Image: Return, Aliyah Aziz (2025)
Steel, Bronze Casted Keys, Fabric, with sound composition.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Lingering Echoes brings into conversation personal sound-centered artworks by artists Aliyah Aziz, Ghislan Sutherland-Timm, Middle, Tanya Louise Workman, and Winta Hagos. Collectively and individually, the artworks take up themes of resistance, collectivity, embodiment, silence, and resilience. Lingering Echoes ask where the individual ends and the collective begins within the porosity of space and temporalities.
This exhibition is the result of “Sounding Spaces” course, part of the Train to Present program led by instructor/artist Nicole Marchesseau.
Curated by Nicole Marchesseau and Fatma Hendawy.
FEATURED ARTISTS
Aliyah Aziz
Aliyah Aziz is a multidisciplinary storyteller, poet and musician who uses light to talk about shadows, and sound to physically move them through us. She uses disruption as a tool of resistance, embracing glitch and static to channel the friction that exists between the surface and the depth of the technology that we engage with. Aliyah’s expressions take many forms, from multimedia moving collages of archived material, experimental sound and poetry compositions, interactive media installations, to performance art. She considers her practice to be an exploration of identity and the power that stories hold, from the history of our shadows to the projection of our futures.
Aliyah works with experimental sound techniques and audio archives such as voice loop samples on magnetic tape, as well as electromagnetic frequency statics made audible in combination with spoken word recitations. She is currently exploring live performance in 5.1 using different instruments she has built to direct the power of the “auditory glitch” as a liberating disruption in confronting naturalized instances of dehumanization of the “Other”. Aliyah finds that cultural resilience is only possible through resistance, and her work is how she does this, using sound as a material force.
Ghislan Sutherland-Timm
Ghislan Sutherland-Timm (they/she) is a multidisciplinary craftsman, media-based researcher, and cultural worker based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Their practice braids archival materials with collage-based techniques across a diverse range of mediums, including analog, to shape autobiographical-fictional narratives centred on ambiguous beings and land formations. Sutherland-Timm volunteers at the8fest Small Gauge Film Festival and The ArQuives. They hold a BFA in Integrated Media from OCAD University and are an alum of the Independent Imaging Retreat: Film Farm (2024) and Black Women Film! Canada (2019).
Previous works of Sutherland-Timm’s has been featured at Sankofa Square (Yonge & Dundas Square) (2025), Artist Project (2024), InterAccess (2024), Xpace Cultural Centre (2024), ArtSpace Gallery (2023), Images Festival (2023), PITCH Magazine Issue 4 (2023) & Issue 2 (2021), RBC Commission Career Launcher OCAD U x RBC (2022), InsideOut 2SLGBTQ+ Toronto Film Festival (2022), Toronto Queer Film Festival (TQFF) (2022), and Nia Centre for the Arts in collaboration with McMaster Museum of Art (2021).
Middle
Middle is a multidisciplinary musician, producer, and sound artist whose practice bridges identity, mental health, and social justice. As a queer, Black artist, she expands her musical world into the realm of installation, using sound as an aura, designed to surround, hold and tell stories.
Her sonic practice blends genres, while also exploring the use of optimal tunings, meditative frequencies, and resonant textures that move beyond entertainment into embodied listening. Through field recordings, synthesized instrumentation, and live soundscapes, she builds immersive sonic environments where audiences don’t just hear, but feel and inhabit sound as space.
Her music has been featured on Prime Video’s Dating Unlocked and TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin, while her remix series #MiddleMix and original works have drawn recognition from artists such as Sampa the Great and Jessie Reyez.
Beyond her own artistry, Middle is an arts educator and mentor committed to fostering spaces where BIPOC and LGBTQ+ creatives can thrive. With over a decade in community-based work, she bridges creative expression and industry knowledge, equipping emerging artists with the tools to navigate their careers with intention. Her dedication was recognized with the 2024 Community Recognition Award from MPP Chris Glover as a Youth Leader.
Tanya Workman
Tanya Louise Workman is a multidisciplinary artist and writer who works with spoken word, text, images and vibration to create tactile installations that oscillate in the space between what is heard, seen and felt. Listening in to make audible what the body holds, she arrives at her practice through a trauma-informed lens, and is most interested in holding spaces that invite intimacy, connection and embodied, felt experiences.
Tanya received her MFA from Maine Media College + Workshops in 2022. She also holds a Bachelor of Journalism from Carleton University, a post-graduate certificate in creative writing from the Humber School for Writers and a photojournalism diploma from Loyalist College.
