Toronto artist Joanne Tod (A.O.C.A., R.C.A.) has exhibited her work nationally and internationally for the past thirty years. Evolving from an early interest in Pop Art and documentary photography, Tod is widely known for her subject of social critique in the guise of high realism paintings. Her series Vanity Fair (2002), featured portraits of individuals from the Toronto art community posing as contemporary representatives of characters from William Thackeray’s 19th century satire. The exhibition Kingdom Come (2009) at Nicholas Metivier Gallery, examined notions of proprietary and moral rights, in relation to antiquities and museum holdings.

Between 2007 - 2011, Tod painted every Canadian soldier that fell in Afghanistan. The project, entitled Oh, Canada – A Lament, consisted of 6" x 5" portraits that were interspersed with other painted panels arranged to resemble a fragmented Canadian flag. The installation travelled to prominent galleries and museums across Canada including the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, Toronto's Harbourfront Centre and the Winnipeg Art Gallery (forthcoming).

Joanne Tod teaches in Visual Studies program at the University of Toronto and is also a member of the Advisory Board for Sotheby’s Canada. Her work is held in many collections including, The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; and the Vancouver Art Gallery and Musee d'art contemporain in Montreal. Tod is represented in Toronto by Nicholas Metivier Gallery.

http://www.steeleandtomczak.com

Lisa Steele works in video, photography, film and performance as well as writing and curating on video and media arts. Steele was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1947, and studied English Literature at the University of Missouri. She immigrated to Canada in 1968 and is now a Canadian citizen. Steele's videotapes have been extensively exhibited nationally and internationally including: at the Venice Biennale in 1980, the Kunsthalle in Basel, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Canada, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Long Beach Museum. Her videotapes are in many collections including: The National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, Texas, Ingrid Oppenheim, Concordia University in Montreal, Newcastle Polytechnic in England, Paulo Cardazzo in Milan, the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She is a co-founder of Vtape, a Toronto media arts resource centre.

Since 1983, Steele has worked exclusively in collaboration with Kim Tomczak, producing videotapes, performances and photo/text works. They have received numerous grants and awards including the Bell Canada prize for excellence in Video Art, administered by the Canada Council for the Arts; the Peter Herndorff award for Media Arts through the Toronto Arts Awards, and, in 2005, a Governor General’s Award for lifetime achievement in Visual & Media Arts.  They have been awarded two public art commissions, one for an outdoor screen at Dundas Square and Watertable, a light installation that marks the original shoreline of Lake Ontario. Steele and Tomczak were awarded Honourary Doctorates by the University of British Columbia (Okanagan) in 2009.

A major survey of their photo and video work opened at Wharf Centre d'art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie in January 2010.  Becoming…, a 4 channel installation work was in Montreal in September as part of Le Mois de la Photo a Montréal.  A travelling survey of their work from the past decade entitled The Long Time, and curated by Paul Wong, opened in Vancouver in September 2012, traveled to A Space Gallery in Toronto in December 2013, and will travel to Halifax in June 2014 and The Art Gallery of Windsor in September 2015.

http://www.johnmassey.ca

Since 1979, Canadian artist John Massey has exhibited nationally and internationally. He has worked in installation, video, photography and sculpture. His early practice focused on large-scale installations, sometimes using scale models of architectural interiors to figure as mindscapes. The intimate scale of these miniaturized interiors coupled with the gigantesque presence of the viewer created a context for his interest in desire and projection.

Transforming a mundane event into a surreal juxtaposition, Massey’s three-channel film installation, As the Hammer Strikes (A Partial Illustration) (1982), is a continuous thirty-minute take of a conversation between the artist and a hitchhiker. The central screen — shot in colour from the rear of a van travelling through a rural landscape — is flanked on either side by pulsing black and white filmed images. The left screen illustrates the speech of the driver and the right screen that of the passenger.

With the advent of computer graphic technologies in the early ‘90s, Massey was able to fashion his narratives using new digital tools with increasing skill and innovation. Over the years he has developed a collage language that embodies an emotional content while rigorously asking rhetorical and structural questions of his selected media.

http://www.marlahlady.com

A Senior Lecturer at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus, Marla Hlady draws, makes sculpture, works with sites and sounds and sometimes makes video. Hlady’s kinetic sculptures and sound pieces often consist of common objects (such as teapots, cocktail mixers, jars) that are expanded and animated to reveal heretofore unexpected sonic and poetic properties often using a system based approach to composition.

Marla has shown widely in solo and group shows including Manif D’Art 6 (Quebec City’s biennial), Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo, NY) (2012), Oakville Galleries (Toronto) (2011), YYZ Artist’s Outlet (2008), Klink and Bank (Reykjavik, Iceland) (2005), New General Catalog (Brooklyn, New York) (2005), the Art Gallery of Calgary (2003), Apexart Gallery (New York) (2002), Museo di San Domenico (Imola, Italy) (2002), L’Oeil De Poisson (Quebec City) (2002), Neutral Ground (Regina, Saskatchewan) (2002), The Power Plant Gallery (2001), The Nunnery (London, England, 1999). She has mounted site works in such places as the fjords in Norway (FTG of Birds/Fitjar 2012), an apartment window (Berlin, 2008), a tour bus (Artengine/Ottawa, 2009), a grain silo (Electric Eclectic/Meaford, 2011), the Hudson’s Bay department store display window (Interaccess/Toronto, 2006), an empty shell of a building (Genereux Gallery/Toronto, 1994).

Marla is represented by Jessica Bradley Gallery.