Derek Liddington, 2023

Liddington (1981) lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. Liddington acknowledges his relationship to the land as shaped by his settler ancestry as a third generation Canadian. After obtaining his BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he focused on video and performance, Liddington completed an MFA at Western University, graduating in 2007. Liddington’s work holds a continuous interest in cultural memory and its iterations through abstraction, representation and modernist forms of visual language. He is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council. Most recently Liddington received the Canada Council creation grant for his project “The trees weep, The mountains still, the bodies rust” presented by the Musée d'art de Joliette. This exhibition is a touring project, having been exhibited at the Richmond Art Gallery (2022/23) and upcoming at Contemporary Calgary (2024). Liddington’s work has been shown internationally, including performances in Athens, Greece and Onagawa, Japan, and select exhibitions of his painting/installation work in Toronto (AGO), Madrid (ARCO), Berlin (Art Berlin Contemporary), and New York (Frieze Art Fair, NADA). Liddington has had recent solo presentations at Cambridge Galleries (Ontario, Canada), Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge, Alberta), AKA Artist Run Center (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan), and the Art Gallery of York University (Ontario, Canada). Liddington has had multiple publications on his work, most recently a catalogue published jointly by the SAAG and AGYU with texts by Emelie Chhangur. A central part of Liddington’s practice is his use of residencies as a means of developing ideas of space and place. These include residencies at the AGYU (Toronto, ON), AKA artist-run (Saskatoon, SK) and Onagawa AIR (Japan). In 2022/23 he participated in a year long research residency at the AGNES Etherington Art Centre spending time observing and listening to the museums collection of contemporary painting.

 

Dean Baldwin Lew, 2021

Dean Baldwin Lew (b. 1973) gambols across media. Toronto-born and Montreal-based, he iterates on themes of hospitality, conviviality, performative still-life, and the structural discrepancies around which we pivot. His practice, which often positions agrarian means within an artworld setting, works to unsettle the structural and social dynamics of a community that privileges its exclusion, its difference. He trades the expected lobster for an invasive crawfish, in River Restaurant; he landlocks a yacht -for the benefit of those without yachts- in Queen West Yacht Club; he fashions Chalet from a museum's previous installation refuse. Moonlighting as host he often passes the bartender's shoulder cloth to friends and visitors, removing himself from its service so others might navigate their newfound work. Applying a palette of aristocracy, he sneaks us in and hoists us up, that we might enjoy the view.

Baldwin Lew has worked in New York, Rome, Tasmania, London & Mumbai, among others.

CHRISTOF MIGONE AND MARLA HLADY 2019

Christof Migone and Marla Hlady have long-standing individual artistic practices; they started to collaborate in 2015. Their joint projects combine pre-existing solo concerns and recurring strategies into works that accent site and sound space within a contemporary visual art context. Marla has an MFA from York and is tenured faculty at the University of Toronto. Christof has an MFA from NSCAD and a PhD from NYU, and is tenured faculty at the University of Western Ontario. Both have international careers, including exhibitions or events in Australia, Korea, Japan, the USA and in 15 European countries. Marla is in the collection of the AGO, the National Gallery of Canada, Museum London, Canada Council Art Bank, amongst others. She is represented by Christie Contemporary and has had over 30 solo exhibitions since 1991. Christof performed at the 2012 Whitney Biennial. A book compiling his writings on sound art, Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body was published in 2012 by Errant Bodies Press. He has been the recipient of commissions from the Tate Modern, Dazibao, Kunstradio, Centre for Art Tapes, New Adventures in Sound Art, Radio Canada, New American Radio. Both live in Toronto.

http://christofmigone.com
http://www.marlahlady.com/index.html

VANESSA MALTESE, 2018

Vanessa Maltese’s practice spans the mediums of painting, sculpture and installation. Through research, she asks questions that explore the nature of art and perception. Her work takes specific an interest in the potential of ambiguous figure-ground relationships and optical illusions. She has a interest in the brain’s ability to decipher a figure, from a background, as this interpretive mechanism is a necessity for recognizing objects through vision. Recent works employ the deceptive visual strategies of trompe l’oeil as a referent to temporarily complicate the viewer’s relationship to the work, the viewing experience and space of the gallery.

Holding a BFA from OCAD University. Vanessa Maltese was the National Winner of the 2012 RBC Canadian Painting Competition and has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions across North America. Her recent and forthcoming exhibitions include, Night Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Shane Campbell Gallery (Chicago, IL), Nicelle Beauchene Gallery (New York, NY), Greenpoint Terminal Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Halsey Mckay (East Hampton, NY), The Power Plant (Toronto, ON) and COOPER COLE (Toronto, ON). She has published artist editions with Nothing Else Press, Paul + Wendy Projects, Slow Editions and Casey House. Maltese’s work has been reviewed in national and international publications including, Frieze Magazine, Artforum and C Magazine. Maltese currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada and is represented by COOPER COLE.

