Creative Minds: Speculative Fabulations
May 8 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Join us for Speculative Fabulations: unfolding new narratives through research creation. In tandem with their newest exhibition, OH BABY, Séamus Gallagher will moderate a conversation between themself and artists Lou Sheppard, Marissa Sean Cruz, and Adrien Crossman. This talk will centre around the overlaps and differences between the four artists, and how each one creates alternative narratives and worlds through the slippery umbrella of Media Art.
About Creative Minds:
The Creative Minds series hosts community leaders and creatives to respond to current events, exhibitions on view, or artworks in the Gallery. Through conversation, music, poetry, or movement, these events aim to provoke new ideas, explore the unexpected and create more understanding for everyone involved.
About the Artists:
Séamus Gallagher is a lens-based artist living between Treaty 1 Territory/Winnipeg and Kjipuktuk/Halifax. Using drag, self-portraiture, video game engines, and set construction, they are interested in camp, the limits of representation, and failure as a form of liberation.
Gallagher’s work has been presented in group and solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada, the Locarno Film Festival, the McCord Stewart Museum, and MOCA Toronto, among other contexts.
Gallagher is the recipient of the 2024 William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists, 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 the Atlantic finalist for the Sobey Art Award.
Photo: Clara Lacasse
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.
Marissa has been exhibited in venues like InterAccess, Gallery 1C03, Video Pool Media Arts Centre and Dazibao. Cruz’s various projects have been displayed throughout the United States and Europe distributed digitally through spaces like the Centre for Art and Thought, Canadian Art, The Art Gallery of Ontario, PLATFORM Projects and more.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Adrien Crossman (they/them) is a queer and non-binary white settler artist, educator, and curator currently residing on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in Hamilton, Ontario. They hold an MFA in Visual Art from the University of Windsor (2018), and a BFA in Integrated Media with a Minor in Digital and Media Studies from OCAD University (2012). Crossman is interested in the affective qualities of queerness, investigating how queerness can be felt through specific aesthetics and sensibilities. In addition to having exhibited across Canada and internationally, Adrien co-founded and co-runs the online arts publication off centre, and runs the independent gallery Orchid Contemporary out of the garage in their backyard. Crossman is an Assistant Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Lou Sheppard works in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation-based practices. His work focuses on climate crisis, loss, queer bodies and ecologies, responding to the social and material histories of sites, bodies and environments. Lou has performed and exhibited across Canada and Europe, and he has participated in numerous residencies including at ISCP in NY, La Cité des Arts in Paris, Rupert in Lithuania and as participant and faculty at the Banff Centre, AB. He was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2018 and 2021 and was one of 25 winners in 2020. Lou is a settler on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq in Mi’kma’ki / Nova Scotia.
Photo: Nathalie Chollet