Contributors
Carrie Jenkins
Carrie Jenkins works at the intersection of philosophy and the creative arts. She is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and the author of What Love Is and What It Could Be. Her debut novel, Victoria Sees It, was be published with Penguin Random House Canada in 2021.
Carla Nappi
Carla Nappi is a historical pataphysician who holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in History at the University of Pittsburgh and co-directs the Pitt Humanities Center. From undergraduate training in paleobiology, Nappi pursued an M.A. in History of Science and then a Ph.D. in Chinese history. Her practice involves working not only in history and creative nonfiction, but also in poetry and very short fiction. Among her current projects is work related to Chinese and Manchu history, translation, insomnia, DJ’ing, wormholes, and fictioning with Bosch’s art.
Vesela Kucheva
Vesela Valentinova Kucheva is an illustrator and graphic designer based in Sofia, Bulgaria. She graduated at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia where in 2013 she took a bachelor’s degree in scenography and costume design and then, in 2016 - a master’s degree in illustration. She also graduated as a graphic designer in 2018 at Design Academy NetIt. Vesela is currently a PhD student at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, researching graphic novels.
Laurie Litowitz
Laurie Litowitz is a visual artist from New York who moved to Oaxaca, Mexico in 1984 after living a number of years in Europe. Her work varies from one project to the next: Large installations using photography and assorted other materials both manmade and natural to her current series started during the pandemic “Letters to Those I Love” which consists of very small detailed pieces also using a variety of materials with embroidery and often original text.
Dianna Frid
Dianna Frid is an artist working at the intersection of material texts and textile. Her artist’s books and mixed-media works make visible the material manifestations of language. In her work, embroidery is a prominent vehicle for exploring the relationships between writing and drawing; and between transcription and legibility.
Frid was born in Mexico where she was first exposed to textiles as complex codes of material writing. This point of reference helps her situate her work alongside lineages that embrace long standing connections between art and needlework, and between ideas and substances. Frid lives in Chicago where she is Associate Professor in the Art Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Ray Briggs
Ray Briggs is a professor of philosophy at Stanford who works in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of probability. They have also written three volumes of poetry: Free Logic (University of Queensland Press, 2013) Common Sexual Fantasies, Ruined (Cordite Press, 2015) and Modern American Gods, Volumes I and II (self-published with Anna Zusman, 2018).
Sophia Beall
Sophia Beall is a visual artist from Greenville, South Carolina who currently studies studio art at Davidson College. She makes paintings and kinetic sculptures, though much of her work is mixed media. Inspired by visionary artists such as Georgia O’Keefe, Jennie Seville and Jean Tinguely, Sophia is fascinated by the human body and narratives formed by the coming together of seemingly unrelated parts. In her artwork, she strives to challenge preconceived notions regarding traditional standards of beauty and art, with the object in mind of creating a multifaceted experience for the viewer.
Melanie Friedman
Melanie is a Canadian born medical student studying in Australia. She has a background of exploring embodiment practices in a variety of forms and has shifted recently to engaging with virtual forms of connection as the world moved online. Her primary interests include connection, building resilience, and compassion.
Michaela Kaplan
Michaela Kaplan is a processed based artist whose practise primarily focuses on sculpture and performative multimedia installation. She is a Bachelors of Fine Arts (hons) graduate from the School of Art at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada with the future intent of achieving a Masters degree in Art Therapy. Michaela describes herself as a curious and competent problem solver and her body of work as honest and invitingly familiar with a humorous, dark undertone. Michaela has exhibited her work in a few, small private exhibitions and has produced a number of commissions. She has been teaching process based children’s art classes since 2015 and is currently teaching on the Gold Coast, Queensland Australia.
Aerial Sunday-Cardinal
Aerial Sunday-Cardinal is a Plains Cree multidisciplinary artist from a small reservation in northern Treaty 6 territory, called Goodfish Lake. As a performance artist, Aerial has performed in spaces and galleries such as the Helen and Morrison Belkin Art Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery with Cuerpo, and the Edmonton Fringe Festival. She creates conceptual art with a focus on philosophy, spirituality, the human experience and her experience as a First Nations being. Her work often questions and resists socio-political colonial structures and their roles in self-hood.
