Author: prideinart

Untitled (Ocean Water), Turtle Island (Ocean Water) + Sun Ritual

Untitled (Ocean Water)

Artist Statement

In the fall of 2018, I asked five people to donate water from the five oceans. The water was then couriered and shipped across other oceans. In the spring of 2019, the water is air-dried in glasses and the residual salt and minerals are collected. The evaporated water then makes its way back to the ocean.

Turtle Island (Ocean Water)

Artist Statement

When we consider water through the lens of western constructs or schools of thought like or akin to geography, typically we think of it as a barrier – that which separates us. It forces a dislocation. An interruption to being in relation to. Curator Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour, informed from the teachings and life work of Anishinaabe Grandmother Water Walker Josephine Mandamin (1942 – 2019). Josephine walked a bucket of water from all four corners of Turtle Island back to Lake Superior (where they were ceremoniously poured in) many times over the course of her lifetime. The artist and curators felt for the work to be shown here meant to honour her and her work. Water from the Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic and Nunavut Waters were gathered & flown in for the work – water isn’t what divides us, its what connects us.”

Sun Ritual

SUM Gallery Rooftop:
July 24 | July 31 | August 2
8:45 – 9:15pm

Artist Statement

A performance document of a walk and swim towards the sun nearing sunset. The performance of an unanticipated duration starts on the coast of Maharashtra, IN and continues in the water of the Arabian Sea.

Tsohil Bhatia is an artist and homemaker based in Lenapehoking. They work with their body and its ghost to contemplate the latencies of quotidian objects, images and phenomenon revealed in the quietude of their home. They studied Performance Art at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology (Bangalore) and were awarded the Regina and Martin Miller Fellowship to attend an MFA at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University (2020). Their work has been shown at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC), Bezalel Academy(Jerusalem), Hair+Nails(MN), Phosphor Project Space(PA) and the Andy Warhol Museum (PA). They’ve participated at Franconia Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Residency, Ox Bow School of Art (MI), HH Art Spaces Residency (Goa), Shergill-Sunderam Shanthi Road Residency (Bangalore) and will be at residence at the Chautauqua School of Art and MASS MoCA in 2021. They’re represented by Blueprint12 Gallery (New Delhi).

Between the Waves

2012
3 Channel Video Installation
26 minutes

Artist Statement

Between the Waves is a vivid and lush *5-channel video installation. Shah creates sensual, poetic, heterotopic landscapes within which she places subjects that inhabit personal/political metaphors – embodiments of the queer, eco-sexual, inter-special, technological, spiritual and scientific. Their activities feel archaic and futuristic at the same time, primitive but filled with urgency and agency. How did they arrive in these immersive environments, which surround them and also us? Both seductive and visceral, they could be spaces of refuge or expulsion.

Multiple historic and mythological references are layered, woven and problematised. That which is perhaps most obvious is the reference to Rebecca Horn’s Einhorn (Unicorn), which in turn references Frida Kahlo’s painting, The Broken Column. Horn has described the subject in Einhorn as “very bourgeois”, the (female) creature walks elegantly, more like a mythical creature than an animal, naked but asexual. Shah’s subjects, however, are neither bourgeois or asexual. They are base and unselfconscious, embodying a ritualistic and intuitive exploration, unapologetically seeking closeness.

Shah’s work becomes practically and publicly political through its situated context. The making and dissemination of radical works such as Between the Waves is a real challenge for artists in India where freedom of speech and creative expression all too often face serious censorship from state and non-state actors. Actions of love, sensuality or sexuality being performed by her subjects can be read as assertively political – articulating the right of a subjectivity beyond the scripted gender binary enforced through various expressions of social as well as state repressions in contemporary democracies.

*This installation is a unique configuration of channels 1, 2, and 4, completed with permission from the artist.

Tejal Shah
b. 1979 in Bhilai (India)
Currently lives peripatetically

Tejal Shah’s is a unique practice that consistently challenges the legible by occupying liminal spaces between fact, fiction and poetry. Working across diverse media such as video, photography, performance, sound, installation and educational projects, Shah positions herself at the intersection of queer ecology, feminism and Non-dual Buddhist philosophy. Exploring the notions of “trans-”—with regard to gender and sexuality, but also to national or cultural identity—Shah’s work inhabits the position of the in-between as a means to destabilise the complacency of patriarchy and the “normative phantasms of a compulsory heterosexuality” (Judith Butler). The body as a gendered and sexualised entity is both medium and subject of their work that, though highly theoretically informed, operates on a very physical, performative level, stressing concepts of multiplicity as opposed to duality or singularity. Theirs is an invitation to examine the relationship between power and knowledge, learned social and political behaviour, and the construction of norms.