Her work has been exhibited and screened in spaces in Toronto and internationally, including at Gallery 44, MOCA Toronto, CONTACT Gallery and the Gladstone Hotel, and with PhotoSensitive, Project Re•Vision, Magnum in Motion and Workman Arts.
As a journalist, Tanya’s writing has appeared in the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, TV Guide Canada and Canadian Living. Her radio doc, “What Happened to Your Face?,” about the stories we tell about difference, aired on CBC Radio’s The Doc Project.
Winta Hagos
Winta Hagos is a Toronto-based multisensory artist and sound archivist whose work explores the intersection of sound, science, and cultural memory. Centering East African sonic traditions, she uses archival recordings, sculptural sound objects, and cymatics to investigate how sound can be both form and feeling. Her practice is rooted in community engagement, upcycling, and deep listening — creating immersive experiences that connect participants to epigenetic memory, emotional release, and spatial storytelling.
October 23 - November 30, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION
Thursday, October 23, 2025 | 5-6:30 PM
WA OFFSITE (32 Lisgar, 2nd Floor, Room 12)
No Reservations Required.
Thursdays – Sundays, 1-6 PM
Workman Arts OFFSITE
32 Lisgar St. 2nd floor, Room 12
ALSO OF INTEREST
Sandpaper Hammock
Performed by Aliyah Aziz | Sonic Art | 40 minutes | English
Keywords: BIPOC, protest & resistance, technology & media
‘Everything has a voice’
Lips pressed against a mic with a determination to be heard, even in fragmented lines, distorting. Two gloved hands wave over a series of objects arranged on a large white table; a VHS player and CRT Monitor, a Cassette Player, three mixers, a camera, a power bar and several charging cells, the crackling electromagnetic static they emit made audible and interruptive. Their wires spill over the edge of the desk, entangled.
‘Sound is something that you can feel beyond your skin’
“Listening Gloves” designed as an instrument to play different pulsing electromagnetic frequencies of curated technological artifacts through touch. In this process of amplification, they tune into sounds as though they are rhythms of a living being.
This is “Sandpaper Hammock”, a solo multimedia performance series where improvised sound compositions are played off of technological artifacts in combination with original poetry recitations. Through sound, a story unfolds, inviting embodied feeling as a vehicle to share in ways that do not center language over sensation.
Static is used as a material of resistance; the electromagnetic frequencies made audible are a sonic reminder of a friction that exists between surface and depth, a disruption of smoothness. During the set, the camera is turned onto the audience and the frequencies generated from a live feed on a CRT are an act of subversion.
This piece disrupts the focus by interrogating the nature of viewership through technology in the performance itself. People are asked to “watch themselves, watching me. Who remembers longer? The static, the screen, or the human being?’
ABOUT THE PERFORMER
Aliyah Aziz
Aliyah Aziz is a multidisciplinary storyteller, poet and musician who uses light to talk about shadows, and sound to physically move them through us. She uses disruption as a tool of resistance, embracing glitch and static to channel the friction that exists between the surface and the depth of the technology that we engage with. Her expressions take many forms, from multimedia moving collages of archived material, experimental sound and poetry compositions, interactive media installations, to live performances. I consider my practice to be an exploration of identity and the power that stories hold, from the history of our shadows to the projection of our futures.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30TH, 2025
Tranzac Club | 292 Brunswick Ave, Toronto
Performed in the Southern Cross
7:30 – 8:15PM
Box office opens at 6:30 PM | Tickets in Advanced & By Donation at the Door while space allows
MORE EVENTS
Illustration: Jenny Chen
IN THE EXHIBITION:
In Praise of Voice Notes and Penguin Pebbling (part of Mourning Microcosmmutes)
m. patchwork monoceros
ARTIST TALK
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Indebted to the words and thinking of disability justice educator Mia Mingus, wherever you are is where i want to be offers access intimacy as the un-structuring logic for our collective queer and trans crip futures. Refusing the loudly eugenicist mapping of isolation and disposability upon our disabled queer-trans-crip bodyminds, the multi-disciplinary practices platformed here speak with a loved urgency to the ways in which embodied experiences of access intimacy have the capacity to reconfigure time, space, and relation. Spanning installation to textile to video, the work of these artists proposes the act, experience, and feeling of crip kinship as a means and model of radical future-making.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Sarah–Tai Black (they/them) is an arts curator and critic born and (mostly) raised in Treaty 13 Territory/Toronto whose work aims to center Black, queer, trans, and crip futurities and freedom work. Their curatorial work has been staged at Cambridge Art Galleries (Cambridge, ON), Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina, SK), MOCA (Toronto ON), PAVED Arts (Saskatoon, SK), and A Space Gallery (Toronto, ON).
