Nadya Kwandibens is Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) from the Animakee Wa Zhing #37 First Nation in northwestern Ontario. She is a self-taught portrait and events photographer. In 2008 she founded Red Works Photography. Red Works is a dynamic photography studio empowering contemporary Indigenous lifestyles and cultures through photographic essays, features, and portraits.

Nadya’s artistic practice builds upon three ongoing bodies of work: Concrete Indians is an open-call series of contemporary urban Indigenous identity and a collective representation of decolonial assertions of resistance and resurgence; Red Works Outtakes is an uplifting portraiture series created to combat the “stoic Indian” stereotype; and emergence, another open-call series, focuses on resurgent acts of decolonization by means of transmission and the conveyance of Indigenous intelligence.

Nadya is also a member of the Indigenous Laws + The Arts Collective, the founding body of Testify, a travelling multimedia group exhibition. Testify pairs artists and legal thinkers to work in conversation with each other to create art pieces that explore facets of Indigenous law.

In addition to commissioned works, Nadya delivers empowering photography workshops and presentations for youth, universities, and community groups.

Alex Flores is the founder and Artistic Director of Las Perlas Del Mar Productions Inc. Flores has extensive mural and multimedia production experience, including ten years of experience as an independent filmmaker, using documentary video production and web design. He has been a visual artist for 18 years.

Artist Statement:
“When I create a painting, my energy becomes happy and positive. Through meditation, I dream I am in forests full of trees, with people and animals in different colours, the shapes become houses where all human beings live in harmony, surrounded by the beauty of the earth.

My paintings are like big urban cities or the jungle in spring, or like people gathering on a cold winter night. I paint my hometown in Mexico City mixing ideas with my home in Toronto.

My mind flies away onto the white canvas with ideas of colourful buildings, faces, trees, pets and harmony around all humans.

I want to show my vision about living in a safe world, where justice and peace and love come together.

The different shapes and structures in my paintings may seem surrealistic; this is an aspect of my technique that I love. I like people to think about what they see in my artwork.”

Marlene Hilton-Moore is a self-taught artist born in New Brunswick and living in Ontario. Her work is in numerous collections, including the Canada Council for the Arts’ Art Bank and the Wilfrid Laurier University collection. She has also produced a number of works of public art, including Monument aux Valeureux in Ottawa and Column of Valour, a monument dedicated to volunteer firefighters in Barrie, Ontario.

THE 2020 WINNERS
Toronto-born Curtiss Randolph constructs scenes as either tableau or staged documentary narratives. Having grown up in a theatre family, the elements of stage production crept into his working process at an early stage. Mixing realism, surrealism, and gonzo journalism, Randolph challenges viewers’ preconceived notion of documentary-style as a way to question ideas of fact and fiction in the photographic medium.

Katherine Takpannie is an Ottawa-based Inuk artist, writer and graduate of the Nunavut Sivuniksavut (NS) program. Her photographs set performative and political gestures against both natural and built environments, including intimate portraits of women. Her work is held in the City of Ottawa’s art collection and has appeared in Getting Under Our Skin exhibition at the Art Gallery of Guelph and They Forgot We Were Seeds exhibition at the Carleton
University Art Gallery.

Vancouver/Berlin-based Noah Friebel focuses on the fabricated aspect of the photograph, using elements of sculpture and installation to examine our relationship to images, each other, and the narrowing space in between. Since graduating from Emily Carr University with a BFA in 2018, Friebel has been part of several group shows: notably Green Glass Door at Trapp Projects and The Lind Prize 2018 at Polygon Gallery.

THE 2021 WINNERS
Chris Donovan is a lens-based artist working in Toronto and New Brunswick. Hailing from the industrial city of Saint John, his practice focuses on the intersection of community and industry. His work has been awarded by Pictures of the Year International (U of Missouri), The Alexia Foundation (Syracuse University), The New Brunswick Arts Board, The Toronto Arts Council, and exhibited across Canada at photography festivals including CONTACT (Toronto), Capture (Vancouver), Exposure (Calgary), Flash (Winnipeg), and Zoom (Saguenay). He is a member of the Boreal Collective and currently pursuing an MFA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University as a Graduate Fellow.