Photography by Sarah Bodri 

Dave Dyment, 2008

Based in Toronto, Canada, Dave Dyment is best known for his sound installation work, although he also works in multiples and photography. Dave’s unique project was inspired by his interest in the collapsing of time and the notion of artists planning a work which will not be complete until their lifetime has passed. A 500L second fill sherry butt full of new-make Glenfiddich spirit has been entombed in the ground at the Glenfiddich Distillery. 25 empty bottles have been sold at The Toronto International Art Fair for CAN$2,000. Buyers can pass on the bottle for the liquid to be redeemed in 100 years’ time when the cask is opened (T&Cs apply).

‘The whisky itself will be the ultimate gift, a whisky that the buyer will never taste, but will pass on.' Dave Dyment, June 08

Lee Henderson, 2017

Lee Henderson’s is a making practice marked by the persistence of collective histories and the brevity of individual lives… which is to say it's funny, in the same way King Lear is funny.

Lee is interested in understanding problems, with an awareness that the work of the artist lies in revealing false problems rather than solving real ones. But whether investigating problems of definition or perception, or of measurement or identification, existential crises or mundane anxieties, he has so far found that they all collapse back to the central problem of the terminus, that presumed point of ambiguous inevitability we spend our conscious lives avoiding, or from which we supposedly sprang. This doesn't have to mean the beginning/end of a particular human life—it can as easily be the disappearance of a culture, the retrofitting of an edifice, the emergence of a language, or the transition between weather patterns. And like an electron or a fable, when examined with care, the terminus problem-point reveals itself to be permeable, mutable, and indiscernible.

Throughout this process Lee stumbles, he gropes; and latches on to a piece of material, or an historical factoid, or the cultural baggage of an object, or a quirk of language, and become fascinated-obsessed until it reveals the mortal banality of its associations. Those associations—networks of human intellectual-emotional investment, more commonly known as "meaning"—then find expression in reconfigurations of light, text, space, sound, and matter. Making artwork is every bit as absurd, direct, and fruitful as rearranging furniture just to see the pattern on the floor.

 

Jonathan Kaiser, 2007

Born in 1982 in Winnipeg, Jonathan went on to study at the University of Alberta, where he achieved a BFA with Distinction in 2005. Jonathan has held a number of exhibitions across Canada, including the recent Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art 2007. The landscape around the distillery and the heritage of Glenfiddich has been a major influence during his residency along with the mysticism – both established and newly imagined.

"During my stay at the Glenfiddich Distillery I have been impressed by its picturesque Highland setting and the proud family history it was built on. I also appreciate the romantic images associated with the brand like the iconic Glenfiddich stag and, being a bit of a Christmas fanatic, the fact that the first drop of spirit ran from the stills on Christmas Day 1887." Jonathan Kaiser 2/7/07

Eleanor King, 2016

Eleanor King is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York and Nova Scotia. She participated in residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, SOMA Mexico, and The Banff Centre among others. She has received creation grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Arts Nova Scotia, and was a national finalist for the 2012 Sobey Art Award. King has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Nuit Blanche Toronto, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (NY) and Galleri F15 (Norway). Her solo exhibition Dark Utopian was recently on view at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and her work was the subject of a feature-length cover article in the Fall 2014 issue of Canadian Art magazine. Eleanor is currently a Fulbright fellow and MFA candidate at Purchase College, State University of New York (graduation May 2016), and she received a BFA from NSCAD University. She is represented by Diaz Contemporary in Toronto. “Combining music, sound art, social practices, improvisation and other modes of creation, the art of Eleanor King is difficult to classify, but remains reliably enjoyable. Whether stacking reams of vinyl records skyward in a sculpture, creating a working bar as part of an art installation, tracing old tape reels to make a drawing, amplifying the sounds of underground streams for a public artwork, (or) playing in Halifax-area bands... her art often provide(s) new ways of connecting with the present moment.” Canadian Art, November 2012

Jon Sasaki, 2015

Jon Sasaki is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist, whose practice frequently borrows Conceptual Art strategies, redeploying them in work with an emotionally resonant core. While his projects often employ both humour and pathos, they do so in the service of addressing the fraught and fragile nature of human interactions. Sasaki's work can at times be mildly and intentionally antagonistic towards audiences and participants; he aims to test the limits of sociability, audience generosity, sustainability of actions, conviviality, hope, enthusiasm. Projects invariably risk and even court failure. For Sasaki, tragedy is an inevitable by-product of a practice that is aspirational at its core.

