untitled ([not] always like this) is an ongoing artwork created by collecting the artist’s used tissues and dipping them in porcelain, adding worth to an otherwise worthless object. The piece is a response to the society we live in and the importance placed on doing: you must make, you must work, you must grind. Our opinions of ourselves are tied to a quantifiable output rather than how we feel. Instead, we should spend time listening to our bodies, allowing ourselves to take things slow, being intentional with the way we move through the world and giving ourselves permission to heal from the everyday. These tissues hold the memories of going against the grain, of days stuck in sickness and hours lost crying.

Kassandra Walters is a multimedia artist currently practicing in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her art tackles mental health, all that it encompasses and all that encompasses it. With a strong desire to normalize speaking about the unspeakable, Kassandra’s work is honest and raw. She finds solace in the act of making through repetition.

This artist has an item in the RWM swag bag to go with their piece in the exhibition. All ticket holders will be invited to receive RWM swag bags available for free curbside pickup during festival hours.

Images of the untitled ([not] always like this) installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Henry Chang

Into the dark of my skin uses a bird’s eye view to look at all possible perspectives, going beyond the corners of the frame. Mutated and shared bodies visually meet in only one spot, never meeting in a second. Their virtual encounter is a need that satisfies and nourishes the fetal and its obsolete memory. This, unfortunately, is a search for impossible love or the cohabitation of two human beings, which is only possible through a visual juxtaposition. The video medium creates a ground that allows a meeting…impossible bodies, different times and places.

Wieslawa Nowicka explores the branches of visual art and its pluralism. As a result, she has liberated herself from a singularity, permitting her to explore the facets of history, anthropology, and psychoanalysis through the plurality of arts – painting, design, performance and video installations.

CONTENT WARNINGS

Nudity

Images of the Into the dark of my skin installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Henry Chang

Quote from the artist: My work is a reflection of an idiot world run by idiots. A two faced world where if you “appear” good, then you are an upstanding person. Being good is not important, just “appearing” good. A place where you can have a career managing and polishing someone’s public persona to make them appear human when they’re actually reptiles. A place where selfishness rules and the ego dictates action. I’m just here for a limited time and I paint what actually IS.

As a self-taught outsider artist from Toronto, Mitchell’s talent is intuitive and his paintings spring from an authentic need for expression. He discovered that through painting, one can overcome hardships. Working in a variety of media in a self -defined style, his larger works begin as vast, abstracted canvases that act like theatre venues, unveiling narratives of semi-figurative actions, improbable scenarios and inordinate scripts. The works offer the artist’s unique vision of the world through narratives of discontentment and critique, mockery and playfulness or just the simplicity of being.

CONTENT WARNINGS

Violence, Suicide, Anxiety

Please visit our online store to purchase:
Looking Up While Down I
Lamb (Scarecrow Redux)
Phoenix Pt. II

Images of the Scarecrow installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Henry Chang

Executed as a hybrid of sculpture and painting, Alpha Support explores the distance between presumption and certainty when observing the masks that obscure vulnerability. The work examines sub-narratives of anxiety, mental health, relationships, support systems, security and the regeneration of personal power. They encourage that we take more social risks; offer support to those who have fallen, accept support in return, advance beyond projected facades to form deeper connections and sideline insecurities to allow our true selves to surface.

Justin Mencel is a Canadian painter, sculptor, and animator. He uses interpretations of space and time to explore elements of human nature and mental health. His work is sold by Birch Contemporary in Toronto.

To purchase pieces from the Alpha Support series, please contact paulina_wiszowata@workmanarts.com for more info.

Images of the Alpha Support installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Paulina Wiszowata

A colourful video projection onto a soft surface, marks the entrance to the installations – a suggestion that the guest, following the arrows, is entering a carnival fun house. A series of drifter dance documentations using hand motions and body movements to respond to and amplify the patterns of found carpets. Taken in the semi-public passageways of hotels— it explores the interpolation of class and the end of conference culture. An act of resiliency, and taking nothing for granted: watching a sunset from a goldfish bowl, spun on a ride at a carnival, your body stays still below, by becoming a blizzard, in an inside out forest. The project celebrates itinerancy of artists, mad folks and other portable persons.

Grey Muldoon (they/them) is a movement artist working primarily out of Toronto / Tkaronto and Halifax / Kjipuktuk. Grey is disciplined in performance and puppetry arts and makes immersive sculptural installations. A proud Workman Arts member, Grey is interested in close observation, picking things up and carrying them gently, and collaborating with clear-voicing and shout-noisilying. Their experience of rare cognitive relational vibrance, a.k.a. Autism, of survival system sensitivity and subtle time injuries, a.k.a complex PTSD, and the discovery of practical imagination technologies via crisises, a.k.a Madness, allows them to make their work.

Images of the Mad Carpets – Hotel Carpet Dance Projections installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Paulina Wiszowata

“The Collage Party” serves as a platform for people of all backgrounds and artistic levels to come together in a group setting and experience the benefits of exercising their creativity through collage making. “The Collage Party” is accessible to all. With collage, you respond to images, as opposed to starting with a blank page like with painting and drawing. One does not have to know ‘how to draw a straight line’ with collage. The objective with “The Collage Party” is to provide participants with a platform to express themselves and exercise their creativity in a supportive, social environment.