Chase Dority
Chase Dority is a PhD student in the philosophy department at the University of British Columbia. His primary research interests are in the philosophy of sex, love, and human relationships, and philosophical issues in the mind and brain sciences.
Photo by Luciana Freire D'Anunciaçao
Jelena Markovic
Jelena Markovic is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Her research and art practice focus on transformative experience, body memory and awareness, grief, and illness.
Jasper Heaton
Jasper Heaton is a PhD student in the philosophy department at the University of British Columbia. Their research focuses on feminist and transfeminist gender theory, social identity and embodiment, and on identity formation in interpersonal contexts. Their work explores lived experience as a form of philosophical methodology.
Wen Wen Lu
Wen Wen (Cherry) Lu is a multimedia artist interested in exploring the hidden, the small and the forgotten through installation, illustration, and animation. Taking inspiration from family history, she seeks to combine it with the present experiences of culture, nature, and community to create something that questions.
Shannon Harvey
Shannon is a visual and public artist who is always looking for ways to connect people. She trained in California in one of the first public art programs in North America, focusing on community art and mural painting. She has led collaborative projects with under-served youth, women, and cultural organizations. Most recently, she created a series called “We Could Be Heroes” to celebrate women activists. Shannon has been living and making art in British Columbia since 2004. Visit her website at www.shannonharvey.ca or Instagram: @shannonjharvey
Photo by Mary Reid
Betty Kovacic
Betty Kovacic, a Canadian artist, received her BFA from the University of Victoria. Her work is informed by her fascination with the human condition. She investigates social issues such as war, the homeless, abuse of women and children, the sex trade, and the ecology. Betty has received many regional and national grants and awards including the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012.
Kovacic is a veteran of numerous solo, group, and touring exhibitions. Betty’s projects have drawn local, national, and international media and academic attention. Her work has been highlighted in scholarly publications and presentations in Canada and South Africa.
In 2012 Kovacic published a book titled “Reflections with an Indifferent Universe”. It included a short story, poetry, and images of work from the exhibition “Too Much of Not Enough”.
Betty’s art has added a unique dimension in numerous public, private, and corporate collections.
Kovacic has worked as an independent art instructor for over 20 years. She teaches several studio art courses for the University Transfer/ Art Certificate Program at the College of New Caledonia.
Whitney Brennan
Whitney Brennan is a curator and sound artist from Vancouver, Canada. Her curatorial work currently consists of collaborative programming as co-director of Arts Assembly, with a focus on supporting artistic research and performative practices. Her sound work has been exhibited at YACTAC and Dynamo Arts Association, Vancouver; Two Rivers Gallery, Prince George, and broadcast through CiTRadio (Vancouver) and framework radio (UK). Her practice focuses on sound, mental health, and sensory sensitivity, and the effects of sound on the nervous system. Her work incorporates poetry, field recordings and augmented natural soundscapes to explore the construction of environments through sound.
Kat Grabowski
Kat Grabowski is a photo-based artist from Vancouver, BC. Her practice is informed by her personal experience with organized religion and conditioned ideologies. Utilizing a multiplicity of photography formats, she aims to explore her position as a female photographer who contributes to the consumption of women’s images while also undermining and complicating standardized and stereotypical versions of the female narrative. Kat earned her MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2020) and her BA in visual arts and design from Trinity Western University (2012).
Isabela Matus / señora 9 muerte
Isabela Matus, or señora 9 muerte, is originally from the coast of Oaxaca. Afro- with Mixtec and Zapotec ancestry, she is a Bachelor in humanities in the area of philosophy graduate from the Institute for Research in Humanities of the Benito Juarez Autonomous University of Oaxaca. A multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary artist, her work revolves around sacred experiences from non-Western mysticism, through the use of power and medicinal plants. Her work proposes a critique of modernity, and of patriarchal systematic violence against women. Using various supports such as engraving, photography, dance, video, sound, and poetry, her work is a syncretism between the sacred cultural narratives of her native people, and the philosophical discourses of ancient Greece.
