Mayumi Lashbrook
Mayumi Lashbrook is a Japanese Canadian settler in Tkaronto who seeks to expose, challenge, and rectify systems of oppression by creating innovative, introspective and inclusive dance theatre. She sees embodiment as at the crux of world making, providing alternatives to unconscious thought, consumerism and oppression. Her primary practices span performance, choreography, education and Artistic Direction. Mayumi is the Co-Artistic Director of Hamilton based Aeris Körper, a facilitator of Dreamwalker Dance’s Conscious Bodies methodology, and the Communications and Outreach Manager for the Canadian Dance Assembly. She is currently studying Butoh and composition in a year-long mentorship with renowned Japanese Canadian dance-theatre artist Denise Fujiwara. Mayumi’s different roles are all-encompassing and overlapping. This enables her to approach projects and communities with openness, curiosity, excellence, and with deep satisfaction.
Jill Letten
Climate change has presented humanity with the most profound and urgent challenge ever faced. Reflecting upon my understanding of rising environmental concerns, I use my practice to combine art with research to address how we interact and perceive the natural world.
Shannon Taylor-Jones
Shannon Taylor-Jones is an interdisciplinary artist working in Toronto and London, Ontario with a BFA from OCAD University. She is a current resident artist at Good Sport, an art collective, gallery, and studio space in London, Ontario. She works with painting, textile, and organic matter; her creative practice is an exploration into the interdependencies of life, decay, and grief as biological and creative processes. Existing as the layered (un)domestication of interwoven life forms and as fragments of larger processes. Through collaborations of care, the inevitability of transience remains; detritus as the answer to one question and the ask of another.
Arabella Young (she/her)
Arabella Young is an emerging Canadian painter who looks for the essence and atmosphere of the natural West Coast. Arabella’s contemplative landscapes evoke wonder and curiosity. Through expressive colour and elusive shapes, Arabella depicts the mystery within a forest and the curious space where sea meets land. Low lying fog between thick emerald greenery, light and dark that dance in water reflections, elements of Arabella’s paintings come together to capture the West Coast ethos.
ee portal
In 2011, ee portal (Elyse & Emilio Portal) initiated their collaboration with the multidisciplinary work, advanced life support unit, at the University of Victoria. As part of the installation the duo deconstructed the space, removing the gallery door to project shadow, a video that documents the movements of a woman (and friend) who was told she would never move her body again after a severe spinal cord injury. In the face of great adversity, she slowly regained access to her body through a movement therapy based on physics and somatic studies, called Feldenkrais. Founder, Moshe Feldenkrais said, “We move according to our perceived self-image.”
Fairything
Alex Masse, AKA Fairything, is a writer, musician, and student residing in what is colonially known as Surrey, BC. The arts are a longtime love of theirs, and they’ve recently begun intertwining it with their climate activism. They’re an alumnus of multiple programs from The Only Animal Theatre, including Art of Resistance and Greenhouse, as well as participating in other programs, such as Vines Art Festival’s Emerging Creatives. They’ve designed posters for protests, sculpted soundscapes for earthy installations, written many a poem about complicated relationships had with the land, and over their life pressed more flowers than they can count.
Remy Bernier
Remy Bernier started a new life in 2006. This was the result of a terrible event that would change his life forever: Remy had suffered a stroke. Prior to his accident, he was thriving as an aspiring mountain guide. Now, the right hemisphere of Remy’s body is paralyzed, and his coordination, speech and vision have been affected. He will be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He continues to raise the bar in everything he does and has no plans to stop!
Donna Grantis
#culturevspolicy is a climate project conceptualized by musician Donna Grantis at 418 ppm.
“My vision is to create music inspired by — and featuring — conversations with climate scientists, activists, Indigenous leaders, policymakers, researchers and sociologists about Earth’s systems and how people relate to the climate emergency. I will explore the connection between culture and policy, in relation to human impacts on our planet, and present ideas as musical works.” — Donna Grantis
Elyse Portal
In the midst of the 6th Mass Extinction, I take my lead from other-than-humans, usually in the form of urban ecologies, plants and stones. There is some kind of magnetic feeling that draws me towards these beings. I sit and listen. I try to offer them something. My art shares perceptions and feelings of these exchanges, as a kind of antidote to separation.
Leslea Kroll
Leslea Kroll’s play Swallow featured two characters: sisters Jules and Karly, climate migrants and keepers of a tailings pond.