Repeating Patterns 1

Preston Buffalo is a Two Spirited, Cree man who lives and loves in the unceded Coastal Salish Territories in British Columbia. His interdisciplinary work uses photography, print making, digital illustration and sculpture to create visual representations of personal Indigenous iconography and symbolism to explore issues such as addiction, mental health and the loss of culture and language , the journey to find connection often meets at the intersection of hyphenated identities.

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Die Bath

Artist Statement

When I began working on this piece I wanted to explore the idea of creating something out of things that weren’t there. I was thinking about 120,00 people that have disappeared in the 5 decades of Colombia’s civil war. In thinking of police and state violence, and the blood that has been spilled, I dipped fabric in blood-red dye baths and used wax to resist the dye and create shapes, in essence bringing attention to what is not there. 

Shortly after I began this exploration, millions of Colombians took to the streets to answer the call for a  national strike. Colombians arrived with drums and theatre and were met with bullets, helicopters, tanks and state sanctioned militarized police and paramilitary tactics. 

NOS ESTÁN MATANDO =  
“THEY ARE KILLING US” 

These words became the rallying cry of Colombians trying to bring attention to the violence. I painted them with white wax on textile, revealed by the blood dripping down the fabric as I pulled it out of the dye bath. This piece arrives at the Queer Arts Festival weathered having been to protests all over Toronto. Having been used to express our grief and determination to have our humanity recognized. At the time I am writing this, it has been 41 days since the protests began. 45  people have been murdered by police and hundreds more are reported missing, presumably dead or in torture camps.

Pablo Muñoz is a community organizer, designer and artist whose work extends from furniture design, video installation, murals and public art. Arriving in Canada as a young refugee in 2000, Pablo draws inspiration from Colombian magic realism and forced displacement. His work often centres the experience of the LGBTQ2s+ global diaspora as well as the stories of communities resisting war, occupation and western imperialism. Growing up in East Vancouver, he became engaged with immigrant/refugee organizing, advocacy and solidarity efforts with Indigenous communities in Colombia. He made his move to Toronto in 2015, the same year his piece No Walls Between Us won a national call for submissions from the AGO becoming a temporary mural installation at the entrance of the gallery. 

He graduated from OCAD University with a degree in Industrial design in 2018. Pieces from his furniture collection Macondo were displayed at the Design Offsite Festival winning “Best of Design Week” by Designlines magazine for two years in a row. His video installation piece, Migrant Restless Syndrome, was featured in the Winter Vernissage of Montreal’s Never Apart Gallery in 2020. 

He currently works for the City of Toronto in public engagement where he facilitates collaboration between city officials, designers and architects and communities to create more equitable parks and public spaces.Since the protests erupted in Colombia in May of 2021 he has centered his efforts in bringing to light the unfolding atrocities being committed by the Colombian police. Particularly the dozens of people murdered over the course of one month, hundreds of people disappeared and Canada’s complicity in this injustice through weapon sales and a bilateral police partnership with the RCMP.

Demilade II

Artist Statement

In ongoing series, “Demilade” (crown me in Yoruba), Oluseye weaves together the traditions of Yoruba masculinity and dominance while asserting and recentering Black women’s place and power in both contemporary and historical narratives of tradition and of rule. Using found objects and women’s hair, Oluseye remakes traditionally male-centered emblems, emblazoning them at their core with symbols and epitaphs of past and present Black womanhood(s). Thus, we are invited and indeed forced to contemplate a world where women stand at the center, as equal partners with power of their own. A power unbounded by time or place.

