Invited Artists

We are proud to showcase the works of three Toronto-based artists at the conference on April 15th and 16th. We are convinced of the fruitfulness of spaces where different, and differing, gazes can meet. The artists, Faye Mullen, Nathan Cyprys, and Nedra Rodrigo, are engaging, and/or confronted with what we might call 'the everyday' in their practice. Not only will their stunning artwork - a performative installation, a photo exhibition, and a spoken word performance - be displayed during the conference, but the artists will partake in an artists forum on April 15th so as to share their thoughts on the themes of the conference, and how it relates to their practice. This is a great opportunity for scholars to engage with the questions and assumptions we have about the everyday from novel and thoughtful perspectives.

The Everyday: Artists' Perspectives

to never forever - a jamais

-Faye Mullen

Faye Mullen is a visual artist working in performative installations and sculptures.
She studied at l'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, at the Ontario
College of Art & Design, and at the University of Toronto. Her work has been exhibited
internationally in solo and curated group exhibitions in spaces such as the Gyeonggi-do
Museum of Modern Art in Seoul, the Galerie Gauche in Paris, and at the Jordan Schnitzer
Museum of Art in Oregon. She is the founder of minnow & bass Gallery, a Toronto-
based migrating artist-run space nestling in vacant buildings.

With an interest in the corporeality of time, this three-channel video installation explores
the interactions between body and architecture while tackling phenomenological
questions of presence, absence, and the quotidian. Through the dissection of a narrative,
to never forever - a jamais addresses one's ongoing struggle for duration. It reveals
an internal desire for the continuance of existence while simultaneously performing
a momento mori gesturing towards sacrifice. By concurrently presenting a form of
ritualistic preservation, and a form of poetic murder, the artwork unearths the sensory
body and allows it to suspend between existence and disappearance.

Renounced Spaces

-Nathan Cyprys

Nathan Cyprys is a photographer from Aurora, Ontario. He studied at the Ontario College
of Art & Design, and his art has been showcased in many group and solo exhibitions in
Canada. Interested in the malleability of objects, people, and spaces, and often taking
himself as the subject of his photography, his work explores notions of distance and
belonging, memory, the ordinary, and the limits of embodiment. Cyprys was recently
awarded the Untapped Emerging Artist Award at this year's The Artist Project, in
Toronto, and he just completed an artist residency at Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island.

In the series Renounced Spaces, he examines conceptions of domestic locations
and how we have come to define them. These photographs are unaltered documents
of abandoned homes within rural Ontario. They show traces left behind by their past
inhabitants, now long forgotten as land developers encroach upon them. These images
represent the slow decay of domestic spaces by highlighting small details which may
have previously been overlooked, yet would perhaps be particular signifiers of memory
to the previous tenants. It is through this documentation that we are invited to discover
the ephemerality of the warmth often called "home".

Non-sequiturs, non-persons, non-places

-Arun Nedra Rodrigo

Nedra Rodrigo is a doctoral student in the Humanities program, and a spoken word
artist. She has been featured at the Asian Heritage Festival, Scream in High Park, Desh
Pardesh, and Masala Mendhi Masti, as well as on the radio on CHRY, CIUT, CKLN and
the CBC. Her poetry has been published in the anthologies 'Understatement', 'Shakti Ki
Awaaz', 'Kala' and the journal TSAR. Her play 'Disappeared' was workshopped and
performed under the aegis of Mayatheatre at Masala Mendhi Masti.

Non-sequiturs, non-persons, non-places illuminates the non-spaces of the everyday.
The spaces will range, perhaps as non-sequiturs, from subway stations to stairwells,
graffiti streaked alleys to Guantanamo Bay, speaking to the silences imposed on us by
the transitions from local to global. While these spaces may be considered non-places,
they are not unmapped and are therefore irrevocably interpolated by the contradictory
processes of modernity. Inspired by anti-Imperialist, feminist, and queer theory, the
poetry will attempt to excavate what Walter Benjamin calls the tiny fragile human body
in a field of torrents and explosions.