All That We Need is in This Room

Ava Roth is a Canadian encaustic painter, embroiderer and mixed media artist. Reverence for landscape and the natural world are at the heart of her work. Roth’s creative practice is fundamentally responsive and relational. Over the past decade, Roth has engaged in an interspecies collaboration with thousands of local Ontario honeybees. The project combines her human handiwork with the remarkable artistry of wild honeycomb. Working together, Roth and the bees transform ordinary materials into evocative composite objects, half human and half insect made. The collection of pieces speaks to ecology, communication, hope, and the human relationship to the planet.

Roth’s project demands intimate observation and dialogue with bees, and to this end she works closely with Master Beekeeper Mylee Nordin. Nordin oversees the health and well-being of associated apiaries, and her expertise is indispensable.

Roth is represented by Wallspace Gallery, in Ottawa. In addition to exhibiting in both solo and group shows in Canada and internationally, Roth’s work has been featured in a multitude of on-line and print magazines. Her pieces have been acquired by museums and private collectors throughout Canada and across the world.

Damian Rogers is a writer and interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto. She is the author of the memoir An Alphabet for Joanna: A Portrait of My Mother in 26 Fragments (KnopfCanada, 2020), and two books of poetry, including Dear Leader (Coach House, 2015), which was nominated for the Ontario Trillium Award. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the intersection of literary narrative and embodied experience through experiments with performance, printmaking, and installation works. She collaborates on sound pieces with her husband, Michael Belitsky, a musician who has been a member of the Canadian rock band The Sadies since the late nineties. Damian teaches courses on creativity and creative writing at Toronto Metropolitan University.

New York-based multi-media artist moira williams offers Blood Songs + Oracles Crip Careoke Lounge, a collaboration with community members of mixed disabilities. Through a series of online creation workshops, moira co-writes songs with participants that reflect their experience of disability and access, inviting visitors to perform the finished songs in an accessibility-centered karaoke lounge.

Unsettled Bodies Collective is the collaborative team of Yuji Szero Lee and Sylvia Ziemann, interdisciplinary artists living in Treaty 4 territory (Regina, SK). Often featuring chimerical characters, Yuji’s work primarily explores alternative ways of being and challenges gender conventions through personal, cultural, and reclaimed religious symbolism. Yuji is a diasporic Chinese (Cantonese) Canadian. Sylvia’s art practice addresses themes of shared anxiety in an uncertain world. Using animal-human hybrid characters, she crafts storied metaphoric worlds through painting, drawing, and sculpture. She is a mother, a Tarot card reader, and second generation German Canadian. Together, they blend their creative vision in a drawing methodology that tells stories of otherworldly creatures and realms through collaborative drawing.

Skeena Reece is a Tsimshian/Gitksan and Cree/Metis artist based on the west coast of British Columbia. She has garnered national and international attention, most notably for Raven: On the Colonial Fleet (2010) her bold installation and performance work presented at the 2010 Sydney Biennale and as a part of the celebrated and widely toured group exhibition Beat Nation. Her multidisciplinary practice includes performance art, “sacred clowning”, writing, music, video, and visual art. She studied media arts at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, and was the recipient of the British Columbia Award for Excellence in the Arts (2012), the Viva Award (2014), and the Hnyatshyn Award (2017).  Recent solo exhibitions include: Moss at the Oboro Gallery, Montreal (2017) and Sweetgrass and Honey at Plug In ICA (2018), Touch Me at the Comox Valley Art Gallery (2018), and Surrounded at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (2019). – Studio 303