Oluseye’s work is a warm embrace of the magnitude and polyvocality of Blackness and of the ways in which it moves across space, place, and time, shaping and shifting the world. Centering Yoruba cultural references in an homage to his heritage, he bends the ancestral with the contemporary and rejects the binary distinction between the traditional and the modern; the physical and the spiritual; the past and the future; what is new and what is old. Imbuing the everyday with the mythic, his work reinforces African rituals and philosophies as living, complex, and valid traditions of Black consciousness. He has exhibited at The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Gallery 151, New York; and Art Twenty-one, Lagos. He is a recipient of the Canada Council for The Arts New Chapter Grant and the 2019 Toronto and Ontario Arts Council Visual Arts Grant.

qné7e  says tá7a

Self Portrait #18: It’s Mine, It’s Mine, It’s Mine

Artist Statement

From an environmental perspective, and even from a ‘relative marginalization’ perspective, it’s not easy to be green while participating in settler colonial culture.   

Using self portraiture as a vehicle for social critique, Self Portrait #18 portrays me as a Limousin breed cow (an actual breed of cattle), pumped up on self proclaimed God given Divine-roids, mobilizing my righteous knee, engaged in a demonstration of dominance. How can I be environmentally green when I’m busy upholding the colonial project that underpins the industrial complex of land-based resource extraction? As a privileged white settler, it’s a stretch claiming green-kinship with Elphaba and Kermit.

Self Portrait #18: It’s Mine, It’s Mine, It’s Mine …, references the violent colonial project of clearing the land of the Plains Indigenous Peoples for settler agricultural activities, and the ongoing violent domination that is intrinsic to colonialism. It also references the murder of George Floyd by police officer, Derek Chauvin, with my cow-knee pressed into the buffalo’s neck. The privileges and benefits I enjoy are all linked to the expansion of settler culture, which was in part made possible through the violent kidnapping of Black Peoples from their homelands for slave labour here in the ‘New World.’ As we know, violence against non-settler bodies is deemed necessary as the go-to strategy in carrying out the settler colonial project. 

The compositional device of a deconstructed square, a binary colour pallet, reference to Christianity, metaphor, symbolism and text are employed in my critique of colonialism in this work.  

Born and raised in Ottawa Ontario, Katherine relocated to Vancouver in 1982 in order to be part of a larger gay community. In 1993 she became active in the local artist’s community and went on to graduate from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2004. As well as being a founding member of the Pride in Art Society, which hosts the annual Queer Arts Festival in Vancouver, Katherine is also one of a group of local artist who founded the 901 Artist Cooperative and established Portside Artist Studios in 2009.

Katherine’s artwork is both personal and political. One of the driving forces behind her interdisciplinary art practice her desire to better understand the ways in which negative social conditioning, such as sexism, homophobia, colonialism and racism, has caused her thinking and behaviour to be incongruent with her values. As well as serving as a social critique, pointing out social dis-ease, Katherine’s art work critiques her internalization of said social conditioning. Consequently, she often employs representational and/or metaphoric self-portraiture in her art. Coming from a ‘recovery’ perspective, Katherine holds the practice of not asking another person to go into emotionally, mentally, and psychically challenging places she is not willing to go herself. Implicating herself in social critique, then, is necessary. Her art work, then, becomes a confessional. Katherine shares her internal excavation discoveries and intra-personal discord in an effort to create an intimate and empathic connection with the viewer, with the hope of promoting social healing.

Modern WarPaint and Protector, Provider, Paternal

Artist Statement

In some Indigenous cultures, warriors would adorn themselves in their finest, and paint their faces accordingly before warring with another nation. Adorning oneself in this way wasn’t to impress their enemies or anyone else for that matter, it was to be fully prepared and entirely ready to meet the creator in such a way that shows the utmost appreciation for life. 

For Indigenous people our colonial present is a daily battle, we never know what could happen in our Indigenous Post Apocalypse. With the ongoing issue and yet to be answered reccomendations coming out of Canada’s inquiry into the Missing and Murdered Women, Girls, Transgendered, and Two Spirit people, and the recent 215 unmarked graves at Tkemlups te Secewepemc Residential school, death has become normalized for the Indigenous body. Mainstream culture assumes we are prone to stereotype and ignorance and therefore deserving of it. With this in mind I prepare myself each morning, showing my utmost appreciation for my life, ready to battle another day. My warpaint accentuates my features. My blanket is my children, my husband, my community, my nation-  it is my comfort and my protection. I complete this look with the sacred medicine I burn to clear my mind, to cleanse my spirit, to shield me from that which would seek to do me harm.

Too often I have seen Indigenous men portrayed from the settler gaze, that is antagonistic in such a way that romanticizes or ultimately dehumanizes them, forever relegating them as a kind of imaginary Indian. I question that when these matters don’t affect you personally, how does one’s humanity not stand out to you clearly? 

