We Made This Mostly at Home with Stuff We Already Had in Our Apartment

Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau acknowledge the support of AXENÉO7 as part of the Autorésidences 2020 programming for the genesis of this project. ‘Envers la tyrannie du réel’ is the third iteration of this exhibition, which began as an evening screening as part of dv_vd by Vidéographe and Dazibao, and was later presented under the title ‘We Made This Mostly at Home with Stuff We Already Had in Our Apartment: Prop Performance and Camp in Contemporary Canadian Video Art’ at the University of Alberta’s FAB Gallery.

Curators

Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau

Artists

Maya Ben David
Maya Ben David (MBD) is a Toronto-based Jewish-Iranian Anthropomorphic Airplane. Working in video, installation and performance, she creates worlds and characters that aid her ongoing exploration of anthropomorphism, cosplay and performative personas. Ben David presents the origin stories of her characters in the form of video and performance, and expands on them via her online presence. They often inhabit alternate universes accompanied by nostalgia, such as the worlds of Pokémon and Spiderman. In addition, Ben David also plays a character called MBD who is known for having multiple feuds with her many alter egos as well as the art world.

Mike Bourschied
Mike Bourscheid sculpture-and performance-based practice involves his fabrication of ungainly orridiculous appendages and prosthetics, in order to channel alternate personae as a device for addressing aspects of masculinity, European pomposity, and patriarchal power.

Bourscheid represented Luxembourg at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, and his recent exhibitions include Richmond Art Gallery (Canada), Centre National de l’Audiovisuel (Luxembourg)) and Heidelberger Kunstverein (Germany). Mike Bourscheid has a current solo exhibition at 1646 (The Hague, Netherlands) as well as upcoming exhibitions at Gr_nd (Berlin, Germany) and Galerie Hyperbien (Paris, France). Mike Bourscheid is based in Luxembourg and Vancouver.

Edith Brunette and François Lemieux
Edith Brunette combines artistic practice and theoretical research. In each of these she is concerned with the discourse – particularly within the art world – around the political forces at play. As an author and researcher, she is regularly published in various journals and art publications. She is a co-founder of the organization Journée sans culture and in 2017 she embarked on doctoral studies in political science at the University of Ottawa.

The artistic activities of François Lemieux combine practice, research and publishing and take the form of installations, documents, and situations that are intended to encourage a collective reflection on notions of value, the everyday and the relationship to the norm. Lemieux has founded collective and independent projects including We left the warm stable and entered the latex void from 2008 to 2010 and the publication that he co-edits, Le Merle, Cahiers sur les mots et les gestes. Lemieux is co-founder of the organization Journée sans culture.

Océane Buxton and Salesforce Child
Océane Buxton is a visual artist specializing in video, photography, sound design and costume design. Inspired by her past as a young influencer, her work focuses on celebrity mythology and the impact of visual media on our perception of reality. Originally from Québec City, she has called Montréal home since 2017. After studying at RMIT School of Art (Melbourne, Australia) in 2019, she received a bachelor’s degree in Intermedia/Cyberarts from Concordia University in 2021. Currently, she is pursuing an M.A. in research-creation at UQAM. Her work has been exhibited by ARTCH festival, the Ada X artist centre, the Struts Gallery (Sackville, New Brunswick), as well as the web art platform Galerie Galerie. In December 2023, she undertook a residency at La Bande Vidéo in Quebec City. In 2021, fueled by her curiosity about the entertainment industry, she participated in the cooking reality TV show Un souper presque parfait.

Summer Emerald/Salesforce Child is an emerging multidisciplinary artist from a small farm in southern Ontario who now lives and works in Montréal. She is interested in the dissonance between genuine concerns about the environment and the intensification of unsustainable habits as a response to looming changes, all within the context of a corporate landscape that exploits these fears and desires for profit. Her art practice subverts these narratives by amplifying their inherent contradictions and pushing them to absurd extremes. In 2022, she graduated Concordia University’s undergraduate painting & drawing program and put on her first solo painting show, We’re all going to heaven together at the same time. Her video and performance work has been featured multiple times on Adult Swim, as well as at Dazibao, Pop Montréal, and Ada-X with her friend and collaborator Océane Buxton. She is currently working on a book which will be released in September 2024.

