Marissa Sean Cruz is an interdisciplinary artist based in Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal) with a focus in video and digital arts. As a biracial Filipinx, Cruz’s work negotiates a layered socioracial identity in sculptural confrontations, conceptual systems and prop-comedy performances. During her residency at Struts & Faucet, she will be working on a video that focuses on the artist anthropomorphizing into a show-poodle. Her video is a departure from research into a troublesome binary that implies “cuteness” as opposition to “criticality”. She examines “adorableness” as an act of resistance and rebellion, rather than a hinderance to an idea of “avant-garde”.

Cynthia Naggar refines herself in digital art. Always pushing boundaries of her art, she innovates into public interactivity using video, sound and biofeedback. She has this desire to make visible the invisible in us. A minimalist work that illustrates a very primitive relationship between man and machine, but that somewhat questions the public about their presence in space and in the time that they occupy.

combines and confounds notions of activism, art production and audience experience. 

Benjamin Evans is an artist and writer currently based in the French Alps. He has zero formal training in data visualization, computer programming, MATLab, signal processing or sleep science in general. Originally from the Canadian province of Newfoundland, he has also spent seven years living in New York City where he directed the non-profit gallery NURTUREart and was active in the Brooklyn arts scene. He has exhibited previous bodies of work professionally in both Canadian and New York venues. While living in Paris, Evans opened the itinerant gallery project Projective City, which exhibited the work of emerging artists in Paris, New York and virtual spaces in between. He holds five degrees, including a PhD in philosophy and an MFA in mixed media, and has taught at several institutions, including the Alberta College of the Arts, The Parsons School of Design in New York and Parsons Paris. Having completed his PhD, he has recently returned to making art full time.

Dominique Pétrin is a visual artist living and working in Montreal, Canada. She has been working primarily with silkscreen printing for over 20 years. A former member of the petrochemical rock band Les Georges Leningrad from 2000-2007, she also collaborated with renowned artists such as Sophie Calle, Pil and Galia Kollectiv (London) and choreographers Antonija Livingstone (Berlin), Stephen Thompson (Paris) and Jennifer Lacey (Paris) in Culture, Administration & Trembling performance. She collaborated with the artist Banksy for The Walled Off Hotel in Palestine. She was nominated for the Louis Comtois Award in 2017, and longlisted for the Sobey Award in 2014. Her work has been exhibited at the Musée National des Beaux Arts du Québec, at the MAC and across Canada, France, the United States, Belgium and the United Kingdom.

I am an interdisciplinary artist. My practice fluctuates between where I am and the trajectory from where I have come, continually hauling and sorting through the baggage as I go. Video, mending, installation and small iterations of performance have been used to observe the folly or fallacy of everyday living. I attempt to make work in a place that either exacerbates a task, proclaims to solve problems with miniature sized solutions or stimulates the obvious with volume.

– Thea Jones