The imaginary Indian man exists in the forefront of the settler imagination only as welfare bums, criminals, deadbeat dads, or raging alcoholics and every mainstream Canadian News media platform perpetuates this lack of vision and oversight. How then would your gaze of this image change if I tell you what I see? What if we attach new meaning to the various components that make up this image?

What is seen to ‘the other’ as a protestor, as confrontational, as troublesome, and degenerate, I see a protector, a provider, a lover, a warrior, a son, a father, and a best friend. I see a line of men, an unyielding and unwavering force. His very existence today, after everything his line has and will endure is captured in the bow’s tension. The arrow meets it’s mark when the warrior sees his target clearly and has the heart to see it through.

Kathleen Ross is a Tsilhqot’in from Yunesit’in. Her Maternal Grandparents are Jack (late) and Lila (late) Elkins, Adopted Maternal Grandparents Otto (late) and Theresa (late) Quilt. She was born to Joanna (late) Elkins, and raised by her Second Generation Irish/Scottish Settler Great Uncle/Father David Ross and Great Aunt/Mother Madeline (late) Myers.

Coming from a cultural upbringing, Ross gives thought to those that are yet to come through creating an archive of imagery of indigenous people that is uplifting and entirely about resurgence. Thriving to leave an archive of knowledge to capture the hearts and minds of indigenous people and to captivate the settler imagination through images of this time and the various facets of indigenous cultures. She seeks to contribute to an already established creative culture and make a mark in the Fine Art world as Deni Artist.

Our Bodies

These photographs have been taken on the ancestral, unceded and occupied territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, here we witness depictions of the colonial violence that has occurred and continues to occur towards these lands and it’s peoples daily, against a backdrop of urban decay. The painful exploitation of the land in these territories transpires through the fabrication of urban sprawl, of literal structures being built from resources extracted from other lands.

The violent colonial systems that violate and assault the land perpetuate a similar violence upon the queer body, these crimes committed against our bodies are felt predominantly and disproportionately by BIPOC. The systems – and the people benefitting and upholding them – fetishize our bodies, other our bodies, deny our bodies access, violate our bodies, regulate our bodies and demonize our bodies. Our Bodies is a celebration of contemporary queer bodies. Our nudity is a reclamation of our representation in the face of adversity, in the face of systems created to smother our bodies as they have smothered the land. Our Bodies is the land as represented by queer bodies, queer bodies as a reflection of the land.  

Flipping the Island

Artist Statement

My current body of work, Flipping the Island, centers around transness and queerness as they relate to the nonhuman, navigated specifically through the myriad ecologies present on the island of minong, also known as isle royale. Drawing from the way the ecologies on this island flip over on themselves, I speculate through art making what kinds of transformations might be possible when taking the ability to move, shift, or change radically, as a given for navigating precarity, rather than a distant possibility.

In Guard Hairs, one of the pieces from this body of work, these ecologies are touched on through the interrelatedness of settler copper mining and ongoing reintroduction of wolves to the island. This process of reintroduction reached a tipping point when, after decades of inbreeding and warming temperatures isolating the island from surrounding wolf populations, the last three wolves who could sustain a population on the island drowned in a copper mine. Approaching this through guard hairs, the part of the animal’s fur which protects the animal from weather and UV rays, as well as signals affective shifts, I query these confluences of ecological crisis, tipping over, and transformation. Guard Hairs was made by cutting, folding and hooking pieces of steel-coated copper wire through gauze over and over. The repetitive, process-based approach, done with material which signals wounding and extraction as well as being precarious in and of itself, speaks to piecing out speculations that hinge on trans and queer formations of un-and-re-becoming, intra/action, and erotics.

Nestled aside his studio work, my research and art practice is often guided by walking. Walking is fundamental to my practice as a way of navigating lived experience and generating long-term place and encounter driven exploration alongside a committed studio practice. My studio practice is responsive and often process-oriented, with engagements of speculation, uncertainty, and precarity informing how I move through making.

