANCTUM (2018) is a sex dungeon-cum-detention center that recasts security and surveillance through BDSM. A film installation, Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033 (2018) follows author Ayn Rand on an acid trip, in which she bares witness to a dystopian future of the internet. im here to learn so :)))))) (2017), a four-channel video installation and collaboration with Jemima Wyman, resurrects Microsoft AI Tay to consider the gendered politics of pattern recognition and machine learning. Facial Weaponization Suite (2011-14) consists of amorphous masks that demand opacity against biometric facial recognition systems.

Blas has exhibited, lectured, and held screenings at venues internationally, including the de Young Museum, Tate Modern, Walker Art Center, 2018 Gwangju Biennale, the 68th Berlin International Film Festival, Matadero Madrid, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art in General, Gasworks, Van Abbemuseum, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, e-flux, Whitechapel Gallery, ZKM Center for Art and Media, and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. His practice has been supported by a Creative Capital award in Emerging Fields, the Arts Council England, Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

His work is in the collections of Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Blas’s practice been written about and featured in Artforum, Frieze, ArtReview, BBC, The Guardian, and The New York Times.

Blas’s writings can be found in the collections You Are Here: Art After the Internet, Documentary Across Disciplines, Queer: Documents of Contemporary Art, as well as e-flux journal and various exhibition catalogues. With Melody Jue and Jennifer Rhee, he is co-editor of the anthology Informatics of Domination, forthcoming from Duke University Press. His artist monograph Unknown Ideals is available from Sternberg Press and MIT Press.

Blas holds a PhD from the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University and an MFA from Design Media Arts at UCLA. From 2015 to 2021, Blas was a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Patrick Cruz is an artist, educator, and albularyo who considers the role of spirituality, improvisation, intuition, and play as emancipatory tools to reify embedded colonial frameworks and ideologies in art making. Cruz employs meditation, divination, and hypnosis as research methodologies to exhume and retrieve hidden knowledge. His works are informed by the intersections of clown philosophy, magic, and the occult, and its syncretic manifestations and relationship in contemporary life. Most recently, Cruz has been making works using material retrieved from past-life regressions to navigate and side-step cultural and ancestral identity.

In 2021, he received the prestigious Thirteen Artist Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines and won the national title for the 17th RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2015. He is an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus and the Daniels Faculty. He is the founder and co-director of the Kamias Triennial, co-curator of Ben Flores Fan Club Collective with Christian Vistan, collaborator at Boring Earth with Laila Fox, and one of the 19 members of the artist-run collective the Plumb.

patrickcruz.org

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Sanaz Mazinani is an artist, educator, and curator based in Toronto. Working across the disciplines of photography, sculpture, and large-scale multimedia installations, Mazinani creates informational objects that invite a rethinking of how we see, suspending the viewer between observation and knowledge. Informed by the visual rhetoric and confounding presence of contemporary media circulation, her multidisciplinary practice aims to politicize the proliferation and distribution of images and introduce critical reflection. She holds an undergraduate degree from Ontario College of Art and Design and an MFA from Stanford University. Her work has appeared in solo exhibitions at institutions including the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the West Vancouver Museum, and Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, California. Her projects have been featured in venues throughout Canada as well as the USA, France, Germany, Guatemala, India, Iran, Switzerland, the UAE, and the UK. Her work has been written about in Artforum, artnet News, Border Crossings, Canadian Art, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Washington Post, among others. She has received grants from the Zellerbach Family Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, and her work is held in public collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the San Francisco International Airport.

Will Kwan is a Hong Kong-born, Tkaronto-based artist and educator. His artistic practice examines the diverse ways that hegemony is produced through economic systems and cultural narratives. 

Kwan received his MFA from Columbia University and from 2004-2006 was a research fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, The Netherlands. Kwan has been a full-time faculty member at UofT since 2007, teaching courses in interdisciplinary art practice and time-based media at the University of Toronto Scarborough and serving as a faculty member in the Master of Visual Studies Program at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. 

Kwan's work is held in the permanent collections of M+ in Hong Kong, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Kwan's work has been exhibited at triennial and biennial exhibitions in Folkestone, Liverpool, Montreal, and Venice, and at venues including MoMA PS1, Art in General, and the Cooper Union in New York, the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the MAC VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine, the CAC in Vilnius, the Polish National Museum in Poznan, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and The Power Plant in Toronto, and The Western Front and Centre A in Vancouver. Kwan has been an artist-in-residence at the Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, the Duolun Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester, and the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito. 

Katie Lyle’s work addresses themes of temporality and action through acts of accrual and erasure, reworking textured surfaces to define a nest of images that emphasize a layered quality of meaning. This process creates a methodology for learning through making that extends to her collaborative performative work with dance artist Shelby Wright, where forms and gestures are built and rebuilt in an iterative, relational approach between dancing bodies. 

