Bios

Gabriela Aceves
Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda is an Assistant Professor at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. As a scholar and media artist, her work bridges the histories of art, media, science, and technology with Latin American, gender studies, and art and design practice. She is interested in exploring how different media practices intervene in the production and dissemination of knowledge and how the legacies of colonialism and patriarchy continue to silence the practices of women in arts and technology. She is the author of Women Made Visible: Feminist Art and Media in post-1968 Mexico (2019) and several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and research-creation projects on feminist media art and archival practices in Latin America. Other research interests include the connections between sound, race, and gender; the environmental entanglements of digital technologies, their histories, and infrastructures; and the histories and theories of embodiment and performance. Her video installations, sculptures, digital projects, print media, and live performances investigate the body as a site of cultural, gendered, bio-political, and techno-scientific inscriptions. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, Mexico, France, India, Chile, and the U.S.
More info on Gabriela’s work is available at criticalmediartstudio.com and gabrielaaceves.com

Matilda Aslizadeh
Matilda Aslizadeh is a visual artist based in Vancouver, Canada. Her media installations are characterized  by dense visual surfaces and unexpected juxtapositions drawn from a range of influences including early cinema, cartography and fashion. Deeply invested in exploring the critical potential of immersive spectacle, the ambivalent centrality of storytelling in human existence, and the fluid threshold between documentation and fictionalization, Aslizadeh’s work locates political thinking firmly within affective experience. Aslizadeh received a BFA from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and festivals and she is represented by Pari Nadimi Gallery in Toronto. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include participation in Art Souterrain Contemporary Art Festival (Montreal) and Contact Photography Festival (Toronto), group shows at the Audain Museum (Whistler) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, and solo exhibitions at AC Institute (New York) and Vancouver Art Gallery. Aslizadeh also teaches at various post-secondary institutions in Vancouver Including UBC, SFU, ECUAD and KPU. More info on Matilda’s work is available at https://vimeopro.com/matildaaslizadeh/matilda-aslizadeh

Robyn Laba
Robyn Laba is a Vancouver based artist. She has had solo exhibitions at the Or Gallery, Artspeak and CSA Space, Vancouver. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery and Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, and at the Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana, Cuba.

Natasha McHardy
Natasha McHardy is an interdisciplinary contemporary artist based in Vancouver. Her work engages with conceptual, visual and folk art histories while exploring ideas of play and relations of power within class, race and gender constructs. Natasha received a BFA and MFA from the University of British Columbia and has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. She received a 2005 Hampton Fund Research Grant (in collaboration), a 2003 Visual Arts Development Award and the B.C. Binning Award for Drawing in 2001. 

Maria Anna Parolin
Maria Anna Parolin is a Burnaby based interdisciplinary artist who teaches at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. She is inspired by multiples found in nature, by the life span of materials, and by consumer packaging. Her fictitious company, Parolin Products (Est. 1999) uses diverse media and different forms of ‘marketing strategies’ to investigate how art operates in our multi-national consumer culture.  Ideas and objects, lifestyles and opinions, moods and political platforms are all packaged for consumption. She has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies in Canada, USA, Japan, Korea, Sweden, and Italy. As her children grow, so too does her art practice. Her recent work investigates multi-tasking, time management, transportation analytics, as well as culinary efficiencies, first aid (physical/mental) and achieving work/life balance. Her work is a whimsical response to all the things mothers experience on a daily bases.

Heather Passmore
Heather Passmore’s practice reconfigures painting, drawing, and photography with socio-historically laden materials. For the past fifteen years, she has exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards. Her work has been included in art fairs and biennials, and is held in many official public collections both locally and abroad. Heather has completed numerous artist residencies and public artworks. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia, Canada.
More info on Heather’s work is available at heatherpassmore.com

Sarah Shamash
Sarah Shamash lives on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tseil-Watuth First Nations in Vancouver. She is a media artist and recently completed her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies at UBC. Influenced by cinema, her projects explore identities and geographies as personal, political, feminine and dynamic. Since the 2000s, she has exhibited her work internationally at art venues and film festivals while working as a film programmer and film studies instructor. Most recently she presented a new installation at Emily Carr University of Art + Design entitled “Cataloguing is not for Superheroes.” She is currently working on a documentary project which will premiere at the 18th Vancouver Latin American Film Festival in September 2020. Her work as an artist, researcher, educator, and programmer can be understood as interconnected and whole; they revolve around a passion for cinema as a pluriversal art. More info on Sarah’s work is available at sarahshamash.com

prOphecy sun
prOphecy sun is an interdisciplinary performance artist, movement, video and sound maker, mother and Ph.D. Candidate at the School of Interactive Arts + Technology at Simon Fraser University. Originally from Vancouver, she is currently living in Nelson on the unceded territories of the Ktunaxa, Syilx and Sinixt peoples. Informed by her creative studies in vocal and movement improvisation, her practice celebrates both conscious and unconscious moments and the vulnerable spaces of the in-between in which art, performance, and life overlap. Her recent research has focused on ecofeminist perspectives, co-composing with objects and matter, extraction and surveillance technologies, and site-specific engagements along the Columbia Basin region and beyond. She performs and exhibits regularly in local, national and international settings, festivals, conferences and galleries and has authored several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and journal publications. She holds a BFA and MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and is the recent recipient of the Carmichael Canadian Landscape Exhibition Jurors Prize and the Governor Generals Gold Award. More info on prOphecy’s work is available here prophecysun.com

Damla Tamer
Damla Tamer is a visual artist from Istanbul, Turkey. Her works explore relations between pictorial and political spaces, taking mark-making as a highly strategic involvement with ethics of representation. During performative presentations accompanying her works, she brings together descriptions of moments of personal catharsis with seemingly banal anecdotes, re-telling of popular events with narrations of first-hand witnessing, descriptions of mental images with verbal modifications of the existing images or objects in the space. Damla has had a solo exhibition at the Darling Foundation (“Due to its nature, it only moves forward.”, Montreal, 2013) and been nominated for the 2012 Future Generation Art Prize by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. She holds teaching positions at UBC and ECUAD.