ALSO OF INTEREST
THE THINGS WE CARRY WITH US
Twinkle Banerjee
The things we carry with us is a mixed media installation that explores the life of the artist’s grandmother, who experienced displacement as a child when India was partitioned as the British exited India. What the artist’s grandmother saw or experienced was never discussed but the signs of her trauma remained. The family went through much emotional upheaval as a result and shaped the artist’s anxieties as her grandmother remained the artist’s caregiver for most of her childhood.
The things we carry with us explores coping mechanisms we pick up as children to survive. And, in practice, it can take a very long time to come to terms with our realities and sometimes we never do; we live behind a net seeing and experiencing the world differently, and that becomes the only world we know.
Twinkle Banerjee (she/her) is an Indian-Canadian visual artist, who explores work that deals with social issues such as generational trauma, globalization and human rights. Understanding the pressure put on BIPOC artists for creating trauma-related work, she also tries balancing her work with introspective experiments with a focus on poetic imagery.
Twinkle has exhibited in the USA, Canada, the UK and Armenia, been published in Berlin and featured on CBC. In 2021 her artwork “Characters of Memorial Park” was part of an exhibition and publication at the ICP-New York.
Artist website: twinklebanerjee.com
Keywords: Activism | BIPOC Experience | Bipolar Disorder(s) | Trauma | CPTSD Generational Trauma
#RWMFest #MoreThanRebellion
This year, the exhibition in the Rendezvous With Madness Festival will be presented in-person throughout the festival from October 27 to November 6.
VENUE:
The exhibition is held at Workman Arts Offsite Gallery, Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street, Unit 302, Toronto.
DATES:
October 27 to November 6, 12 – 6 PM.
EXHIBITION OPENING & ARTISTS TALK
October 29, 1-4 PM, Talk at 2:30 PM
After the opening reception, engage with the artists of kind renderings as they delve into their work and practice.
TOURS
Please join us for a guided tour on Thursday, November 3 at 5 PM
ACCESSIBILITY
If in-person access is a barrier, please contact Raine Laurent-Eugene at raine_lauenteguene@workmanarts.com.
Visit the Accessibility page for further festival information and wayfinding.
MY LEFT-HAND IS TALKING AND MY RIGHT-HAND IS NURTURING
MY LEFT-HAND IS TALKING AND MY RIGHT-HAND IS NURTURING
Jessica Field
The collection of poetry and drawings in My left-hand is talking and my right-hand is nurturing, explores the experience of moving past survival mode to let go of false perceptions of self, building the capacity to reclaim a truer sense of identity. It is about the experience of living with inexplicable illness and pain, loss of memory, abuse, love, and loss. It celebrates the beauty of imagination’s power to heal the body, rejuvenate our sense of self, and teach better ways of living.
Everything Jessica Field makes is biased to her lived experience. She creates AI drawings to explore new configurations on what drawing about pure emotion can be about in relation to the greater concept of the human condition. The artist’s drawings act as material that is reinterpreted by an “other”, to compose hundreds of variations as a way of seeing greater possibilities outside the limits of her lived experience. This “other” remains anchored by the artist’s genuine inner emotional life exploring how feelings, unconscious memory and experience is embodied in the gesture of line, in how the exploration into the self can lead to visual expressions that are universally relatable and authentic to lived experience.
The objective of these drawings is to illustrate the complicated space in dealing with the human bias, ignorance, and still manage to connect and understand a divergent perspective. This project shows how empathy and perspective taking bridges these gaps by putting the discussion into the space of universal human experience where we all can relate to each other.
Jessica Field works with installation, video and performance to create AI systems to show the impact of our environment on mental health and how individual histories and temperaments influence the ways that we live our lives. Jessica has exhibited in Sweden, Switzerland, Austria and Canada. She has shown in Electrohype 2008, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Oboro, Optica, the Museum Tingely and at Kunsthaus Graz.
Jessica teaches as a full-time sessional at Toronto Metropolitan University; she received her AOCAD at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, Ontario and her MFA at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec.
Artist website: jessicafield.ca
Credits
Coding Visual Layout Algorithm: Meera Balendran
Book Designer: Lisa Kiss Design
Video and Editing: Empty Cup Media
Images, Poetry, and Artificial Life Algorithms: Jessica Field
Content Warnings
This artwork contains content that may be triggering to some individuals.
