34.3 Contributor Bios

07 Jul 2011, Posted in Blog, 0 Comments

The contributors to issue 34.3 are really a stellar group, and many of them have been longtime writers for FUSE. Catch up with some of them here.

Karl Beveridge

Karl Beveridge lives and works in Toronto. Together with Carole Condé he has collaborated with various trade unions and community organizations in the production of his art work over the past 35 years.

Condé and Beveridge have exhibited across Canada and internationally in both trade union movement and galleries and museums. Recently their work has been included in exhibitions at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland, the Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati, Ohio, and a survey exhibition at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario

Condé and Beveridge are active in several arts and labour projects including the Ontario Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton, Ontario.

Ayanna Black

Poet, activist, mentor, publicist, arts administrator — Ayanna Black made a major difference to Toronto as a place of culture and social justice. Born in Jamaica, she moved to London, England where she trained in a psychiatric hospital. She then came to Canada and turned her energy to many creative actions.

Black was co-founder of Tiger Lily, the pioneer literary journal for women of colour, and the Canadian Artists Network: Black Arts in Action (CANBIA). She was programming chair of Toronto Arts Against Apartheid, and led the effort to bring Bishop Tutu here. Ayanna wrote three books of poetry — No Contingencies (1986), Linked Alive (1990), and Invoking the Spirits (2009) — and edited three influential anthologies of African Canadian writing. She was a member of the boards of many arts and community organizations, including The Women’s Art Resource Centre.

Susan Crean

Susan Crean is a writer, cultural critic, and activist whose books include Who’s Afraid of Canadian Culture? (1976), and Grace Hartman — a Woman for her Time (1995).  Her 2001 book, The Laughing One — a Journey to Emily Carr, which examines the legacy of Carr, was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Literature in 2001 and won the Hubert Evans Prize for non-Fiction in British Columbia.  She is currently working on a book about Toronto.  Crean is also a former Chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada, and founding co-chair of the Creators’ Rights Alliance / Alliance pour les droits des créateurs. Check out her website at www.whatistoronto.ca.

Sara Diamond

Dr. Sara Diamond is the President of OCAD University, Canada’s “university of the imagination”. She holds a PhD in Computer Science and degrees in new media theory and practice, social history and communications. While retaining OCAD University’s traditional strengths in art and design, she has led her university to become a leader in digital media and design research and curriculum through the Digital Futures Initiative, towards new research in Inclusive Design and health and design, as well as in sustainable technologies and design. She has also led OCAD University to begin the unique Aboriginal Visual Culture Program.

Bruce Eves

Bruce Eves: “As the former chief archivist with the International Gay History Archive – now part of the Rare Books and Manuscript division of the New York Public Library – I was impacted directly in my understanding of the broader context of our political, social, and cultural lives. This provided me with a wealth of raw data that fed directly into my art practice. But rather than take the standard trip down memory lane into the suck-and-fuck paradigm I began cherry-picking at will from mutually exclusive sources — the morning headlines, the official record of 20th century art, the signs and signifiers of the gay male underground – which allowed me to explore the spaces between these charged relationships. As an amalgam of Aubrey Beardsley and Johnny Rotten, I’ve positioned myself as an ironic spectator.  The proposition explored in much of my work is that it should be possible to be simultaneously hot and sweaty and critical and detached. It is desirable — even exhilarating — to question the givens of our cultural baggage while at the same time allowing ourselves to be wrapped in its brawny arms.”

Rachel Gorman

Rachel Gorman is a performance artist working in dance theatre, video, and installation, and is Assistant Professor in the Graduate Program in Critical Disability Studies at York University. Since receiving her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2005 with a dissertation on disability culture and class consciousness, Gorman has held a Lectureship at the University of Toronto; Research Fellowships at Manchester Metropolitan University and the University at Buffalo (SUNY); and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship exploring disability politics and national liberation struggles. Rachel is a member of the board and programming committee of A Space Gallery, and worked on the editorial committee of Fuse Magazine from 2007-2009. Rachel has been active in the Disability Arts and Culture movement since 1999.

Candice Hopkins

Candice Hopkins is the Elizabeth Simonfay Curatorial Resident, Indigenous Art, at the National Gallery of Canada and the former director and curator of exhibitions at the Western Front, Vancouver. Her recent writing is published in The Fillip Review, Canadian Art Online and The Happy Hypocrite. Hopkins was co-curator with Lee-Ann Martin, Steve Loft, and Jenny Western of the multi-venue exhibition Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, which opened in January 2011 in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Greg Staats

Greg Staats (b. Ohsweken, Ontario) is a photographer and video artist whose works combine mnemonics and the natural world via body as repository, the archive and condolence; a Haudenosaunee restorative aesthetic. Staats’ solo exhibitions have included: Articule, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Mercer Union, Gallery TPW, and McMaster Museum of Art 2011. Group exhibitions include: Ottawa Art Gallery, CMCP, and the NGC. Staats was faculty for 2 Aboriginal Visual Arts Thematic Residencies 2009/2010 at the Banff Centre. He lives and works in Toronto. http://www.re-title.com/artists/greg-staats.asp

Kathryn Walter

Kathryn Walter grew up in Toronto and has lived and worked in Vancouver and Montreal, maintaining a studio practice that intersects visual art, material culture and the built environment. She returned to Toronto and in 2000 started a company called FELT, a laboratory through which she explores the material and history of modern industrial felt through exhibitions, research, architectural commissions and a product line. <http://www.feltstudio.com> .

She has created feature wall installations for residential and commercial buildings in Canada and the US.  Her project “Unlimited Growth”, installed in 1990, remains on the face of the building at 555 Hamilton Street in Vancouver (currently the OR Gallery, formerly the Contemporary Art Gallery of Vancouver).