Afternoon Tea

Fait Maison

Initiated by Thomas Grondin in his home in Gatineau, Quebec in August 2005, Fait Maison was a party, a laboratory and a performance space. On selected evenings, a few times a year, an audience was invited to a party in which performances happened at different moments and spaces in and around Grondin’s home from the garden, to the kitchen, to the basement and even the bathroom. Over the years, Fait Maison incorporated a range of performance artists, both emerging and established, as well as local, national and international and has had events at various alternative locations including private houses, an exhibition at G101 in 2009 and most recently at L’Imagier in Aylmer in 2017.

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Thomas Grondin

Since 1998, Thomas Grondin has curated several projects with AXENÉO7 artist-run centre (Gatineau), including Kapow : une convention de superhéros (2010), L'échelle de la langue (2002), Expérience trouble (2001), Le millénaire est mort, il faut le manger (2000), and Adopter un artiste (1998).

He has participated as an artist in numerous solo and group exhibitions, video screenings, events and performances in Quebec at the UQO gallery (Gatineau), the Art-Image gallery of the Maison de la culture de Gatineau, Dare-Dare centre (Montreal), Action-Art-Actuel (Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu), 3e impérial, centre d'essai en art actuel (Granby), AXENÉO7 (Gatineau), Centre des arts actuels Skol (Montreal), Musée contemporain des Laurentides (Saint-Jérôme), Centre de production DAÏMÔN (Gatineau), as well as in Ottawa, Ontario at Gallery 101, Saw Gallery and University of Ottawa.

As an active member of the visual arts community, Thomas Grondin founded and directed Fait Maison, a project dedicated to performance art and has served on the Board and programming committee of several cultural organizations, including AXENÉO7, 3e impérial, centre d'essai en art actuel, the Regroupement des centres d'artistes autogérés du Québec (RCAAQ), La Filature and Gallery 101.

He teaches art history at Cégep de l'Outaouais and Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO) and holds a bachelor's degree in visual arts from UQO and a master's degree in art history from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM). Thomas Grondin lives and works between Gatineau and Montreal.

Website

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Anna Khimasia

Anna Khimasia is an independent curator currently based in New York City. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University where she was a contract instructor in the art history department until 2018.

Often working collaboratively, Anna’s projects focus on under-represented bodies and voices, interrogating the politics of space, race and gender. Recent curatorial projects include: Live in Palestine which she co-curated with Rehab Nazzal and Stefan St-Laurent and was presented at AXENEO7, A Space Gallery and Montréal, arts interculturels (MAI); Sex Life, as Assistant Curator with Jason St-Laurent, including the co-curating and editing of the accompanying HB Magazine; and Open Space Labs (OSL), a research and performance-based residence initiative with Carleton University Art Gallery. OSL01: Gita Hashemi was the recipient of an Ontario Association of Art Galleries Exhibition of the Year Award — monograph under 20K. During the pandemic, she has moderated panels for The Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC), Fait Maison and Pleasure Dome in Toronto.

Since completing her doctoral degree, she has participated in residencies at the MAI, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, MCA Chicago, and the Robert Rauschenberg Residency where she worked on a new performance project with Chicago artist Barak adé Soleil. Last summer, she had the privilege of attending the Critical Theory Workshop led by Gabriel Rockhill.

Anna has published in Canadian Art, BlackFlash, C Magazine, ETC Media, Image[&]Narrative and written numerous exhibition essays and texts. She is currently working on a book-length writing project about trespassing in performance and the politics of belonging.

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Dayna Danger

Dayna Danger is a visual artist who claims space with her human scale work to challenge perceptions of power, representation and sexuality.

Dayna Danger is a 2Spirit/Queer, Metis/Saulteaux/Polish visual artist raised in so called Winnipeg, MB. Using photography, sculpture, performance and video, Dayna Danger‘s practice questions the line between empowerment and objectification by claiming space with her larger than life scale work.

Danger’s current use of BDSM and beading leather fetish masks explores the complicated dynamics of sexuality, gender, and power in a consensual and feminist manner. Danger is currently based in Tio'tia:ke.

Danger holds a MFA in Photography from Concordia University. Danger has exhibited her work in Santa Fe, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Montreal, Peterborough, North Bay, Vancouver, Edmonton and Banff. Danger currently serves as a board member for the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective (ACC/CCA).

Site web

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Don Kwan

A third-generation Chinese Canadian, Don Kwan turns to his own experiences and challenges of being a gay, East Asian artist as a way to ground in broader conversations about identity, representations, and intergenerational memory-making in the diaspora.

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Michelle Lacombe

Since obtaining her BFA from Concordia University in 2006, Michelle Lacombe (Montreal, QC) has developed a practice rooted in performance, mark-making, and conceptual body art. Her actions, often short in duration, use simple gestures, minimal materials, and strategies of mild discomfort to explore the evocative quality of the unspectacular, as well as to complicate the reading of the white cis-gendered female body (her body) and the visual histories and the cultural constructions that surround it. Recipient of the 2015 Bourse Plein Sud, her work has been shown in the context of numerous D.I.Y events, as well as in performance events, exhibitions, and colloquiums presented in Canada and abroad. Her artistic practice is paralleled by a commitment to supporting difficult and undisciplined forms of art making. She is currently the director of VIVA! Art Action, an international performance art biennial.

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Kama La Mackerel

Kama La Mackerel is an award-winning Mauritian-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, educator, writer, curator and literary translator who works within and across performance, photography, installations, textiles, digital art and literature. Kama’s work is grounded in the exploration of justice, love, healing, decoloniality, hybridity, cosmopolitanism, ancestral healing and self- and collective-empowerment. They believe that aesthetic practices have the power to build resilience and act as resistance to the status quo, thereby enacting an anticolonial praxis through cultural production.

They are the author ZOM-FAM (Metonymy Press) which was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, a Globe and Mail Best Debut, and was a finalist for the QWF Concordia University First Book Award and the Writers' Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize. World Literature Today called ZOM-FAM "a milestone in Mauritian literature."

Kama has exhibited, performed and lectured internationally and their writing in English, French and Kreol has appeared in publications both online and in print. In 2021, Kama was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Joseph S. Stauffer Prize for emerging and mid-career artists in Visual Arts.

In 2021, Kama presented their new multimedia exhibition Queering the Is/land Body at La Galerie de l’UQAM as part of MOMENTA, Biennale de l’image.

Site web

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Stefan St-Laurent

Stefan St-Laurent, a multidisciplinary artist and independent curator, was born in Moncton, New-Brunswick, and lives and works in Gatineau, Québec. He holds a Bachelor of Media Arts from Ryerson University in Toronto. His performance and video work has been presented in numerous galleries and institutions, including the Centre national de la photographie in Paris, Edsvik Konst och Kultur in Sollentuna (Sweden), YYZ in Toronto, Ottawa Art Gallery, Western Front in Vancouver, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. He has been a curator and programmer for a number of artistic organisations and festivals, including the Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, Lux Centre in London, the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montréal, Festival international du cinéma francophone in Acadie in Moncton, and Pleasure Dome in Toronto. He was the guest curator for the Biennale d’art performatif de Rouyn-Noranda in 2008, and for the 28th and 29th Symposium international d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul in 2010 and 2011, in Quebec. From 2002 to 2011, he was curator of Galerie SAW Gallery and from 2014 to 2019, Director of AXENÉO7 in Gatineau. He has been an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Ottawa University since 2011.