Marissa Sean Cruz
Marissa Sean Cruz is a digital multimedia and video performance artist from Kjipuktuk (so-called Halifax). Cruz’s topics of interest are related to labour, power and surveillance as seen through digital platforms and pop culture. Their experimental videos comprise found footage, 3D modelling, sound design and costumed performances to look at value systems with critical sensibility. These satirical works aim to capture a fast-paced contemporary present and envision possible, liberatory futures.

Rah Eleh
Rah Eleh is a video, digital and performance artist and a PhD candidate at the die Angewandte (University of Applied Arts) in Vienna, Austria. Rah’s work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally at spaces including: Venice Biennale (ECC, Palazzo Mora), The Juno Awards (Canada), National Museum (Oslo, Norway), Vögele Kultur Zentrum, (Pfäffikon, Switzerland), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Museum London, Vienna Art Week (Austria), Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa), Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, Massachusetts), Miami Art Basel, Nieuwe Vide (Haarlem, Netherlands), SomoS Art Haus (Berlin, Germany), Kunsthaus Graz Museum (Graz, Austria), and Onassis Cultural Center (Athens, Greece). She has been the recipient of numerous awards including: Long listed for 2023 Sobey Art Award, Chalmers Arts Fellowship, numerous Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Art Council Grants, and SSHRC for her MFA and the CGS Doctoral Fellowship for her PhD. She has been awarded several residencies including the ONX Studio (NYC, NY, 2024), Intergenerational LGBTQ Artist Residency (Toronto Island, 2019), Koumaria Residency (Greece, 2016), MUU Galleria (Helsinki, 2015), Studio Das Weisse Haus (Vienna, 2014) and the Artslant Georgia Fee Residency (Paris).

Rah Eleh is represented by gallery Studio Sixty Six in Ottawa and Vtape, Canada’s leading artist-run distributor for video art.

Erica Eyres
Erica Eyres (b. 1980 in Winnipeg, Canada) lives and works in Glasgow, UK. Through videos, drawings, paintings and sculptures, Eyres' work uses found images and objects to explore the unreliability of autobiography and the artist’s subjective truth.

Solo shows include Do I Have to Love You? at OTP Copenhagen (2023); Family Meal at Norberg Hall, Calgary (2022); Another Dirty Room at Celine, Glasgow (2022); and Too Shy to Party at Plaza Plaza, London (2020). Group shows include Secret Signals with Keith Boadwee at OTP, Copenhagen (2021); Lunch, curated by Panel Glasgow for London’s Kitchen (2021); and Private Behaviour at White Columns, New York (2021).

Beth Frey avec Phth
Beth Frey uses a variety of media, including drawing, painting, video, sculpture and installation. With her wry and absurd sense of humour, Frey plays with the contradictions in her themes, blurring the lines between the beautiful and the grotesque, the innocent and the perverse, often incorporating representations of herself into her cartoon-like chromatic world. Working from her intricately layered watercolours, Frey incorporates accessible smartphone applications and AI image generation tools to extend this world and incorporate her body as an active actor.
Frey holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University and a BFA from the University of Victoria. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in Canada, the U.S., Mexico and the U.K., and she has participated in several group exhibitions, including the Museo Cabañas in Guadalajara, Mexico and the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. Her collaborations with the experimental vocal collective Phth have been featured in the Femsa Bienal de 2024 in Guanajuato, Mexico, and have been presented at the University of Alberta. Frey currently divides his time between Montreal and Mexico City.