Keywords: Anxiety | Grief | Psychiatry | Trauma
#RWMFest #MoreThanRebellion
This year, the exhibition in the Rendezvous With Madness Festival will be presented in-person throughout the festival from October 27 to November 6.
VENUE:
The exhibition is held at Workman Arts Offsite Gallery, Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street, Unit 302, Toronto.
DATES:
October 27 to November 6, 12 – 6 PM.
TOURS
Please join us for a guided tour on Thursday, November 3 at 5 PM
ACCESSIBILITY
If in-person access is a barrier, please contact Raine Laurent-Eugene at raine_lauenteguene@workmanarts.com.
Visit the Accessibility page for further festival information and wayfinding.
ALSO OF INTEREST
AN IN-PERSON EXHIBITION
Kindness is not an act of weakness. It is an act that resists societal expectations of doing and saying nothing. This form of rebellion is evident in this year’s Rendezvous With Madness visual art exhibition whereby the six exhibiting artists address within their work personal experiences that challenge what mental health and wellness looks like. Action is apparent through frameworks of compassion, thought-provoking imagery and considerate storytelling.
IN THE EXHIBITION:
CHAINS & CROWNS
Stéphane Alexis
THE THINGS WE CARRY WITH US
Twinkle Banerjee
LOSING IT
Boozie
MULTITUDE OF FISH - ACENSION TALES
Jenny Chen
MY LEFT-HAND IS TALKING AND
MY RIGHT-HAND IS NURTURING
Jessica Field
CINNAMON
Wen Tong
This year, the exhibition in the Rendezvous With Madness Festival will be presented in-person throughout the festival from October 27 to November 6.
VENUE
Workman Arts Offsite Gallery, Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street, Unit 302, Toronto
GALLERY HOURS
October 27 to November 6, 12 – 6 PM
EXHIBITION OPENING & ARTISTS TALK
October 29, 1-4 PM, Talk at 2:30 PM
After the opening reception, engage with the artists of kind renderings as they delve into their work and practice.
TOURS
Please join us for a guided tour on Thursday, November 3 at 5 PM
ACCESSIBILITY
If in-person access is a barrier, please contact Raine Laurent-Eugene at raine_laurenteugene@workmanarts.com
Visit the Accessibility page for further festival information and wayfinding.
WORKMAN ARTS MEMBER ARTISTS JURY:
Sylvia Frey, Visual Artist, Toronto
Sylvia Frey is a Mad, Queer, BIPOC Visual Artist based in Toronto. Her artwork explores the intersection of Madness, Healing, and Art. She is an interdisciplinary artist, working in the mediums of painting, drawing, writing, and performance. Most currently, she has started to explore film and photography. Her artwork can be found in various private collections in North America and Europe.
Esmond Lee, Visual Artist, Researcher, and Architect, Toronto
Esmond Lee is an artist, researcher, and architect based in Scarborough. Lee explores long-term, intergenerational experiences of migration in peripheral spaces. He holds a Master of Architecture and is pursuing a Doctorate in Critical Human Geography. Lee draws from these seemingly diverging backgrounds to examine identity, belonging, and nuanced cultural and political borders in the built environment. Recent works include installations for Nuit Blanche Toronto, developed during his time as the Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence, and at Malvern Town Centre for CONTACT Photography Festival. Lee’s current projects include two photobooks: ‘Below the City’, recognized by the Burtynsky Grant, and one for Woodside Square Library as the TPL Artist-in-Residence.
Laura Shintani, Visual Artist, Toronto
Laura Shintani is a multimedia multidisciplinary artist who’s curiosity leans into learning, leadership and making friends with the interior monologue of the mind. Having a Japanese-Canadian ancestry, she directs themselves to create work that re-connects a disconnected past to the present. She lives with and embraces neurodiversity.
Her work has been shown at the Royal Ontario Museum, Campbell House Museum, Tangled Arts + Disability and Workman Arts. She helps to facilitate CAMH’s client “Art Cart” through Workman Arts and has received grants from and has been on juries for the Ontario Arts Council. Her most recent skill is trying her hand at taiko drumming!
