De l’autre côté du miroir / Through the looking glass

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, center 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.

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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 with 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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Francisco González-Rosas

Currently based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Francisco González-Rosas is a performance and new media artist born in Chile. He holds a BA in Acting from Finis Terrae University, Santiago, Chile and a Master in Fine Arts in Intermedia, from Concordia University, Montreal. His work has been exhibited in Chile, China, Italy, UK, Poland, Czech Republic and the US. Francisco’s practice integrates performative strategies in the production of sound and image, performance, video and installation. Questions of representation, gender, race, sexuality, digital culture, image and technology are at the core of his work.

González-Rosas’ first solo show Techniques of the Narcissist was presented as a multichannel video installation at Elektra Gallery, Montreal, in 2019. The video performance piece Dating for Export was recently acquired by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal for its permanent collection. It was also presented at Poland (Inout Festival, Gdansk, 2019), Italy (Group exhibition Una Selfie Va Sepellira?, Rome, 2017) and at the show in præsentia/in absentia special program of Festival international du film sur l’art (FIFA) and MOMENTA Biennale, at Dazibao, Montreal, 2019. In 2017 he was part of the group show Ignition 13, at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, Montreal, with the video installation Audiovisual Jungle: Latino Bodies & Exportation Fruit. During 2014 and 2015 Francisco worked between Canada and Chile creating the audiovisual performance Adolescent Sex, presented in Videofag, Toronto, Rats9 Gallery, Montreal, Centro Cultural de España, Santiago and at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo of Valdivia, Chile. His first works as a theatre and performance director, Proyecto Él and Proyecto Ella, were presented in different centres and events in Santiago and the short film Los Tres Idiotas was exhibited in Beijing, China, as part of the Love Queer Cinema Week, in October of 2015.

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David Khang

David Khang is a visual and performance artist whose practice is informed by education in psychology, theology, dentistry, and law. Khang selectively imbeds these disciplinary codes into his work, to compose interdisciplinary languages that are communicated in visual, textual, and spoken forms. Through performance, Khang embodies these languages to interrogate socially constructed intersections — of gender, race, and interspecies relations. By strategically employing non-native languages and code switching, Khang produces divergent and dissonant readings that re-imagine the poetic and the political.

Khang received his BSc and DDS from the University of Toronto, BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, and MFA from UC Irvine, where he was the recipient of the University of California Chancellor’s Fellowship. Khang concurrently completed UCI’s Critical Theory Emphasis, for which he worked with Jacques Derrida, Fred Moten, and Gayatri Spivak. In 2004, Khang’s thesis was chosen to represent UC Irvine at the Distinguished Master’s Thesis Writing Competition (USA). Khang was a 2007 recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art Award (Brooklyn, NY), and 2010 artist–in–residence at SymbioticA Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts (Perth, Australia). Khang has taught at Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2005–2016), and Goddard College (2009-2010). Khang was born in Seoul, grew up in Toronto, and currently resides in Vancouver, where he divides his time between art practice, dentistry, and finishing his JD at the Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia (2021).

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Laura Paolini

Laura Paolini (she/her) is an artist from Tkaronto/Toronto, currently living in Ottawa. Her artwork is primarily conceptual and manifests through installations, videos, and performances, often unfolding where these forms meet, merge and collapse. Paolini’s work strives to create hybrid spaces, which point to the larger social matrices that are relational and informed by recent political and social history.

She has performed at art-based events and festivals, and has exhibited in various Canadian galleries including Hamilton Artists Inc, Xpace Cultural Centre and Art Mûr during the 17th edition of Fresh Paint/New Construction 2021.

Paolini earned an MFA from the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa. She was awarded the 2021 Henry Mandelbaum Graduate Fellowship for Excellence in Social Sciences, Humanities, or Arts, from The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA). Her writing and critical thoughts on art and art-making have appeared in Fuse, Musicworks, Les Fleurs du Mal, and ART International. Her video works are available through Vtape in Toronto.

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Theo Pelmus

Theo Pelmus is a multi-disciplinary artist working in visual and performance art, photography and video. He has presented his work nationally (Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal) and internationally (Denmark, New Zeeland, NY. USA, Romania, Bogota, Colombia). Theo has performed with his collaborator and partner, Kris Snowbird, under the collective name PelmuSnowbird at each of the 2015, 2016, and 2017 Winnipeg Nuit Blanche events, as well as the 2017 LIVE Biennale of Performance Art (Vancouver, BC).

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Pascale Théorêt-Groulx

Pascale Théorêt-Groulx's video, performance and installation practice focuses on the relationships people have with various aspects of their existence: physical, psychological and social. She examines the uncertainty and unpredictability of the world we live in and the uncontrollable need human beings have to master it. Théorêt-Groulx hails from Gatineau, Outaouais where she received a BFA with a major in visual arts and a minor in graphic novel creation at Université du Québec en Outaouais. In 2014, she completed a MFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver for which she received a Joseph-Armand-Bombardier graduate grant form the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Théorêt-Groulx has carried out residencies at the Banff Centre in Alberta, at the artist-centre DAÏMÔN in Gatineau, at Pigment Sauvage in Baltimore and at the Vermont Studio Center. From 2015 to 2019 she was an artist in residency at the Fonderie Darling's Montreal Studios. Her work has been presented as part of many solo and group exhibitions, notably at Fonderie Darling, Centre Clark, DARE-DARE and Galerie B-312 in Montréal, at Verticale in Laval, at Club SAW in Ottawa and at the ICA in Baltimore, Maryland. She lives and works in Montréal.

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