Naomi Watkins
April 29 - June 3
Naomi Watkins is a Two-Spirit Secwépemc interdisciplinary artist from Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc (Kamloops) currently based in Vancouver, BC. Their practice explores the interconnectedness of land, story, and more-than-human beings such as plants, water, stones; who they understand as living relations.
Through carving, sound, video installation, Naomi reflects on themes of displacement and reconnection – both personal and ancestral – and how these shape our relationships to place.
Their current projects explore sound, video and vibration as accessible, embodied ways of experiencing story; spaces where touch, listening, and presence become acts of recognition. Through their installations, Naomi invites quiet, relational encounters between people, material and land.
Naomi holds an MFA from Emily Carr University and is currently an artist-in-residence at Totest Aleng: Indigenous Learning House. Their film Her Stories Have Always Been a Part of Me (2024) where they document bridging the distance between their current home and their nation, Kamloops, has been screened at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, BC and is going to be screened as part of the FORM Festival in November 2025.
Rooted in process and relationship, Naomi’s practice is a continual return to land, to voice, and to the slow work of remembering how to listen.
bree gant
June 17- July 22
bree gant is an artist and thinker from the Westside of Detroit. Their interdisciplinary practice remarks on the forces that shape and distort workings of power in everyday life.
bree studied film at Howard University while gentrification paved over Washington, DC and moved back to Detroit, when the city filed for bankruptcy, to see the cranes had followed them home.
bree spends a significant amount of time binging science fiction and fantasy, waiting for the bus, and elbow-leaning in windows.
Alex Apostilidis
July 23 - August 27
Alex Apostolidis is a queer multi-disciplinary artist with an image-based practice working in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang (Montreal, Quebec). Using chaos and comedy as cloaking devices, they explore communal experience of mass media and deviance from cultural hegemony in broadcast media through performance, video art and photography via subject matter such as television and kitsch memorabilia. Apostolidis’ performance practice has spanned playing in punk bands, acting in plays and short films, and performing and directing their own experimental narrative durational performance pieces. They founded the ongoing video and performance project “IWant2BeOnTV” - which make videos and performances addressing power dynamics typically seen in cable television. Alex has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography at Concordia University. Notably, their works have been shown at Celine Bureau (2023) and Artch (2023), Art Souterrain (2022) Montreal, QC, Performance is Alive (2019), Brooklyn, NYC.
%20fixed%20in%20place_Morgan%20Sears-Williams.jpg)
Morgan Sears-Williams
October 22 - November 26
Morgan Sears-Williams (b. 1991, Kingston, ON) is an artist based in Vancouver, BC. Her practice reflects on queer feminist histories both known and unknown, while speaking to larger societal structures of power and oppression. Morgan completed her BFA in Photography at OCAD University in 2017, and her MFA at University of British Columbia in 2024. Morgan has exhibited works across Turtle Island in Toronto (Gallery 44, Arsenal Contemporary), Hamilton (Factory Media Center), Calgary (Contemporary Calgary), Vancouver (Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Grunt Gallery), Ottawa (SPAO Photographic Center) and internationally (Japan, United Kingdom, Spain and Slovenia). In support of her art practice and research she has received grants from the BC Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.
Bridging methods of alternative processes, experimental film and queer histories (both personal and political), I trouble traditional approaches to analog film to address contemporary concerns in image making. Following in the lineage of handmade cinema, the hand is present during the process and the aesthetics of my art works, highlighting the materiality of analog film. I often use organic film developers which necessitates working directly with the film, resulting in an intimate collaboration between material, concept, and aesthetic. The intervention of my hand onto the surface while film development is occurring creates scratches and artifacts on the emulsion, obscuring the image and countering the dominant tendency towards clarity. In addition to the mediated destruction through film developing, I employ film decay techniques to lift the film emulsion and create patterns on the image. In this sense, the 16mm film itself is a body that is susceptible to decay and manipulation through my hand, mirroring themes of grief and loss of queer space and histories (both personal and political) while referencing photographic histories.
Queering traditional approaches to photography and handling film, I see film as a resilient material, embracing marks on the emulsion as a form of refusal. Moving beyond representation and visibility politics, my art practice focuses on expanding ideas of contemporary queer photography by connecting community, ecology and time.