Instructor
Donna is an interdisciplinary artist who creates installations, sculptures, videos, photography, book works and collaborations. She received her MFA from NSCAD. Her work reflects her interest in the urban environment, language and communication, body and mind and the power of the habitual on our dreams and realities.
Instructor
Lisa Cristinzo (She/her) is a queer painter and installation artist, and a first-generation Canadian settler living in T’karonto on Turtle Island. Cristinzo’s large-scale painting installations traverse natural history, climate hazards, materialism, and magic. She holds a BFA from OCAD U and an MFA from York University, where she received a graduate scholarship and SSHRC federal funding for her research into fire and climate change. Cristinzo’s writing and artwork about fire was recently published in Fire Season II by Liz Tooney-Wiese and Amory Abbott. Along with being an artist, she has spent over a decade managing arts programs and community cultural hubs, including Artscape Gibraltar Point, an artist residency and event space on Mnisiing/Toronto Island.
Through a Canada Council for the Arts research-creation grant she spent 60 days at four artist residencies, including a residency at Vermont Studio Center, where she explored the tradition of “plein air” painting through the lens of climate change. In June 2023, she will be facilitating a thematic residency based on her experience called, “i made it through the wilderness” at Artscape Gibraltar Point. Lisa was also recently selected for the Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence Program and will be spending time this summer plein air painting at the Scarborough bluffs.
Instructor
Julie is a visual artist. Her practice is aligned with a number of intersecting movements that emerged in the 1960s, including performance-based video, body art, and land art. She received her MFA from Ryerson University. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, the USA and internationally.
Instructor
Max received a BMus from Brock University and an MA from University of Ottawa, focusing on classical guitar performance, composition and music theory. He is a guitarist, composer and sound designer who has been heavily influenced by South American harmonies, rhythms and techniques. Max teaches sound design and music programming at Brock University. He is a founding member of Stolen Theatre Collective and of the Chimichangas Latin Music Duo. Max has been a featured musician in several recordings, and a commissioned sound designer and composer for theatre companies and visual artists in Toronto and the Niagara Region.
Instructor
Jimmy is a photo-based artist working in installation, ceramics and sculpture. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts, Photography from the Ontario College of Arts and Design. His work values the image over the object and his commercial practice of shooting products and documenting art shows is increasingly collapsing into his art practice. Jimmy has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Canada and the United States.
Dr. Allison MacDuffee is an art historian whose main area of study is nineteenth-century French painting and graphic media, especially Camille Pissarro (1830-1903). She earned her BA and MA from Queen’s University, and her PhD from the University of Michigan. She has taught Art History at the University of Toronto, Sheridan College, Queen’s University, Ryerson University, and elsewhere.
Dr. MacDuffee’s articles and reviews have appeared in The Burlington Magazine, Queen’s Quarterly, Canadian Art, and other periodicals, and she has presented conference papers in Canada and internationally.
Gallery Coordinator & Instructor
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PhD, Western University
MA, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
BA, Brock University
Sonya Marie de Lazzer is the Gallery Coordinator of the Visual Arts Gallery and Student Exhibition Space (MIWSFPA) and works in consultation with preparators, curators, artists, students, as well as public outreach. Sonya brings extensive museum and art gallery experience in the areas of curation, programming, exhibition writing, design, and installation. She also teaches in the areas of art history, visual culture, and curation. de Lazzer is trained as a historian of visual culture with an interest in souvenirs, collectibles, and collections. Her research is focused on the visual culture and visual history of Niagara Falls as a tourist site, with investigations into contemporary notions of the sublime that expand on recreational, social, and immersive experiences within landscapes, specifically, the recreational sublime and sublime fiction(s). Her research constellates the material culture of mementos, souvenirs, tourist attractions and experiences.
Visual Arts Facilities Technician and Instructor
B.A. hon. Brock University (1988)
B.ed. University of Western Ontario (1990)
MA. (Contemporary Literature and the Arts), Brock University (2013).
Arnold attended the University of Western Ontario and Brock University. He is an artist as well as a musician. Arnold’s artwork has been exhibited widely across Ontario, and his work is represented in public & private collections across North America. He is represented by Thielsen Gallery of London, Ontario and recent projects include:
Publications
Excerpts from “(O)”. Not Your Best. Edited by Eric Schmaltz and published by KNIFE FORK BOOK. Toronto, ON. 2019
Excerpts from “(O)”. Curated by Catherine Parayre, published in Brock University journal VOIX PLURIELLES: Vol 7, No 2. 2019.
Excerpts from “For”. Concrete and Constraint. Edited by Anthony Etherin & Clara Daneri, published by PENTERACT PRESS. London, England. 2019.
Excerpts from “Who Decides the Land is Sacred?”. Curated by Catherine Parayre, published in Brock University journal ti<. Vol 7, No 2. 2018.
Exhibitions
Signs of our Discontent. Collaborative project with poet Gregory Betts. Exhibition component of the Kanada Koncrete: Material Poetries in the Digital Age conference at the UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA. Ottawa, ON. 2018.
Signs of our Discontent. Collaborative project with poet Gregory Betts. Selected for presentation in the IN THE SOIL ARTS FESTIVAL. St. Catharines, ON. 2018.
Presencia a solo exhibition mounted at the Gibson Library, Brock University 2015.
Parallax a two-person exhibition with Duncan MacDonald mounted at the Grimsby Public Art Gallery 2015.
