Juliet Palmer’s music has come to life under a highway off-ramp, in a swimming pool, in the plastic flotsam of a remote beach and in concert halls across North America, Europe and Oceania. Originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, Juliet makes her home in Toronto where she is artistic director of Urbanvessel, a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration.
Urbanvessel creates new performance works through interdisciplinary collaboration. Rooted in music and sound, the power of the human voice is at the heart of our creative process. Led by Artistic Director Juliet Palmer and drawing upon the diverse talents of our collaborators, Urbanvessel fuses sound, music, text, imagery and movement. Urbanvessel shares knowledge through our educational programmes and community outreach activities.
Aeris Körper is a professional dance company based in Hamilton. We bring people into their bodies through movement, awareness of sensations and connection to self and others with the aim of fostering resilience, understanding and empathy. This allows us to lean into blocks of self-expression which ultimately leads to self empowerment, community building and social change.
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.
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.”
TRAction is a dynamic collective of interdisciplinary artists who actively and publicly address issues of climate justice.
Although the projects are primarily facilitated and organized by Melanie Kloetzel and Kevin Jesuino, TRAction expands and contracts to include other interested allies, professionals, scientists, volunteers and artists who work at the intersection of art-making and climate change. Using diverse methods of artistic creation, TRAction addresses complex environmental issues and advocates for climate justice for all humans and species.
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.
Alison Beaumont is a multidisciplinary artist living on the traditional and unceded territory of the Sylix Okanagan peoples, her work is primarily focussed on climate awareness and her own experiences of connection to land and ecological sorrow. She hopes through art that she can inspire changes in our daily existence to avert the climate crisis. We all have a part to play, no matter how small. Incrementally changes build, if we preserve our forests and old growth, biodiversity can rebuild, if we consciously consume less, our resources and water can flourish again. Each small act builds and grows, the Earth will survive without us, but we cannot survive if we do not change our actions and ways of knowing and doing.
Gary Crosby is a very prolific artist. When you think about that statement, it would explain a lot about Gary. He likes to think of himself as an artist on a lifelong quest. To create a piece of artwork that needs no explanation. It is a work of art that grabs you and holds you in its tight grip, and you have a profound understanding of what is meant by the art. Climate Change is the largest globally destructive issue that the world is facing today. He is using his art to bring about change and provide an understanding of the issues of Climate Change. We are all in this together! We must all work together to heal the world.
Jennifer Ireland is a research based, multi-medium artist, working to question with wonder; ways of knowing and ways of being in land. Ireland strives to make work that is mindful of situation, site, context, and access. This ethic is found in her work through materials and methods which are often light, sustainable and provisional. Ireland’s practice ranges from drawing, photography, video, and sculpture, to site-sensitive installation and performance. Each of their works strives to operate as speculative wayfinding in this Anthropocenic time.
The Climate Art Web (CAW-WAC) is a grassroots network that brings together climate artists living in northern Turtle Island (Canada).