Currently based in Toronto, Paul Butler is a multi-disciplinary artist with an interest in artist- driven projects that challenge current art world models. His practice includes: hosting “The Collage Party” – a touring experimental studio established 1997; directing the operations of “The Other Gallery” – a nomadic commercial gallery focused on overlooked artists’ practices; founding “The Upper Trading Post” – an invitational website that facilitates artist trading and initiating “Reverse Pedagogy” – a traveling, experimental residency. He has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; White Columns, New York City; Creative Growth Art Centre, Oakland and La Maison Rouge, Paris.

The first 25 people who sign up for The Collage Party Zoom event get a collectible Collage Party pencil case with necessary tools to collage with. They are available for free curbside pickup at 651 Dufferin Street between the hours of 10AM-9PM, October 15-25.

Ectoplasm would leak from psychic mediums during photography sessions as a manifestation of the spirit entering the physical world. Expulsion often caused great pain to the psychic mediums creating it. At times the substance was solid and would take the shape of a face or body parts, while at other times it was fluid and contained imagery of spirits or memories. Ectoplasms is a multi-channel video installation that depicts the decay and dripping of photographs. The images initially seem static, but they begin to move around the viewer in ways that defy gravity and orientation. As the viewer tries to place the imagery, they grapple with its disappearance.

Megan Moore is a Montreal-based media artist. Through the manipulation of personal and public archives, her immersive photo and video installations offer reflections on memory, grief and the photographic medium. Megan has exhibited in Canada (FOFA Gallery, Orillia Museum of Art and History, Toronto Media Arts Centre) and Europe (Maison de la Photographie, France, Ulster Museum, UK.) In 2015 she won the Montreal Emerging Photographer award. Megan holds a BFA in Photography from Concordia University and an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Guelph.

Images of the Ectoplasms installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Henry Chang

Post-Part is a room within a room installation that draws on the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Barbara Ehrenreich, the modern collage movement and the RGB innovation of Carnovsky. Post-Part re-imagines a 19th century-style brocade wallpaper pattern incorporating “hidden” illustrations, collage elements and sensor-triggered audio, to bring to life the experience of postpartum mood disorders, including postpartum psychosis. Handheld cellophane filters reveal collage compositions hidden within the wallpaper, and the viewer’s proximity to the wall triggers audio recordings of women’s testimony as well as “cures” prescribed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Longernin Collective formed to create the installation work, Post-Part. Drawing on combined experiences in illustration, animation, writing, film, collage and art therapy work, the members’ individual works have been exhibited, published and screened to audiences locally and globally.

Longernin Collective would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Images of the Post-Part installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Franco Pang & Paulina Wiszowata

ThreadBare is an interactive textile installation that centers the voices of survivors of sexual and domestic violence and abuse. The piece features a collection of poetry and prose submitted by survivors, sewn into clothing and fabric and interwoven within the piece. Audiences are invited to observe and interact with the structure, which responds to movement using lighting and sound. This piece was created to elevate the stories and experiences of survivors through the repurposing of fabric and clothing and aims to foster conversation, reflection and a shared sense of solidarity and hope.

Alexandra Caprara is a multidisciplinary artist and writer from Toronto. She is a graduate from York University’s Theatre and Creative Writing programs and has worked internationally as a designer and director.

Raechel E. Kula is a multi-disciplinary artist with a background in software and information technology. She brings a systems approach to the dramaturgy and design of interactive and performative works for live audiences.

CONTENT WARNINGS

Rape and/or Sexual Violence

Images of the ThreadBare installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Henry Chang

Intolerance of Uncertainty is an installation that combines a single-channel video, Instruction to the Ball Measure and the Ball in a fictional setting that resembles the interior of a psychiatrist therapy session. This participatory work asks an audience to sit as “a testee” to assess the levels of their own anxiety. The audience can grab the red ball placed on the table, which also appears in the video, and follow each gesture of the hands interacting with the ball. It is to measure an individual’s anxiety, especially their intolerance of uncertain future events. The Ball physically channels its participant to the imagined realm of psychiatry, unfolding in the video through its tactility.

Ivetta Sunyoung Kang is an interdisciplinary visual and video artist and writer, currently based in Montreal. She studied film directing in South Korea and earned her MFA in Film Production at Concordia University. She has presented short films and videos at film festivals and galleries around the world, including in South Korea, Canada, Germany and the United States. In 2016, Kang was shortlisted for the Simon Blais Award in Canada. She recently published a poetry book entitled Absent Seats and is a co-founding member of the artist collective Quite Ourselves, and the A/V duo CCVX?.

This artist has interactive materials which will be provided in the first 50 RWM swag bag in order to interact with their virtual content. All ticket holders will be invited to receive RWM swag bags available for free curbside pickup during festival hours.

To purchase this work, please visit our online store. To purchase only the interactive item, click here.

Images of the Intolerance of Uncertainty installation in Re:Building Resilience:

Photos by Henry Chang