Toronto-based artist Dainesha Nugent-Palache has participated in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally. A founding member of the plumb, an ad hoc collective of artists, writers and curators and art venue in Toronto, she has also curated for the feminist music festival and concert series Venus Fest, and Blindspots, an art exhibition and film screening where queer artists explore LGBTQ experience through a diasporic lens. Graduate and recipient of major awards, her artwork is found in The Wedge Collection, Toronto Dominion Bank Art Collection and private collections. Her experiences as an artist have also been spotlighted in CBC COVID residencies series.

Vancouver-based artist Dustin Brons MFA (UC San Diego), BFA (UBC), and recent participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program works with the recontextualization of existing materials across photographs, videos, and text. His work incorporates visual forms from Western art history as tools to process contemporary sources. Still life and landscape painting, gestural abstraction, linguistic conceptualism, and photographic devices from pictorialism to appropriation are re-configured in representations of climate change and gentrification, emphasizing the ways that visual forms contribute to shaping social and political understandings of these intangible yet totalizing processes.

Working primarily in paint and sculpture, artist Raquel Da Silva focuses on creating abstract environments. Currently her work explores how two and three-dimensional forms and shapes can work together to create an environment. Her art in this collaboration celebrates the vibrant culture of our city. She reflects on that energy to inform, inspire, and regenerate. Da Silva recently completed a one-year residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto.

Filipino-Canadian multidisciplinary artist, Jason Zante, has already gained a huge fanbase in the art scene. He’s known for his use of vibrant colours, bold contrasts and ethereal landscapes in his art. If his style looks familiar you may have recently passed by his larger than life mural titled The Riviera located at the Four Seasons Hotel Toronto. His work has also been featured in Architectural Digest.

Illustrator Daria Joyce‘s playful and vibrant style reflects the power of connection at one of North America’s largest shopping destinations located right here in the heart of our city. Her work depicts the inspiring environment bringing people together into the communal experience beyond retail activity.

In 1972, Colette Whiten graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design, receiving the Governor General’s Medal in recognition of her fine work. In the same year, she exhibited her first cast piece: a wooden structure filled with fibreglass molds of her friends’ arms and legs. Whiten’s figures express the nature of human existence and are primarily concerned with human interaction, particularly power relationships. The artist is also fascinated with the process of art, often documenting her creative flow through photographs and slides.

Over the years, the focus of Whiten’s practice and subject matter has evolved to include explorations into identity and the duality inherent in cast images, the nature of the art object and art making, and political power or everyday violence. Whiten’s larger scale, sculptural pieces have taken years to make as their many intricate pieces are constructed mainly by hand.

Whiten’s public art commissions include a wall construction with figurative cutouts for the Mental Health Centre, Toronto (1978), an award-winning sculpture for the 1988 Calgary Olympics, Weathervanes for Bankers Hall, Calgary (1990-91), and Tender, at the Worker’s Compensation Office, Simcoe Place, Toronto (1994-95.) Both Weathervanes and Tender were collaborations with Paul Kipps, Whiten’s beloved partner.

Between teaching at York University and the Ontario College of Art and Design, Whiten’s work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions around the world. In 1991, she was the recipient of the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Visual Arts Award and in 2013, she was awarded a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Upon earning his BA in Visual Art from the University of Western Ontario, Paul Kipps focused his artistic practice in the realm of sculpture. His works were driven by his interest in alienation, shaped by the often exclusive nature of cultural backgrounds, age, gender, class, or place. Kipps explored these concerns through the making of sound, photography, and three-dimensional structures.

Kipps’ work was exhibited in both Canada and Europe, and has been presented across Canada through a number of collaborative public art commissions with his partner, Colette Whiten. Kipps taught for many years, offered his distinct eye in curating, and continued to create up until his death in 2014.

Pam Lostracco is recognized as an award-winning graphic designer and artist. While studying at OCAD, she completed an exchange in Scotland, won a group competition and earned two scholarships—including her name on a plaque at The Arts and Letters Club.

