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.
Marie LeBlanc is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist. Through photography, multimedia projection, short film, performance and wordsmithing she explores themes related to landscape, isolation, beauty, health and nature. Capturing faces, shapes, shadows and reflections with digital and on-camera effects, often superimposing her own reflection, she seeks to embrace the present moment and the ethereal world around her.
Saint John-based creator, Danielle Manuel, is creating and learning in the unceded and traditional territory of the Wolastoqiyik and Mi’kmaw Nations. Her self-taught work holds many forms including digital art, mixed media, acrylic painting, felting, photography, and most recently, spore printing. She has experience in designing and creating art for an annual publication of poetry, designing album covers, large scale acrylic painting, murals, custom portraits, and other adventures.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.”
The Climate Art Web (CAW-WAC) is a grassroots network that brings together climate artists living in northern Turtle Island (Canada).
