What does the presence chemicals mean within cultural contexts? What are the possibilities around remediation? What responsibilities do institutions carry in the process of returning sacred objects to the communities they were taken from?

Beth Stuart (any pronouns) works in an expanding range of media including writing, painting, ceramic, performance, textiles, and sculptural installation. Their work is mostly about battling binaries. They see this as an ethic of hope and a way of showing up for the world they want to live in. This comes through in continuous material play and a careful critique of modernist aesthetics, colonial relations and anarchist philosophy. The motifs that come up most: clothes, architecture, patterns, wonky figure-ground relationships, ritual, food and plant histories, zombie Victorianism, Quakers, swimming, mud, and a free Palestine.

Lan “Florence” Yee 余承佳 is a visual artist and cultural worker based in Tkaronto/Toronto & Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. They collect text in underappreciated places and ferment it until it is too suspicious to ignore. Lan’s work has been exhibited at the Art Museum at The University of Toronto (2024), the Textile Museum of Canada (2023-24), the Darling Foundry (2022), the Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art (2021), and the Gardiner Museum (2019), among others. They obtained a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from OCAD U as a Joseph-Armand Bombardier SSHRC scholar. They are a recipient of the William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists (2023). Lan writes and curates as a member of JIA Foundation, fostering Chinatown’s cultural heritage.

Meryl McMaster earned her BFA in Photography from the Ontario College of Art and Design University (2010) and is currently based in Québec, Canada. Known for her large-format self-portraits that have a distinct performative quality, she explores questions of self through land, lineage, history, and culture, with specific reference to her mixed nêhiyaw (Plains Cree), British and Dutch ancestry.
Meryl is a citizen of Siksika Nation in Alberta and her family is also from Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan.

Jerry Ropson is an artist, writer, educator and community organizer raised in the Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland) outport re-settlement of Pollards Point. In acknowledging the settler and indigenous history of his community, he combines images, objects, text and narrative to focus an artistic practice within site-specific installation and performative storytelling. Having exhibited throughout Canada and abroad, he makes class- conscious work often seeking non-traditional sites and outcomes.

Montreal-based artist Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama- and Kentucky-born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. In recent years, her work has involved close examination of her family’s migration and their connections to Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley and Black Strathcona, the “All-Black” towns of Oklahoma, the Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada and the US.

Explore how Don Kwan’s art connects historical and contemporary experiences by reflecting on Chinese Canadian history. Through his creative process, Kwan weaves together cultural heritage and personal identity, offering new perspectives and enriching conversations about the Chinese diasporic experience in
Canada.

Jennifer Stillwell primarily works with sculpture and installa- tion and her recent work is site-responsive. Found objects and manufactured materials are physically transformed in order to provoke imaginary possibilities – scale shifts, spaces collapse and meanings slip. She is currently completing a new body
of work with the industrial activities around her studio space serving as the catalyst.

Marlene Yuen (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works on the unceded and ancestral home territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her current focus is on illustrations, prints, comics, zines and handmade books.

Sonja Ahlers is a visual artist and writer from the unceded territories of the (Lekwungen) speaking peoples, now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations (Victoria, BC, Canada).

Her books are challenging to classify and can be found in several different sections of the library. 1994’s A Wandering Eye was the first of many self-published books that circulated mainly through the underground “penpal” network of DIY punk rock and Riot Grrrl zines. Ahlers attracted national attention with Temper, Temper, published by Insomniac Press in 1998, followed by Fatal Distraction in 2004. In 2010, Drawn & Quarterly published The Selves, and in 2021, Conundrum Press published Swan Song.

Justin Seiji Waddell is an artist and Associate Professor in the School of Visual Art at the Alberta University of the Arts in Mohkinstsis (Calgary), Alberta. He is currently the Vice President of CARFAC National, Board member of Peripheral
Review, C the Visual Art Foundation, the New Media Caucus, the Immigrant Council for Arts Innovation, and the Arts,
Culture, and Education Committee (ACE) of the National Association of Japanese Canadians. He has worked in various
capacities at several artist-run centers, festivals, galleries, and magazines in Canada, including Prefix Photo, Trinity Square Video, Lola Magazine, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the New Gallery, Emmedia, and Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival. He has served as the Director at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, the Director of the Stride Art Gallery Association, and as a founding member with the every-age art and music venue, Local Library in Calgary, Alberta.

Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez Pueblo/Korean) is a visual artist and the co-founding director of exhibitions and programs at the Center for Native Futures, a contemporary art space located in the heart of Downtown Chicago that is dedicated to Native artists. She previously served as the Community Engagement Coordinator at the Field Museum, where her work was crucial in developing the current Native Truths exhibition.

Julie Edel Hardenberg (b. 1971) was born and raised in Nuuk, Kalaallit
Nunaat/Greenland. She studied art in Finland, Norway, and England before gaining her MA in Art theory and Communication at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She lives and works in Copenhagen where she has acquired the Novo Nordisk Foundation – Mads Øvlisen PhD scholarship in her practice-based artistic research: “Between power and powerlessness – the de/colonized mind “. She is affiliated to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and University of Copenhagen, beside her Associate Professor II position at Bergen Art Academy.

Jessica Stockholder’s often sprawling constructions have played a crucial role in expanding the dialogue between sculpture and painting. The artist merges seemingly disparate, everyday objects, such as – lampposts, car parts, hoses, containers, extension cords, lumber, car parts, carpets and furniture. Drawing attention to these ordinary everyday materials, Stockholder engages the sensuality and pleasure evoked by color and formal …

Mike and his wife Dr. Mique’l Dangeli have trained three generations of dancers, singers and drummers in their dance group the Git Hayetsk. He has carved hundreds of masks and headdresses as well as made hand-painted leather regalia that are danced in the performances of Git Hayetsk as well as by many Nations and dance groups along the Northwest Coast.

As a residential school survivor of 10 years, Robert knows the power of art. Robert’s art speaks to his life stories that emerge from the various social and political injustices he has experienced throughout his life on systematic, community, and individual levels that have informed Robert’s intricate symbolism. Creating his own elements and symbols, Robert steps out of a defined cultural iconography to construct his own unique style.

Skawennati investigates history, the future, and change from her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. Her early adoption of cyberspace as both a location and a medium for her practice has produced groundbreaking projects such as CyberPowWow and TimeTraveller™. She creates machinimas—movies made in virtual environments—as well as still images, textiles and sculpture.

Kwakwaka’wakw author, artist & activist Gord Hill is the 2024 Lehan Lecturer with UVic’s Faculty of Fine Arts. His free public talk ran on Thursday, March 7 in room A110 of UVic’s Turpin building. You can watch his talk in this video: An artist, author, political…

Kemi Craig is the 3rd Artist in Residence for the City of Victoria. Through her lived experience as a woman of African descent, her artistic practice moves through analogue and digital visual technologies to center futures for people with raced and gendered bodies. She creates multi-sensory, site-specific installations and performances, embedding community and audience engagement.

Joel Ong is a media artist whose works connect scientific and artistic approaches to the environment, particularly with respect to sound and physical space. He is an Associate Professor in Computational Arts and Helen Carswell Chair in Community Engaged Research in the Arts at York University in Toronto.

Farheen Haq’s multidisciplinary practice, which often employs video, installation and performance, is informed by interiority, relationality, family work, embodiment, ritual and spiritual practice. Haq’s current work focuses on understanding her family history on Turtle Island, caregiving and the body as a continuum of culture and time.

Michael Doerksen is a Canadian visual artist who has exhibited sporadically since the late 1990s. His practice is based mostly in sculpture with occasional detours in drawing, photography, and video. His figurative group sculpture entitled ‘chatbots’ along with his latest wood carvings based on whimsies are the focus of this talk.

Indigenous artist, visionary, and creator of the powerful art installation ‘The Witness Blanket,’ Carey Newman guides us through some of his inspirational art pieces to teach us how art can be the key to enabling ordinary people to do extraordinary things.