Jay Pahre is a queer and trans settler artist, writer and cultural worker currently based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Weaving between drawing, sculpture and writing, his work queries trans and queer nonhuman ecologies as they intersect with the human. Originally from the midwestern US, Pahre has turned his work back toward the shifting ecologies of the Great Lakes and Great Plains regions. Recently, this has been navigated with a focus on the myriad ecologies present on the island of minong or isle royale, an island located in northwestern lake superior. Pulling from personal lived experience of walking the island, shifting geographies, and queer/trans ecologies, he pieces apart the moments when these different trajectories begin to fold in on themselves and open other ways of being, knowing, and moving. The uses of metal, electricity, and heat has been instrumental in his work to think through conductive and transforming ecologies. Leaning on these moments of conductivity and transformation, his work ferrets out alternative formations and futures of what queer and trans ecologies of being might look like while slipping through moments of temporal, embodied, and environmental precarity. He received his BFA in painting and BA in East Asian studies in 2014, and his MA in East Asian studies from the University of Illinois in 2017. He went on to complete his MFA in visual art at the University of British Columbia in 2020. His work has been exhibited across the US and Canada. He was selected for the 2020 Transgender Studies Chair Fellowship at the University of Victoria, as well as the Helen Belkin Memorial Scholarship (2020) and Fred Herzog Award in Visual Art (2019) at the University of British Columbia.

Bears

Isaac Murdoch, whose Ojibway name is Manzinapkinegego’anaabe / Bombgiizhik is from the fish clan and is from Serpent River First Nation. Isaac grew up in the traditional setting of hunting, fishing and trapping. Many of these years were spent learning from Elders in the northern regions of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Isaac is well respected as a storyteller and traditional knowledge holder. For many years he has led various workshops and cultural camps that focuses on the transfer of knowledge to youth. Other areas of expertise include: traditional ojibway paint, imagery/symbolism, harvesting, medicine walks, & ceremonial knowledge, cultural camps, Anishinaabeg oral history, birch bark canoe making, birch bark scrolls, Youth & Elders workshops, etc. He has committed his life to the preservation of Anishinaabe cultural practices and has spent years learning directly from Elders.

Isolation Journal and Yellow Pages

The Yellow Pages

Artist Statement
(Adapted from the “Yellow Pages Appendix”):

Asian Crimes Godzilla in Toronto
Beauty Ads of whitening product in the Philippines, China and India
Choice How to wear a hijab
Delicacy Shark fin in the water
Empowerment Heroes and heroines: Son Goku of Dragon Ball, Mulan, Bruce Lee, Astro Boy and Po of Kung Fu Panda
Fresh Off the Boat Luxury car brands
Gourmet Menu of the now closed Master Chef Cafe, Vancouver
Home World map
Invasions Front page, the New York Times, February 25, 1945
Justice Statue in memory of the Comfort Women during WWII, Seoul, South Korea
Kung Fu Found drawings of squatting men
Liberation Air strikes over Vietnam during the American War M.S.G. Movie posters of gangster films from South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Malaysia
North Korea Peace poster for North Korea
Orientals Pictorial symbols re-designed or appropriated from the handbook by Rudolf Modley
Patriarchy Portraits on banknotes
Queer European wigs and Chinese hairstyle from past centuries
Rouge Victims of Khmer Rouge, Cambodia
Solidarity Poster for Black Lives Matter
Transformers Magazine and memorabilia of Takarazuka Revue, a Japanese all-female musical theatre troupe
Uprising The Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong (source: the Huffington Post)
Visibility Across appeared on American prime time television
Whiz Kids Words cut out form ads in newspapers
Xenophobia Internment and refugee camps
Yellow Fever Girls’ Generations, a South Korean girl group
Zen A-bomb explosion

Ho Tam was born in Hong Kong, educated in Canada and the U.S. and worked in advertising companies and community psychiatric facilities before turning to art. He practices in multiple disciplines including photography, video, painting and print media. His first video, The Yellow Pages, was commissioned by the public art group PUBLIC ACCESS for an installation/projection at the Union Station of Toronto in 1994/95. Since then Tam has produced over 15 experimental videos. He was included in the traveling exhibition Magnetic North: Canadian Experimental Video by Walker Art Center, Minnesota. His feature documentary film “Books of James” was awarded Outstanding Artistic Achievement (Outfest, LA) and Best Feature Documentary (Tel Aviv LGBT Film Festival). He also publishes several series of artist’s books and zines. Tam is an alumnus of Whitney Museum Independent Studies Program, Bard College (MFA) and recipients of various fellowships and artist’s grants. Since 2019, Tam has been running the Hotam Press Bookshop/Gallery in Vancouver.

