Fossilized Sunshine

Camille Turner is an explorer of race, space, home and belonging. Straddling media, social practice and performance art, her work has been presented throughout Canada and internationally. Wanted, a collaboration with Camal Pirbhai, was shown most recently at the Art Gallery of Ontario and uses the trope of fashion to transform 18th century newspaper posts by Canadian slave owners into contemporary fashion ads. Freedom Tours, created collaboratively with Cree-Metis artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle is a national commission for LandMarks 2017/Repères 2017 that consists of participatory, site-specific events that re-imagine and reanimate land and water from Black and Indigenous perspectives. The Afronautic Research Lab is a reading room in which participants encounter buried histories. The Landscape of Forgetting, a walk created collaboratively with Alana Bartol and sonic walks HUSH HARBOUR and The Resistance of Peggy Pompadour evoke sites of Black memory that reimagine the Canadian landscape. Miss Canadiana, one of her earliest projects, challenges perceptions of Canadianness and troubles the unspoken binary of “real Canadian” and “diverse other”. Camille is the founder of Outerregion, an Afrofuturist performance group. She has lectured at various institutions such as University of Toronto, Algoma University and Toronto School of Art and is a graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design and York University’s Masters in Environmental Studies program where she is currently a PhD candidate.

Camal Pirbhai was born in Canada but raised in Switzerland and trained as a couturier in soft furnishings in the UK. Drawing from his expertise fabricating large-scale textile projects, hand-sewn furnishings and intricate embellishments, Camal has evolved a multidisciplinary artistic practice exploring a wide array of materials, media processes such as sculpture, fiber, installation, painting, performance and media art. Although the majority of Camal’s work is commissioned for private collectors and is recognized for its esthetic beauty there is always a deeper layer of meaning.

Shaheer Zazai is a Toronto based Afghan-Canadian artist with a current  studio practice both in painting and digital media. Zazai received a BFA from OCAD University in 2011 and was artist in residence at OCAD University as part of the Digital  Painting Atelier in 2015. 

Zazai’s practice focuses on exploring and attempting to investigate the  development of cultural identity in the present geopolitical climate and diaspora.  The digital works revolve around Microsoft Word and imagery drawn from traditional  Afghan carpets. Through mimicking carpet-making methods, Zazai creates his own  designs in Microsoft Word, where every knot of a carpet is translated into a typed  character. While the digital is a process based exploration, the paintings have been  an internal investigation into vulnerability and fear.  

Zazai is a recipient of Ontario Arts Council grants and he was a finalist for EQ Bank’s  Emerging Digital Artist Award in 2018. Since graduating, Zazai has had several solo  and group exhibitions such as those at the Capacity 3 Gallery, CAFKA Biennial 2019,  Art Gallery of Mississauga, Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant., Double Happiness Projects  and Patel Brown Gallery. His digital works have been covered by CBC Arts in 2018,  Ajam Media Collective in 2019 and Globe and Mail in 2020.

Born in East Jerusalem, Larissa Sansour (PS/DK) studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London and New York. She represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include Dar El-Nimer in Beirut, Bluecoat in Liverpool, Chapter in Cardiff, New Art Exchange in Nottingham and Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen. Sansour is represented by Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai and Montoro 12 Contemporary Art in Rome and Brussels. She lives and works in London.

Timothy Yanick Hunter  is a multidisciplinary artist and curator based in Toronto Canada. Hunter's practice employs strategies of bricolage to examine non-neutral relationships relating to Black and Afro-diasporic experiences as well as concurrent strategies of decolonization. His approach alternates between exploratory and didactic; with a focus on the political, cultural, and social richness of the Black Diaspora. Hunter's work often delves into speculative narratives and the intersections of physical space, digital space, and the intangible.

Wally Dion is a visual artist living and working  in Binghamton, New York. He is a member of Yellow Quill First Nation  (Salteaux). Dion holds a BFA from the University of Saskatchewan and an MFA  from Rhode Island School of Design. Throughout much of his career, Dion’s  work has contributed to a broad conversation in the art world about identity and  power, and can be interpreted as part of a much larger pan-American struggle  by Indigenous peoples to be recognized: culturally, economically, and politically,  by settler societies. Utilizing large scale portraiture, found object sculpture, site  specific installation & kinetic sculpture Dion has expanded upon this practice to  include themes of personal history & spirituality.  

​Dion has exhibited extensively throughout Canada & the USA and has had  numerous solo exhibitions including: Wally Dion: Current (2019), Boise Art  Museum; Color Wheel (2017), Urban Shaman Gallery, Winnipeg; Wally Dion: Star  Blankets (2011), Ottawa Art Gallery; Thunderbird Series (2010), Art Gallery of  Southwestern Manitoba, Brandon; Red Worker (2008), Grunt Gallery, Vancouver;  and Wally Dion (2008), MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina.

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