Pam has worked for several Toronto design studios, including Dinnick & Howells and Viva Dolan. While working with the best art directors, she produced high-end books and identities for clients including Butterfield & Robinson, Curious Papers and Ace Bakery. These projects earned awards from the Advertising & Design Club of Canada, Applied Arts, and Communication Arts. Her illustrations have also been printed in books for Jump Math and Fisher Price, and she continues to design books and logos.

A year-long travel endeavour, started a new artistic path of making mixed-media artwork. Her drawings and photographs were layered into a unique style that has been exhibited at the McMichael, Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition and Toronto Pearson International Airport. She has collaborated with public art projects, including a bench design for Liberty Village, photographs presented in TTC stations for the Contact Photography Festival, and a traffic lightbox for the city’s Outside the Box program. Pam’s artwork and products have been purchased by the Four Seasons Hotel, Craft Ontario and The Textile Museum of Canada.

Now, Pam is designing and painting walls for homes, condos, shops and resorts around Canada. Her murals have been featured on Apartment Therapy and Pinterest. Pam’s goals are working towards helping to improve communities and health care facilities around the world. She continues to draw nature and explore places, while at the same time, create beautiful and uplifting spaces.

Eldon Garnet is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Toronto. Surveys of his sculptures and photographic work have been held at the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and the Amsterdam Center of Photography. He is represented by the Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto and Torch Gallery in Amsterdam. Garnet is also a professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design University.

Constructing an unsettling ambiguity by using whatever means of expression Garnet deems suitable is probably the only connecting thread in his works. Instead of defining himself as an artist with a central medium, he tries to create an allegory of words, images, sound and time.

His projects often take on the qualities of a contemporary gesamtkunstwerk (the German term “Gesamtkunstwerk”, roughly translates as a “total work of art” and describes an artwork, design, or creative process where different art forms are combined to create a single cohesive whole) that surpasses both the obvious narrative and the postmodern ironic.

He uses tools like humour, erotic triggers and commonplace semiotic patterns, but never lets them reach their perceived conclusion. The effect is best described as a recognition of the joke but never getting to the punchline, or feeling disgusted or aroused but never quite understanding why.

PA System’s Alexa Hatanaka and Patrick Thompson work in textile, printmaking, painting, video, and public art. They create collaborative and socially-engaged projects namely in the high arctic, including their ongoing project with Inuit youth in Kinngait (Cape Dorset, Nunavut) called Embassy of Imagination.

Their work has been exhibited in institutions worldwide, such as the Royal Ontario Museum, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, University of New Mexico Art Gallery, Canada House in London and the Guanlan International Printmaking Base in China. In September of 2019 they exhibited their work in the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art.

PA System has been involved in the Kinngait community for six years spending three months at a time activating their Embassy of Imagination workshops or projects with the youth. They lead out-of-community projects with smaller groups of youth annually. Their work as PA System is currently informed by the significant time spent in Kinngait, as documentation of moments, memories and the land, and reflects on how they may address issues or aspirations identified by the youth, with the youth.

They have partnered with the District Education Authority of Kinngait to launch PPStudio (printmaking program) and Land and Cultural Leadership Program. Equipment funding for the latter program is received from the sales of the collaborative Future Snowmachines in Kinngait ongoing project. The Snowmachines have been exhibited in the AGO and as a large-scale installation at The Bentway.

Matthew Hickey is Mohawk from the Six Nations First Nation and is a licensed architect with 12 years of experience working in an on-reserve architecture firm. He received his Masters of Architecture from the University of Calgary and his Bachelor of Design from Ontario College of Art and Design, winning both the Alberta Association of Architects Presidents Medal and the Medal for Best Thesis, respectively.

Hickey’s focus is on regenerative design – encompassing ecological, cultural, and economic principles. His research includes Indigenous history and the adaptation of traditional sustainable technologies to the modern North American climate. He currently instructs at OCAD U, for the OAA and the Canada Green Building Council.

Jacqueline Daniel is an intern architect at Two Row Architect. She is a graduate of University of Michigan’s master of architecture program and holds a BA in architecture from the University of Toronto.
Two Row Architect is focused on guiding the realignment of mainstream ways of thinking on their journey towards Indigenous ways of knowing, being, design and architecture. The steel sculpture is one of a series of public art pieces at the university that will come to fruition throughout 2022.