Sasaki's work has been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions, recently at the Ottawa Art Gallery, (Ottawa, ON); the Tom Thomson Art Gallery (Owen Sound, ON); Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina, SK); MacLaren Art Centre (Barrie, ON); the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, (Lethbridge, AB); and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Recent group exhibitions include Platform Art Spaces (Melbourne, Australia); Nihonbashi Institute of Contemporary Art, (Tokyo, Japan); Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto, ON); The Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, (Toronto, ON); Pace University Digital Gallery, (New York, NY); and Dazibao (Montréal, QC); and Oakville Galleries. Sasaki holds a BFA from Mount Allison University (Sackville, NB) and is represented by Clint Roenisch Gallery in Toronto.

Sasaki holds a BFA from Mount Allison University.

Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, 2014

Weppler and Mahovsky have worked collaboratively since 2004. Both artists have MFA degrees from the University of British Columbia, where they met in 1996. They initially developed their collaborative practice in Vancouver and have continued after relocating in 2012; Mahovsky currently lives in Toronto, while Weppler divides her time between Vancouver, Burlington and San Francisco.

Exhibits include: National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Vancouver Art Gallery, Alter Space, (San Francisco), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), Flux Projects (Atlanta), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), LABoral (Gijon), Dos de Mayo (Madrid), Power Plant (Toronto), Musee d’art Contemporain (Montreal),   Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Orange Coast College Photography Gallery (Costa Mesa, CA), Tokyo Wonder Site, loop-raum (Berlin), Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax), 516Arts (Albuquerque).   

Daniel Barrow, 2013

Winner of the 2010 Sobey Art Award, Winnipeg-born, Montreal-based Barrow has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad including performances at; The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), and The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s TBA festival.

“Thanks so much to everyone at Glenfiddich for this wonderful artist residency opportunity. I had an incredibly, intensive and productive summer – creating 2 new performances, as well as a print and drawing series. I know that the work and the concepts I conceived in Scotland, will act as the footing and foundation for the exhibitions I will present over, at least, the next few years”.

Jillian McDonald, 2012

During her time at the distillery, Jillian cast local residents and Glenfiddich craftspeople in a video, creating costumes and masks on location in response to the local landscape, legends, traditional highlands costume, and folklore - both real and imagined. The haunting remarkable romanticism of the landscape figures prominently as the camera creeps across the valleys uncovering dales and knolls.

Helen Cho, 2011

"The goal of the workshop is not about producing good art/craftwork but to enjoy the idea of, and the experience of making something"

Born 1969, Youngwall, South Korea, Helen Cho moved to Canada in 1982. She now lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Her artworks explore disparate elements encountered in daily life such as everyday objects, prosaic thoughts and film images that are bound together in fateful collisions on an unexpected surface unbound by time, place or space. Notions of make-believe and facts intertwine, chronologies of history are upset, and objects of fiction co-exist in the same space as real objects.

Damian Moppett, 2010

Born 1969 Calgary Alberta, Damian is a graduate of the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, Vancouver, British Columbia, where he went on to teach between 1998 and 2004. Currently living and working in Vancouver, his work is analytical, conceptual, and highly referential in both form and content. Exploring the process of craft making and it's ability to function as a highly personal and autobiographical art form. Moppett also focuses on his own skills; he produces work that spans the entire range of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, film and ceramics.

Solo-exhibitions include Yvon Lambert, Paris, (2009); Temple University Gallery, Philadelphia (2009); Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver (2007); and Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, (2006).

Arabella Campbell, 2009

Arabella Campbell lives and works in Vancouver. She has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of British Columbia (1996) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr Institute of Art and the San Francisco Art Institute (2002).

Arabella Campbell’s practice is rooted in the studio and attends to a range of media. Calling attention to the white cube, the context of the art exhibition and the medium itself, Campbell’s practice is consistently self-reflexive and produced with formal clarity. Her practice is informed by site-specific studies and conceptual based strategies, resulting in formally attentive works that are concerned with the fundamental structures of representation, as they are manifest in materials, language and place. 

Dave Dyment

Dave Dyment was the 2008 Canadian Artists in Residence Prize recipient and has served on the selection jury panel for Artists in Residence Canada for the past 5 years.

Based in Toronto, Dave is best known for his sound installation work, although he also works in multiples and photography. Dave has had a number of solo exhibitions, and his work has been displayed all over the world from Bulgaria to Ireland, London, Canada and the USA. 

DAVID DIVINEY

David Diviney is the senior curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. Prior to joining the AGNS in 2009, he practised as an independent curator and held positions at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and Eye Level Gallery. He has also taught courses at Alberta College of Art and Design, University of Lethbridge, Thompson Rivers University, and Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. Diviney participated in the Canada Council for the Arts Asia-Pacific Visual Arts Delegation in 2014 and was a member of the curatorial panel for the Sobey Art Award in 2010, 2012 and 2015.