ALSO OF INTEREST
HOW WE CARED
Saroja Ponnambalam & Rupali Morzaria
How can we create our own architectures of liberation? How we cared (3-channel video installation) is a return to Pandi Kumaraswamy’s archives, reinterpreting the multiple systems of care in his life, over which he had varying levels of autonomy. This expanded schematic of forced care, natural forms of care and creative care. The three sites operate within a fluid and undetermined ecosystem spanning the healthcare/medical world to the spiritual/natural based on family experiences. The schematic attempts to move away from finite solutions to healing medically diagnosed disorders. It prompts viewers to take a step back from conventional architectural practices that use speculative methods to conjure up imaginary built environments for those receiving mental health care.
Saroja Ponnambalam is an Ontario-based filmmaker. Her art practice involves working with a variety of documentary mediums – animation, photographs, family video archives and interviews. Her more recent work explores intergenerational mental health experiences through an intersectional lens.
Rupali Morzaria is a designer and film programmer currently based in Tiohti:áke/ Montreal. She is moved by storytelling and movement—in film, dance, and advertising—and uses design as a way to indulge in this fascination. Her work is based in traditional forms of print media and finding new forms of expression within contemporary media arts.
Keywords: BIPOC Experience | Bipolar Disorder(s)| Depression | Family | Psychiatry
IN-PERSON VIDEO INSTALLATION
CAMH (ground floor window)
1025 Queen Street West
Oct 28 – Nov 7
This piece has an audio component that will need to be accessed through a personal mobile/cellular device onsite. If data is unavailable, access to Wi-Fi is available upon request.
Headphones/earphones are also recommended to bring to experience this installation, though not necessary if mobile/cellular device has a speaker. Workman Arts will have extra headphones available onsite upon request.
If accessing this in-person installation is a barrier and to find out alternate ways to experience this piece, please contact Paulina Wiszowata at paulina_wiszowata@workmanarts.com or at 416-583-4339 ext 6.
WORKSHOP – MOCA PARTNERSHIP:
FROM SCRAPBOOK TO SCREEN
Sun, Nov 7, 1 PM ET
Join artist Saroja Ponnambalam for a virtual workshop that responds to MOCA’s GTA21 exhibition.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Made with funding support from Toronto Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council
ALSO OF INTEREST
GREEN GAZING
Ashley Bowa & Lesley Marshall
Green Gazing is an immersive multimedia installation that includes interactivity, sound, image and biofeedback. In a room of plants, the audience/participants will experience guided movement amidst ambient sound and video rooted in ecological elements. Surround sound and multi walled projections are altered through live manipulation and using bio data gathered from the plants in the room. The ambient electronic sound and videoscape becomes a co-creation between plant, participant and artist.
Funded by the Ontario Arts Council for research and creation in 2018-2019
Ashley Bowa is an emerging filmmaker, media artist, and arts educator based in Toronto. She is also trained as a yoga, pilates, and outdoor education instructor.
Lesley Marshall / LES666 is an award-winning filmmaker and intermedia artist. Projection art by Lesley has been exhibited at the National Art Centre, Montreal Jazz Fest, and Centre PHI.
Keywords: Anxiety | Community
VIRTUAL PATICIPATORY PERFORMANCE
Sun, Nov 7, 2 PM ET
CLOSING DAY
Experience a Green Gazing “Virtual Performance” where the public are invited to engage in a movement class over a virtual meeting space led by Ashley Bowa. Participants can move and see the video response the plants have to the “class”. For this presentation, please create a comfortable space to enjoy the meditation: a comfy chair or a mat on the floor. We invite you to bring nature into your space in whatever way speaks to you (e.g. a houseplant, fallen leaves, a handful of dirt, a bowl of water, etc). You will just need yourself and, if you feel like joining the movements, some space to stretch. A Q&A will follow afterword.
A “Virtual Field Guide” will be available for download to learn more about Green Gazing, investigate indigenous plants of the Toronto area, write down your ecological anxieties, and explore our changing environmental landscape.
Please RSVP below in order to participate in this performance:
Accessibility
If you require ASL interpretation, please reach out to Raine Laurent-Eugene at raine_laurenteugene@workmanarts.com, at least 48 hours before the performance in order for us to ensure that we are able to accommodate. Open captioning will be available.
ALSO OF INTEREST
SZEPTY/WHISPERS: DIALOGUE
Through the voices of various artists, this web-based experience explores the relationship between mental health, language, and lineage. Many awareness campaigns urge us to “break the silence”. But the question of whether – or how – to speak is complicated. Mental health discourses are shaped by particular histories, which reverberate in the present. By juxtaposing multiple perspectives, Szepty/Whispers: Dialogue aims to expand the possibilities for how we communicate about madness, trauma, and neurodivergence. The content is offered in the form of audio files, transcripts, and ASL videos.