ᐊᐧᐢbᐃᓱᐣ 
WASBISON  (MossBag)

Artist Statement

The Bag

The Plains Cree are akin to the Wasbison (MossBag). It is the external Womb, designed to transition the infant from Woman to World.  Also known as a child development tool, the Wasbison holds the infant in an upright position allowing the learning to be through observation – this forms the basis of their cultural socialization. Furthermore; strapped to the Mother’s back, this position allows for extensive travelling and observing the landscape.  It is a piece that provides warmth, protection and self-discipline.  The exterior adornment of Wasbison tells us much about the infant’s identity from Tribal group to status.

—

The Moss

Every morning Moss (sphagnum) was gathered, washed, cleaned and dried. It was then placed in the Wasbison (MossBag) to catch the baby’s discharge, much like a diaper.  FYI, Moss contains a natural antiseptic to prevent diaper rash.

The Moss is our Ancestor who has been with us since time immemorial.

The Moss is our Grandmother who helps us with our children.

The Moss is our Mentor who strengthens our relationship to the Land.

It ain’t easy being green.

—

The Art

..represents four genders that are talked about in Neheyawin culture. 

   Female 

   Male

   Female-Two Spirit

   Male-Two Spirit

The BlueBag, the LoveBag is hung for all the conversations yet to come.

Upon the closing of the show the install will be taken back to its original home in the forest on the beautiful lands of the unceded, yet stolen territory of the Squamish people as a gesture of gratitude and respect. 

—

The Resistance

The colonial lens viewed the Wasbison as heathen and unfit for an infant, yet it was gifted to us by our Chapan’s and their’s. They knew the importance and teachings of the Wasbison.  For children are so sacred we must treat them that way.

Ribbon (Waybinawsinen) is used as protocol in many of our Neheyawin ceremonies. It is sacred fabric. The Wasbison has a very important and sacred role with NewLife. Ribbons are the blessings, the offerings for a beautiful Life, a gift to the Creator.

When we bring an infant into this World through Wasbison teachings, we are blessing this newborn with unconditional Love and promising acceptance without judgment…regardless!

Ekosi.

Nourish Me Balcony

Artist Statement

My body (of work) is a decolonizing and queering of power structures that uphold colonial logics of binaries (nature/culture, man/woman, self/other). It is interdisciplinary, using video, photography, installation, writing, 3D animation and so on, but is always performative and of/for/against the body – my body.

My body (of work) disrupts and resists the ‘other-ing’ of non-humans and the exoticizing and marginalization of ‘international’ bodies and queer/trans people of color. I use humor as a strategy to both invite and disarm, slowly revealing layers of meaning within and beyond laughter.

My body (of work) rests between these intersections of (post)human and (post)colonial discourse. Yet it comes from a place of wanting to live my truths and create work that mumma has access to. From this place of deep personal and critical investment, I search for joy in myself and share it with those (humans, non-humans alike) whose joy has been systemically stolen.

---

Falak Vasa (they/she pronouns, b. 1995) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator currently based in Bhawanipur, Kolkata. They are an MFA candidate in Literary Arts at Brown University, and have attended artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and ACRE. Her practice is a decolonizing and queering of oppressive power structures through gesture and language, always filtered through humor. But Falak, you may ask, where is the humor in this bio? Well friend……….good question.

Currently, Falak works as a freelance educator and writer, waters her plants daily, and showers sometimes. Or so she claims.

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Ephemera

2020—2021
Photographic series

Tsanizid

Artist Statement

Tsanizid means “Wake up” in the Tsuutina Dene language. In this new contemporary dance work, Beric presents a moving image journey through sound and metamorphosis. Situated amidst the moon, the night, and the first thunder storm of Spring, the dancer ventures into the unknown in search of new beginnings by exploring the spiritual terrain of being a multi-gender being.

Beric Manywounds is a Two Spirit writer, filmmaker, and intermedia performance artist from the Tsuutina Nation of Treaty 7. Taking a special interest in the genres of fantasy, horror, and magical realism, Beric’s storytelling often reflects an exploration of post trauma consciousness and spiritual transformation. Now soon to be graduating from the Intermedia Cyber Arts program at Concordia University,  Beric is now giving shape, form, and voice to their futurist visions of Indigenous resurgence and decolonized gender in new works of cinema, performance, and contemporary dance.