Séamus Gallagher
Séamus Gallagher is an Irish-Canadian lens-based artist living between Treaty 1 territory and Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia. Through infusing queer aesthetics with self-portraiture, video game engines, and set construction, Gallagher is interested in camp, limits of representation, and failure as a form of liberation. Their practice often takes the form of a video work, a series of photographs, installation, and occasionally VR. Their work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, the Museum of Fine Art of Leipzig, the Portrait Gallery of Canada, as well as the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, among others. In 2023 they had their first solo museum exhibition at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal, as part of that year’s MOMENTA biennale de l’image.

Gallagher is the recipient of the Scotiabank 2022 New Generation Photography Award, the 2022 Nova Scotia Emerging Artist Recognition Award, and the 2019 BMO 1st Art Award. In 2023 they were shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, presented by the National Gallery of Canada. That year, they exhibited their work at the NGC, representing Atlantic Canada at the annual award exhibition. Gallagher was longlisted for the 2024 Sobey Art Award.

Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau
The collaborative artistic practice of Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau is marked by theatricality and choreography, invested through video, performance, sculpture, sound, text and photography deployed in their installations. They are interested in the complex and elusive relationship between bodies and inanimate objects, a subject they have explored for several years through the lens of chronic illness. Working together since 2000, they are based in Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton).
They have exhibited at the Esker Foundation, Calgary; Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal; Kunsthalle Wien; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art; Whitechapel Project Space, London; University of Texas, Austin; Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown; and Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto. Their work is included in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.

Geneviève Matthieu
Geneviève Matthieu is an artist duo formed in Rouyn-Noranda (Quebec, Canada) in the late 1990s. The duo expresses its art through performances, installations, videos, concerts, and poetry, creating communal representations and staged social scenes inspired by art and life. Geneviève Matthieu's work has been showcased at numerous exhibitions and events in Canada and Europe, including venues such as the Musée d'art de Joliette, Usine C (Montreal), the Fonderie Darling (Montreal), the 7a*11d festival (Toronto), the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (Paris), La Capella (Barcelona), and the actoral festival (Marseille).

In 2024, the duo was selected for a residency by the Conseil des et des lettres du Québec at Les Récollets in Paris, and in 2022, they won the 2-12 residency program at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. In 2023, they were shortlisted as Quebec finalists for the Sobey Art Award presented by the National Gallery of Canada, and for the Prix en art actuel presented by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in 2018.

Lenore Claire Herrem
Lenore Claire Herrem is a transdisciplinary artist from Saskatoon, and has been working in Tio’Tia:Ke (Montréal) since 2013. Formally trained in theatre performance, she also works in studio arts, animation, digital art, video art, and performance art. She works under the character name Sandy Bridges for cabaret and web series, and Precious Puppies is the name of her humble animation & merchandising empire.

Marisa Hoicka
Marisa Hoicka, (Canada), creates films, choreographs dancers, performs installations, and paints. Her recent film "Teen Girl Fantasy" was honoured by inclusion in the International Film Festival Rotterdam's 2024 Tiger Short Competition (Netherlands), the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema -BAFICI (Argentina), the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival (USA), Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Czechia), Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival (Portugal), Guanajuato International Film Festival (Mexico), SF Cinematheque's Crossroads Film Festival (San Francisco, USA) and the Calgary International Film Festival. She has exhibited in major festivals and museums including Uppsala Short Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, Antimatter Media Art Festival(Victoria, Canada), Ann Arbor Film Festival, Oakville Galleries, San Francisco MoMA, the Power Plant and more.

She has choreographed pieces for Toronto Dance Theatre, Dancemakers, and has performed for 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival. She has participated in residencies with the Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, Ireland, the Doris McCarthy Artist Residency and the Images Festival.

Hoicka has received several Ontario Arts Council grants, a visual art grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, and a grant from the Writer's Union of Canada. She has a Master of Digital Media from Toronto Metropolitan University and a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University (Montreal).