The process for Szepty/Whispers: Dialogue began when artist Veronique West invited seven collaborators to make audio recordings in response to open-ended questions about mental health, language and lineage. The collaborators were: mia susan amir, Kagan Goh, Maya Jones, Constantin Lozitsky, Jivesh Parasram, Kendra Place, and Manuel Axel Strain. A digital platform was developed to host the recordings, through collaboration between the Cultch Digital Storytelling Team, Sound Designer David Mesiha, Inclusive Designer JD Derbyshire, Dramaturg Kathleen Flaherty, Deaf Interpreter Ladan Sahraei, Production Coordinator Brian Postalian and Veronique West. Szepty/Whispers: Dialogue was first presented at the 2021 rEvolver Festival.
Consultants: Amy Amantea, June Fukumura, Simran Gill, and MariFer Rios.
For a full list of the Szepty/Whispers: Dialogue team’s biographies, please follow the link below:
CREATIVE TEAM BIOGRAPHIES
Keywords: 2SLGBTQIA+ | BIPOC Experience | Community | Disability | Family
COLLABORATOR ARTISTS TALK
Recording available online Oct 28 – Nov 7
Accessibility
For Artist Talk:
ASL and Closed Captions
For work in exhibition:
ASL, Transcripts, Audio Playback
Content Warnings
Brief references to colonization, war, genocide, child abuse, suicide, and psychiatric hospitalization. Detailed description of ableism, depression, mania, trauma, and a parent’s incarceration. The content does not play automatically and can be paused or skipped.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Digital Platform Realization by: The Cultch Digital Storytelling Team
Developed at Playwrights Theatre Centre as part of the Associates program.
The project has also been supported by:
Upintheair Theatre’s rEvolver Festival
The National Theatre School of Canada’s Art Apart initiative
The parallel in-person performance has been supported by:
the Canada Council for the Arts
the BC Arts Council
the Province of British Columbia
Playwrights Theatre Centre
Rumble Theatre
Progress Lab 1422
Chimerik似不像 Collective
Boca del Lupo and Rice & Beans Theatre’s DBLSPK series
Mentorship with Boca del Lupo’s Artistic Director Sherry J. Yoon
Universal Limited’s Horizontal Help program
The Arts Club Theatre Company’s LEAP Playwriting Intensive
The Cultch Digital Storytelling Team would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts
ALSO OF INTEREST
COAL MINES AND TREE TOPS
Dani Crosby
This body of work titled Coal Mines and Tree Tops follows the main character, a canary through different scenarios meant to represent an autistic experience. These images represent the experiences of the artist, Dani. However, they are meant to be related to by anyone who finds a connection to the work. This body of work discusses Dani’s personal experiences as an autistic person. Dani chose the canary as a visual metaphor for strength, sensitivity, vulnerability, and perceived expendability. Each piece explores a different experience and their creation has helped Dani process these experiences, some for the first time. In this series, Dani visually discusses subject matter such as: positive connection, strengths, relationships, abuse, sensory management and overwhelm, vulnerability to predatory individuals, coping mechanisms, the weight of masking and more.
“I decided to create this work about my experiences because I finally feel safe to do so. I feel it is time to remember out loud, to create visual evidence of past and present challenges and joys associated with my identity. I feel it is time to start sharing my experiences with others. This is a first step in what I hope will be an ongoing discussion in my work. This work serves to benefit me therapeutically and also possibly provide others with understanding and a sense of compassion between myself and those who have had similar experiences.” -Dani Crosby
Dani Crosby is an artist, illustrator, arts educator and community collaborator working and living in central Oshawa. Art has become many things for Dani – a service they offer and an experience to share in academic settings. But before any of these things it serves as a place to put the parts of themselves that have nowhere else to go. Dani recognizes how lucky they are to have this outlet. Dani has been making art since childhood and has never stopped. They began showing, creating illustrations, and teaching visual arts in 2004 and continue to this day.
Keywords: Alcoholism | Anxiety | Depression | Trauma
PANEL:
JOIN THE CONVERSATION: CHANGING THE NARRATIVE
AUTISTIC REELS: RECLAIMING OUR STORIES
Sun, Oct 31, 1 PM ET
Note: The link to the virtual panel is accompanied with the film ticket to “Autistic Reels: Reclaiming Our Stories”.
All films are PWYW
ACCESSIBILITY