Instructor
Dr. Kristin Patterson is an independent curator and writer who teaches widely in the field of visual culture, media studies, museology, and gender studies.
Kristin received her Ph.D. in Contemporary Visual Culture at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, England. Her dissertation examined biography as a gendered discourse in the reception of women artists working from 1960-1980. Her current project explores the relationship between feminism and domesticity in contemporary performance and new media along with research interests in film, design, textiles and craft. Kristin has presented at several international conferences and is currently preparing a portion of her dissertation for publication.
Instructor
Laur Pilon is a trans, queer and neurodivergent artist (Laur P) based in Tiohtià:ke-Mooniyang-Montréal and in St-Catharines (Ontario), and a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brock University.
Their work offers a speculative visibility of paleo-ecological compositions in becoming, an imaginary space that they investigate from a trans-queer-crip perspective. In their works, fragments of inter-species compositions compress through a slow process of accretion, decomposition and re-emergence. Throughout this stratigraphic process they seek fossilization and indetermination while paying particular attention to the agential force of the materials they use. This intuitive and taphonomic approach allows them to visualize entanglements that are at once underworldly and topographical, micro- and macroscopic, and in which various temporal and metaphorical dimensions intersect. On the periphery of eco-critical considerations of contemporary nature-cultures and the hauntings they reveal, Laur P’s assemblages of pictorial fossils invite a rapprochement between the formal contemplation of materials that are associated in their work and their intertwined intentions, which are, to disrupt speciesist understandings of evolution and natural phenomena, to disturb the tradition of the landscape as a space for humanistic representation of nature, to disorient ableist pictorial conventions, and therefore to resist anthropocentric myopia.
Laur Pilon holds an MFA from the University of Guelph (2021) and a BFA from Concordia University (2015). Their work has recently been exhibited in Montréal (Galerie Nicolas Robert, Livart, McClure, McBride Contemporary), Toronto (AGO, Galerie Nicolas Robert, the Plumb, Birch Contemporary) and New York (Sargent’s Daughters, NADA). Laur P is represented by Galerie Nicolas Robert.
Breanna Shanahan (she/her/they) is a recent resident of the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas (Hamilton). Shanahan is an artist, researcher and educator whose sculpture and drawing practice focuses on a community engaging process of collective creation which she calls Daily Art Practice. Shanahan’s studio work investigates topics around cultural and philosophical posthumanism, challenging the ways we address human nature and legacy through works that observe environmental impacts on the natural world. Shanahan is a director at the Hamilton Artist Inc., one of the newest members of the Assembly Gallery artist collective, and is a member of QO (Quite Ourselves) artist collective who had their recent Moving Box Trailer show this past May in T’karonto. Shanahan is a core member of the STAC Collective (Shortcuts for Teachers Artist Collective) who recently presented research on pedagogical methods and art student resilience at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland in June. Her works have been exhibited in Italy, China, Austria, the United States of America and in Canada. She has taught Sculpture and Drawing courses across Canada at multiple post-secondary institutions including Concordia University, Mt. Allison University, NSCAD University, Sheridan College and most recently Brock University. Shanahan received her MFA at Concordia University in 2019 and was a SSHRC recipient in 2017.
Instructor
Richard is an artist whose work ranges from drawing and painting installations critiquing white privilege and toxic masculinity, to performance projects designed to provide experiences of creative engagement for their participants. He earned his PhD in Art from the University of Calgary, with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Instructor
Denise received her MFA from the University of Waterloo. She is an Interdisciplinary Artist focusing on the psychological dimensions of familiar objects and environmental spaces. Denise’s practice hybridizes disciplines of print, installation, art intervention, sculpture, audio, video, photography and participatory experiences. Her conceptual concerns investigate the applied nature of perception, meaning and belief, while exploring the potential of social economies, the prosthetic use of objects, and the semiotics of language, text and dialogue.
Instructor
Pearl Van Geest is a visual artist, arts educator and writer, maintaining an active studio practice since graduating from OCAD University in 1996. She also holds a BSc, BEd and received her MFA at the University of Windsor. Much of her work is in one way or another inspired by prolonged observations of and learning about the natural world, and contemplation of interwoven sensory, material and esoteric connections. Her work has been supported by Canadian and Ontario Art Councils, and is in the Canada Art Council’s Art Bank collection, public galleries, and private and corporate collections. Van Geest was the City of Guelph’s inaugural Artist in Residence, and together with participants, created an artwork that is on permanent display in the City of Guelph.
Instructor
Tracy is an artist and filmmaker working with text, video, installation and the internet. She received her MFA from Concordia University. Using the moving-image within immersive contexts, her research focus is the affective relationship between bodies and mediums, both as conduits and networks, embodied and entangled, hosting the currents and maelstroms of feeling. Tracy’s work has been exhibited nationally and screened at festivals internationally.
Instructor
After finishing a three-year apprenticeship in Digital Media Design Tobias graduated from The German Film School in 2004. Tobias is President of and founded morro images Canada – a VFX and 3D animation company in April 2009. He is also the co-owner of morro images Germany located at the Babelsberg Film Studios. He is the Chair of the Generator at one Advisory Panel and is also technology partner of the Generator at One. Tobias has been nominated for and won several awards with his companies’ work both in Germany and Canada. Tobias’ special interests lie in 3D animation, VFX, 3D Scanning, 3D printing, Motion Capturing and Augmented Reality. Tobias has been teaching in Germany at The Babelsberg Film School and Canada at Brock University.