Stefan Hancherow

Stefan Hancherow is a curator and collector based in Toronto. He has recently held positions as the Project Director of Feature Contemporary Art Fair and Assistant Curator of the Sobey Art Award. He is an alumnus of NSCAD University, and graduated with an MFA from OCAD University in 2013. Recent curatorial projects include Absolutely Free at OCAD U, There is No There at the Hamilton Artists Inc. and Is This Thing On? at MSVU Art Gallery.

Ivan Jurakic

Ivan Jurakic is the Director/Curator of the University of Waterloo Art Gallery. He received his MFA from SUNY Buffalo and an Honours BA from the University of Guelph. Since 2004, he has curated numerous exhibitions, sat on the curatorial panel for the 2009 Sobey Art Award and co-curated Zone C for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2013. His curatorial practice focuses on multidisciplinary art and installation and he has curated significant exhibitions and written about the work of Kelly Mark, Colleen Wolstenholme, James Carl, Laurel Woodcock, Kelly Richardson, Lois Andison, Roula Partheniou and many others. He is also a principal of TH&B, an artist collective whose site- responsive projects address the intersection of urban and rural environments. He lives in Hamilton.

Raymond Boisjoly

Raymond Boisjoly is a Vancouver-based artist whose work is derived from his training in photography. He uses screens, scanners, photocopiers, and inkjet printers to capture technological processes interwoven with subject matter centered on cultural propriety, humour, and poetic-prophetic texts of mysterious origins.

Boisjoly’s solo exhibitions include MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2022); Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2021); The Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver (2020); VOX, Montreal (2016); Carleton University, Ottawa (2015); Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts, Winnipeg (2014); Simon Fraser University Gallery, Vancouver (2013). He has been featured internationally in exhibitions including at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2022); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca (2021); Honolulu Biennial (2020); Daegu Photo Biennale, South Korea (2018); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2017); Triangle France, Marseille (2015); SITElines, Santa Fe (2014); Camera Austria, Vienna (2014) as well as exhibitions at La Biennale de Montréal (2014); The Power Plant, Toronto (2012); and the Vancouver Art Gallery (2018, 2016 and 2012-14).

Boisjoly is Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University. He received a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (2006) and an MFA from the University of British Columbia (2008). He was a recipient of the VIVA Award (2016), presented by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts, Vancouver. He is represented by Catriona Jeffries

Joshua Schwebel

Joshua Schwebel is a Canadian artist based between Montreal (Tiohtià:ke) and Berlin. Since graduating from NSCAD in 2008, Schwebel has become known for practising a particularly direct form of institutional critique, undertaken through process-based performances, withdrawals, delegated transactions, and impostors. Selected solo exhibitions include presentations at L’Oeil de Poisson (2023) Galerie UQO (Gatineau, 2022), Centre Clark (Montreal, 2021), piloto pardo (London, UK, 2021), Or Gallery (Vancouver, 2019), Kreuzberg Pavillon (as one of the shortlisted artists for the 2019 Berlin Art Prize (2019)), the Fonderie Darling (Montreal, 2018), and Centrum (Berlin, 2017). Schwebel was a participating fellow in the Art by Translation program’s inaugural year (2017), was a participant in BPA // Berlin Program for Artists (2020-21), and has undertaken residencies at AiR 351 (Lisbon), Laznia CCA (Gdansk), the Couvent des Récollets (Paris), the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Rupert (Vilnius), Tadeusz Kantor Foundation (Krakow), Standards (Milan), and Where Where (Beijing), among others. Schwebel’s work has been supported by numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec.

Eunice Luk

Eunice Luk (b. 1988, Hong Kong) is a visual artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her practice includes installations, sculptures, paintings, and multiples. Luk’s work explores sentiments and commonalities found across cultures and landscapes and draws inspiration from the natural environment. She publishes artist books and multiples under the imprint, 'Slow Editions’.

Ruth Burns

Ruth Burns is a programmer, curator, advocate and non-profit administrator with over twenty years of experience in the arts. She has served as the Executive Director of Ontario Culture Days since 2017. She was the founding director of Nuit Blanche Edmonton, which launched in 2015 as the largest arts event the city had seen at that time. Ruth has also served as an Associate Curator and lead of Interpretive Programs at the Art Gallery of Alberta. She was a sessional instructor at MacEwan University, and recently completed a term as co-chair of Ontario's Provincial Art Service Organization Coalition. Ruth was a founder and editor of Locus Suspectus Magazine, a contemporary art publication which ran from 2005-2008. She is a freelance consultant on several high-profile arts initiatives, with her work often highlighting contemporary and historical Canadian art. She holds an M.A and B.A (Honours) in Art History from McGill University.