Artists

中文版本

A queer afro-indigenous descendant, Gina Goico is multidisciplinary artist, educator and self-proclaimed necia. Through their work, she navigates their identity and the spaces where they exist in the Dominican Republic and the United States. Through their career, they have come to create a diverse body of work that ranges from embroidery to installations, ink drawings and performance. Goico also facilitates spaces for temporary communities and dialogues around healing in the current status quo. Goico was a Van Lier Fellow and artist in residence with Smack Mellon. They also participated in AIM fellowship at The Bronx Museum of the Arts; The Laundromat Project, Kelly Street Resident Artist, among others. They have exhibited in the US and the Dominican Republic, and continue to support actively socio-political initiatives in the island and in diaspora. Goico holds an AAS in Fine Arts and Illustration from Altos de Chavon the School of Design in the Dominican Republic and a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons. They are expected to graduate with a MA in Arts Politics from NYU in 2021.

Artist Website: ginagoico.com
Artist Instagram: instagram.com/ginamgoico
Artist Twitter: twitter.com/ginagoico

Presentation Description

Gina Goico will speak to community building in (physical) isolation and how this can anchor folks who feel either trapped, alone, and not-represented, as well as transcending the limiting belief that the haptic can only happen IRL. Goico will interrogate the limits and possibilities of touch in the zoomverse, contemplating and moving through how BIPOC+QT2S folks must sell their data and safety for survival. Goico will ask: how are these connections made and facilitated?

Gina Goico will be speaking at Visionary Organizing on Social Media: The Limits and Possibilities of Touch, Tenderness and Timelessness on May 20, 2021, from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM PDT.

中文版本

Romi Kim is a second-generation Korean Canadian genderfluid interdisciplinary artist living and studying on unceded Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh territories. They often work within themes of gender performativity, intergenerational effects of colonialism, memory and emotions. Their video work has screened in England, the UK, Seoul, South Korea and various parts of Canada. They are also known as Skim in drag and are a part of the House of Rice, an all-Asian drag house in Vancouver. Kim has performed in Seoul, South Korea, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam and various cities in Canada. They have led various workshops in communities including a “Racialization, Stereotypes and Allyship” workshop at the Caetani Cultural Centre in Vernon, BC and a “Youth Drag” workshop series in Vancouver, BC with Artstarts in schools. Kim has graduated from the University of Victoria in Visual Arts and Gender Studies and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia.

Artist Website: romikim.com
Artist Instagram: instagram.com/skimisme

Romi Kim will be speaking at Workroom: Drag, gender, and the challenges of being seen in digital and analog spaces on May 7, 2021, from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM PDT.

中文版本

Danielle Mackenzie Long, a queer emerging contemporary dance artist and self-taught filmmaker, resides on the stolen and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver). Captivated by the ideas of childhood memories, her upbringing in the Okanagan has greatly contributed to her fascination with exploring identity and perception of self. She currently studies at Modus Operandi Contemporary Dance Program under the direction of Tiffany Tregarthen, David Raymond, and Kate Franklin, where she will graduate in June 2021. As an independent artist, Danielle frequently collaborates with Oksana Augustine. Her past film works have been presented at Screen:Moves (Toronto), in which she had the privilege of being a commissioned artist, as well as F-O-R-M (Vancouver). 

Artist Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/daniellemckz

Artist Statement

Movement expressed through film allows me to communicate most freely and expand my self-awareness, while exploring my thoughts and questioning my reality. My work reflects on the past and utilizes my recalling of it to guide me through the present. In order to understand myself I nostalgically reflect on my childhood. I draw from the memories of my youth, as well as fantastical images to help transport me to the various emotional worlds and physical territories I desire to escape to. How do we allow ourselves to be seen? How does identity change in relation to time? How is the perception of self manipulated by society? Observation pushes me to discover gaps that need investigation and areas I wish to explore in more depth. I am influenced by my appreciation of the mundane physical moments I witness and experience in my everyday world. The ability film has of capturing those moments and reshaping them by manipulating time and perspective fascinates me. Pursuing the marriage of movement and film inside traditional and nontraditional formats informs every aspect of who I am and, I believe, who I will become.

Experience Danielle Mackenzie Long’s Project (un)important, today this is.

中文版本

Mickey L.D. Morgan is a TransLesbian Jewish bookmaker and social practice artist who works primarily with storytelling, translation, diaspora, anti-racism, de-colonialism, queering, cripping, and altogether reimagining the ways we hold space with one another. They hold a bachelor’s degree from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (ECUAD), with a major in Visual Arts and a minor in Social Practice and Community Engagement. They have been in several group shows focussing on visual arts, and recently finished a fellowship with Patio Press and ECUAD printing covers for the second edition of their anthology ​DOYKAYIT. In current community work, they are working on the project ​Mapping East Van. They also had the pleasure of being one of many advocating to create and becoming a transcriber for the project ​On the Record: The BC Jewish Queer and Trans Oral History Project​, part of a partnership with local organizations Jewish Queer and Trans Vancouver (JQT) and the Jewish Museum and Archive of BC (JMABC). 