Photo by Jackie Dives
Amanda Wood
Amanda Wood works with tactile media in a third space where time and materials overlap and inform each other. Through object manipulation, Wood makes accidental discoveries and loosens control as she slips between etching, handweaving and darkroom photography. She allows dangling threads, holes, and glitches to come forward as a response to the embodied slippages that Wood experiences as a multi-ethnic woman existing between cultural spaces. Through abstracted forms, grounded in the metaphors of cloth, she searches for optimistic alternatives to post-colonial narratives.
Wood was awarded Canada Council for the Arts grants in 2020 and 2021. Her work has been featured in Galleries West and Uppercase Magazine and has been exhibited across Canada. She has a BA from Simon Fraser University and a diploma in textile art from Capilano University.
Wood has participated in several residencies, most recently a micro-residency at the New Media Gallery in New Westminster, BC. She currently lives and works on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples in Vancouver, BC with her family.
Steve Stelling
Steve Stelling is an artist from Pittsburgh, PA. His comics are light on narrative and heavy on poetry. He spent a number of years exhibiting abstract paintings, reading, and goofing around with home-recorded music. Those interests have likely left their mark on the image-text combinations found in his work. Steve has an MFA from Ohio State University and his self-published booklets are/have been available at Copacetic Comics (Pittsburgh), Quimby’s (Chicago), Eye Level Gallery (Halifax), and Printed Matter (New York).
Kate Joranson
In Kate Joranson’s expanded practice as an artist and a librarian, she explores creative modes of discovery through collaborative projects such as What Does it Mean to Be Curious? and I’m Wondering if You Can Help Me With Something. Her work activates the intersection of art-making and the often gendered labor of teaching, caregiving, and service work. She documents artifacts produced by this labor, and constructs situations where she and her collaborators produce artifacts through this labor.
Edie Reaney Chunn and Melanie Evelyn
Edie Reaney Chunn is a writer who lives and works in so-called “Vancouver”, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. They are an MFA student in the Creative Writing Program at UBC, where they have a focus on playwriting and writing for children. Edie works in a style of heightened lightness and radical softness to explore themes of recovery from mental illness, hidden histories of queerness, and developing spaces of care through storytelling. They are the 2021 first-place winner of the Norma Epstein Foundation National Award in Creative Writing, and their play, How the Light Lies (On You), enjoyed a pandemic-Zoom-production with Eastern Front Theatre in June 2021. They enjoy working collaboratively & inefficiently on theatre projects, and other pursuits.
Melanie Evelyn is an interdisciplinary artist and educator currently living and working on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ land. She holds a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University and a BEd in Secondary Arts Education from Simon Fraser University. Her photographic practice explores queer identity and adolescence through motifs such as road trips and sleepovers, while her painting and theater work take on magic, fairies and environmental activism. The recurrence of magical creatures such as fairies and unicorns satirizes and recontextualizes the use of these terms in queer settings. They lean into maximalism and magic as the antithesis to compulsory cisheteronormativity across various media. Evelyn dons queer femme aesthetics as armour, as regalia, and as a philosophy of being. Currently Evelyn is teaching art at the secondary level and creating a psychedelic comic book exploring queer love through space and dreams.
Alexandra Bischoff
Alexandra Bischoff (she/they) is a prairie-born settler performance artist and writer. They hold a BFA in Visual Arts Studio from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2015) and are an MFA graduate from Concordia University in the department of Intermedia (2021). Bischoff’s practice is primarily based in durational performance and installation. Precarious living and underrepresented archives are some of her primary concerns. Through art and writing, Bischoff aims to sensitively exercise the point at which leisure becomes labour and the sensual becomes unsettling. They currently live on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ peoples.