Lyle’s current research investigates practices of painting conservation—past and present—and considers how the discipline reconfigures a painting’s relationship to materiality and value. Borrowing from treatments used for conservation of fresco and easel painting, she will address losses, lacuna, and patching as sites for retelling and shaping narrative in real time. By allowing these techniques of care and touch to act as sites for defining new forms of narrative and compositional structures in her work 

Lyle is an artist working across painting, drawing and performance. Selected presentations include; NADA House, Governors Island, New York presented by Franz Kaka; The School of Art Gallery at the University of Manitoba; La Datcha, Berlin; Franz Kaka, Toronto; Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto; Erin Stump Projects, Toronto; Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto; Projet Pangée, Montreal; The MacIntosh Gallery, London, ON; 67 Steps, Los Angeles; Oakville Galleries; the Nanaimo Art Gallery. Lyle has worked collaboratively with Toronto based dancer Shelby Wright since 2014. Selected presentations of their co-authored work include: the Toronto Biennale, SummerWorks Festival, and the Canadian Art Foundation. Lyle is based in Toronto 

MFA, Sculpture, York University (2004)
BA, Honors with Distinction, Art & Art History Specialist, Aboriginal Studies Minor, University of Toronto (1999)
Degree, Art & Art History, Sheridan College (1999)

Maria Hupfield is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Digital Arts and Performance and a Canadian Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts. An alumni of UTM, Hupfield has been at the cutting edge of art and public engagement for many years, from her early work as founder of 7th Generation Image Makers, Native Child + Family Services of Toronto, forging partnerships with the Art Gallery of Ontario, Charles Street Video, and ImagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, and the Toronto Indigenous community to recent collaborative performances with musicians and artists including her commission of five multimedia projects for Toronto’s Nuit Blanche (2017).

Hupfield was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation prize for outstanding achievement by a Canadian mid-career artist (2018). Her first major institutional solo exhibition The One Who Keeps on Giving was a production of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, in partnership with Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal; Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, Halifax; and the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris (2017-18).

Her work has shown in New York at the Museum of Arts and Design, BRIC, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; represented Canada at SITE Santa Fe (2016), and travelled nationally across Canada with Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (2012-14). Recent performances include Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Para\\el Performance Gallery in Brooklyn, and Gibney Dance.

Hupfield is a Guest Curator, Artist of Color Council Movement Research at Judson Church Fall 2019/Winter 2020 Season. Her upcoming solo Nine Years Towards The Sun opens at the Heard Museum, Phoenix December (2019). Together with her husband artist Jason Lujan she co-owns Native Art Department International.
 

My work exists at the intersection of Anishinaabek cultural knowledge and Western based art practices. Previously based in Brooklyn for the past 9 years, I am Canadian like my settler father and Anishinaabe like my late mother, as well as an off-rez citizen of Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario. My strategies to disrupt and deconstruct colonial spaces transform institutional models of trust building and strengthen Indigenous peoples in our homelands resourcefully through art. My commitment to art based practices expands conversations on North American Indigenous bodies that crossover the Nation State borders of Canada and the United States of America. I view Indigeneity as mobile from multiple positions to free it from reductive singular readings. My projects position Indigenous arts as a technologically advanced and active living presence across time and into the future, expanding and contracting from the local to the global. — Maria Hupfield

Current Research Projects
Hupfield’s five-year research program in Indigenous Digital Arts and Performance is grounded in her transdisciplinary art practice and collaboration while prioritizing an increased understanding of the world through hands-on experience and direct dialogue with others. It seeks to change the way that universities are accountable to Indigenous people; it models new ways of connecting with Indigenous communities through arts-based practices; and it establishes respectful ongoing relationships with Indigenous peoples and land.

Hupfield’s research program has three components: 1) Community Medicine Garden; 2) Indigenous Creation Studio; 3) Living Archive. Each space will both constitute and facilitate the development of creative work grounded in Indigenous oral traditions and the natural world. Hupfield’s research will move traditional and digital art from the land to the classroom and into virtual space. She is dedicated to dynamic scholarship that probes the development and maintenance of good relations with land and within communities. The projects will model accountable collaboration with Indigenous peoples grounded in non-competitive community building, social practice art, wellness, Indigenous knowledge, land sovereignty, and LGBTQ2+ inclusivity, especially for Indigenous trans and queer people of color, and two-spirit folx. Hupfield aims to build networks of awakened solidarity, fueling the movement for resurgence, decolonization, and reclamation of Indigenous homelands in North America.

Karen Kraven is an artist working with photography, sculpture and installation. Influenced by her father’s (and his father’s) knitting factory, which stopped manufacturing the year that she was born, and by the physical and optical properties of textiles, her practice explores the ways in which clothing registers the body — how the body is unfinished, unstable and like an archive, something that unfolds and changes with time — pointing to the sustained impact of work and wear. 

Recent solo exhibitions have included Le Chiffonier at AXENÉO7 in Gatineau (2022), Hoist at PLATFORM Centre in Winnipeg (2022), Lull at Latitude 53 in Edmonton (2020), Dust Against Dust at Parisian Laundry in Montreal (2019) and Pins & Needles in the Toronto Sculpture Garden (2018). Reviews of Kraven’s work have been published in C Magazine, Canadian Art, Momus and Artforum. Her work was also recently acquired by the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal. She is represented by Bradley Ertaskiran in Montreal.