Artist Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mickeym00rgan/

Artist Statement

Practicing the oral-written paired tradition of Judaism with an emphasis on translating for multiple points of access, ​Negev Varod/Seeing Pink​ is a visual-scroll-format and audio-collage thought-stream poem focussed on pink-washing, the act of propagandizing 2LGBTQ+ acceptance in order to obscure systemic violence. The settler-colonial metropolis of “Vancouver,” the location of the artist and Digital Carnival Z, is also guilty of pink-washing. Mickey considers it their responsibility to publicly and explicitly critique what tokenized acceptance of white Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and sometimes Trans folx does in violence to their racialized siblings both here and far beyond colonial borders. Though since the construction of race all Jews have been and often continue to be unequivocally racialized, and branded as Semitic and other, upon the diaspora of the holocaust light-skinned Jews, mostly Ashkenazis, have assimilated as white people in this New World. As a binary oppositional result of this colonial mindset, Mizrahi Jews, dark-skinned and Black Jews, Palestinians and other Arabic speakers are racialized and coloured. This analysis charges the colour symbolism that is woven into the artist’s personal experience and is designed to play off of readers’/viewers’/listeners’ deep-seated understandings of these themes as colonized and/or colonizers.

In this poem, the idea and function of 2LGBTQ+ in racist and zionist existence is questioned, mapped, translated, decolonized, and re-imagined in relation to embodying an understanding of Home that is only known in Western-colonial diaspora. The necessary heart of this work is intersectional agitation and hope for Home. In the way that Negev ​Varod/Seeing Pink​ is true to the artist’s understanding of these constructs in cis-hetero-colonial-patriarchy, readers, viewers, and listeners are too able to experience Mickey’s attempt to locate using the colours and rhetoric in their vocabulary. A vital result is their imagining new colours, ideas, and understandings in coalition with those who are also fighting for an alternative way to be.

Experience Mickey L.D. Morgan’s Project Negev Varod/Seeing Pink

中文版本

Kofi Oduro/Illestpreacha is a creative coder, creative engineer, thinker, poet, and performer based in Montreal. Kofi describes his art practices as “an observation of the world around us that I then put into artworks for others to relate to or disagree with. Through Videography, Poetry and Creative Coding, I try to highlight the realms of the human performance and the human mind in different scenarios. These situations which we face in our everyday lives can be described as social, internal, or even biological. Adding music and visuals often helps to perceive one’s own feelings, and to highlight the different subtleties that make us human. With a dose of technology, there is an endless range of progress in the human creative endeavours.”

Artist Website: kofioduro.myportfolio.com
Artist Instagram: instagram.com/illestpreacha
Artist Twitter: twitter.com/illestpreacha

Artist Statement

Digital Exploration of the Expansion is a presentation and performance of a speculative fiction through live coding[1], creative coding, and other mediums that explores how the body can be reimagined. A speculative scientific report [2] made me think of producing a work that challenges the notion of what humanity is based on. What biology, what culture, what geology will occur if we thought differently? Thinking into the digital nature of my work, what if this realm was also controlled by how we used technology and how it uses us. By taking on a digital exploration that expands what is considered “body culture,” maybe we can engage in dialogues that expand past our normal range of ideologies. By adding sound and poetry, we will be adding a multisensory experience that engages the various senses[3], an integral part of our bodies that have to be included in any exploration of the body. 

[1Livecoding: “Improvisational Code” or “on the fly code”, where the sounds, visual and/or other forms of interactivity/creativity is done through code. In this medium, the code is usually seen by the audience because that is the live component. This can be considered a subset of creative coding, where the same approach is taken but not necessarily in real time.

[2] Bacaksizlar, Gizem, Stefani A. Crabtree, Joshua Garland, N. Grefenstette, Albert B. Kao, D. Kinney, Artemy Kolchinsky, T. Marghetis, M. Price, Maria Riolo, Hajime Shimao, Ashley I. Teufel, Tamara van der Does and V. Yang. “Greetings from a Triparental Planet.” arXiv: Populations and Evolution (2020).  

[3] Due to the speculative nature of this piece, the term “senses” ranges beyond the traditional five senses and may include senses such as Vestibular (Movement), Proprioception (Body Position), and “the feeling senses: sensitivity to gravity, air and wind pressure, and motion.” For more information, visit https://www.sensorytrust.org.uk/blog/how-many-senses-do-we-have.

Experience Kofi Oduro/Illestpreacha’s Project Digital Exploration of the Expansion