Mathieu Lacroix
Mathieu Lacroix’s multidisciplinary practice is expressed through drawing, sculpture, installation and performance. The notion of the “sketch” is at the heart of his work, which he enacts both as a conceptual approach and as a technique applied through a wide range of mediums. In his interventions, the theatre of the everyday is simultaneously put forward and perverted by the construction of a poetic unreality.

Born in 1981 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Lacroix is a Montréal artist who grew up in Drummondville (Quebec). He holds a BFA from UQAM. Lacroix has recently exhibited at the Off Biennale d'art africain contemporain de Dakar (Senegal), the Clark Centre (Montreal), the Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges (Montreal), and CIRCA art actuel (Montreal). He has performed in numerous cultural events, including the 7a*11d, International Performance Festival in Toronto, and Dazibao in Montréal. His works are part of the collections of the City of Montréal and Drummondville.

Amy Lockhart
Amy Lockhart is a filmmaker, animator and artist. Her animations have screened internationally, including the Whitney, NY, British Film Institute, N.Y. Anthology Film Archives, GLAS Animation Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Ottawa International Animation Festival, Carnegie Mellon, and Hiroshima International Animation Festival. Lockhart has received a fellowship at the National Film Board of Canada and support from the Canada Council for the Arts. She has completed residencies at Calgary’s Quickdraw Animation Society, Struts Gallery, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her drawings, comics and paintings have been published by Fantagraphics (Ditch Life, 2019), Drawn & Quarterly (Dirty Dishes, 2009), and by Colour Code (Looking Inward, 2016). Her animations are held in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Experimental Animation Archive.

Elizabeth Milton
Elizabeth Milton (she/they) is a mixed European settler artist of Croatian and British ancestry who lives as a guest on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations in Vancouver, Canada. Her media and performance-based practice utilizes absurdist character-play and hyperbolic expressivity to explore identity, affect and the radical potential of comedic performativity. Involving a range of participants, from family members to hypnotists, her interdisciplinary and collaborative works aim to critically investigate the visual language and power structures of amateur spectacle.

Her work has been exhibited and performed in Canada, The United States and Europe. Recent performances include a collaborative musical with a group of elders, Queen Tilly & the Marys, (VIVO Media Arts Centre, Vancouver) and A Guided Meditation with VHS Eyelashes at Dynasty Handbag’s Weirdo Night (Los Angeles). Milton holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of British Columbia and a BFA in Visual Art from Simon Fraser University. She is an Assistant Department Chair and faculty member in the Department of Fine Arts at Langara College where she instructs studio courses in Media and Performance.

Bridget Moser
Bridget Moser is a video and performance artist who works with inanimate objects and her own body. She has presented work at Remai Modern, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Western Front, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Esker Foundation, the Art Gallery of Ontario and Mercer Union. She has been shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award and was the 2023 recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Visual Arts Award.

Sin Wai Kin
Sin Wai Kin (b. 1991, Toronto, CA) brings fantasy to life through storytelling in moving image, performance, writing, and print. Drawing on experiences of existing between binary categories, their work realizes alternate worlds to describe lived experiences of desire, identification and consciousness.

The artist was the recipient of the 24th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel 2023 for their film series Portraits (2023). Their film, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (2021) was nominated for the 2022 Turner Prize, and included in the touring exhibition the British Art Show 9, as well as being screened at the British Film Institute’s 65th London Film Festival. Recent solo exhibitions include MUDAM, Luxembourg (2024); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York (2024); Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley (2023); Fondazione Memmo, Rome (2023); Soft Opening, London (2022); It’s Always You at Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong (2021); Narrative Reflections on Looking at Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2020) and Indifferent Idols at Taipei Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (2018).

Group exhibitions include The Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; Cement Fondu, Paddington (2024); Somerset House, London (2024); Mudam, Luxembourg (2023); Taikwun, Hong Kong (2022); The British Museum, London (2022). Sin’s work is held in the collections of The British Museum Prints & Drawings; White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; The Ingram Collection of Modern British Art, UK; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo; Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong and M+ Museum, Hong Kong.