
Friday, January 31, 2025, 7pm
PLAY BACK | A Screening of work by recent Artists-in-Residence
Francisco González Rosas, Sarah Houle-Lowry, Kerri Flannigan, Daze Jefferies, Max Dooher
Prioritizing process and experimentation through our various programs, Struts provides production facilities and technical support for visiting artists to develop new media arts projects. The format of our residency programs doesn’t always provide our community with the opportunity to view the artist’s finished work. PLAY BACK brings together video works made at Struts by five artists from 2022 - 2024. We’re thrilled to reconnect with these artists as we screen their finished work.
Please join us Friday, January 31 at 7pm to watch works by
Francisco González-Rosas (Open Studio 2023);
Sarah Houle (Open Studio 2023);
Kerri Flannigan (Open Studio 2023);
Daze Jefferies (Ease Down The Road 2022); and
Max Dooher (Video Artist in Residence 2024).

Dismembered fixations, 2023. 5m 36s.
Dismembered fixations is a large-scale, multi-channel video and sculptural installation that combines video, performance, 3D animation, and sculptural objects. Originally produced for the exhibition Terms of Use (2023) at the Phi Foundation, the video performance piece will now be presented as a single-channel work for the first time as part of Playback. Through different strategies, Dismembered fixations conveys a subjective account about the way queer and racialized identities are commodified and showcased as spectacle in mainstream media. The video performance takes the form of a monologue, intertwining references to philosophers Michel Foucault and Paul B. Preciado with quotes from the television program RuPaul's Drag Race and the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning. This performative act pays homage to and satirizes the format of reality TV confessionals, offering a performance of the self that reflects on how image-making in networked technologies becomes a tool for both personal expression and public consumption.
Francisco González-Rosas
Francisco Gonzalez-Rosas (he/they) is a Chilean artist focused on performance and new media, currently based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. They hold a Master in Fine Arts in Intermedia, from Concordia University, Montréal, and a Bachelor in Acting from Finis Terrae University, Santiago, Chile. Their practice explores existing and speculative crossovers between body and technology, using performance, sound, video, installation, and CGI. Recent solo shows include “pose & aparato” at Centre Caravanserail, Rimouski, and “the museum of the copy/pasted identities”, at Centre for Culture & Technology, Toronto; recent residences include transmediale in Berlin, Germany and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, in Banff, Alberta. Francisco is the 2024 recipient of EQ Bank Emerging Digital Artist Award in the category of 3D installation. Their piece “Dating for Export” is part of the permanent collection of the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art.

dream zones hormones undertones fish bones, 2023. 12m 30s.
dream zones hormones undertones fish bones explores intergenerational connections and hope for the future among trans femmes on the internet, at the turn of the millennium, in Atlantic Canada. Imagining backward to the late 1990s, a speculative and dream-like email correspondence between two trans women in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia contextualizes relationships across the Atlantic region at a time of new beginnings and precarious survival.
Daze Jefferies
Daze Jefferies (she/her) is a white settler artist, writer, and educator in Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). Her multidisciplinary and research-based creative work exploring queer, trans, and sex worker embodiments, counter-histories, and intergenerational relationships in Atlantic Canada has been exhibited and performed at The Rooms, Eastern Edge Artist-Run-Centre, Struts Gallery, Owens Art Gallery, Galerie de l’UQAM, Art Gallery of Guelph, and the Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador Gallery, among others. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks water/wept (Anstruther, 2023) and ullagone (antiphony, 2025), as well as co-author of stay here stay how stay (The Rooms, 2024), an artist catalogue accompanying her first major solo exhibition. She won the 2023 VANL-CARFAC Emerging Artist Award and the 2024 Riddle Fence Poetry Prize.

How to Build a Fire: Amy, Mike, Josh, Lori and Ross, 2024. 13m 39s.
How to Build a Fire: Amy, Mike, Josh, Lori and Ross grew out of anxieties about climate change and curiosities about wildfire. Learning more about fire also offered an opportunity to develop a relationship with my father, a fire scientist.
This video contains excerpts of conversations that were held between 2020-2024 with Mike Flannigan (my father), Amy Cardinal Christianson, Lori Daniels, Josh Johnston and Russ Russell.
Through conversations with my father and his colleagues, which have included both settler and Indigenous voices, we discussed the changing fire behaviors, fire suppression, the role of colonization in understanding how fire has been viewed and managed. These talks also consider what kind of relationships we should have with each other, with fire, and with the land around us.
Kerri Flannigan
Kerri Flannigan is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and educator currently based on Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ Territories (Victoria, BC), who experiments with methods of research and storytelling through drawing, video, and performance. With a background as an experimental animator and zine-maker, Flannigan is interested in investigating different ways of creating and performing narratives, working to create a framework through which the personal is critically connected to a wider sphere of context. Family mythologies, coming-of-age confessions, queer experiences of place, fire, and swimming have all been subjects of recent works.
Flannigan has shown locally and internationally, receiving funding from the Canada Council for the Arts in 2023, and the BC Arts Council in 2024. Flannigan is currently developing two projection-based performances, Slow Dive and Wild Flame.

Still, Circles, Sarah Houle, 2024. 4m 24s.
Circles, 2024. 4m 24s.
Circles is an exploration of my matriarchal relationships and the intersecting, overlapping stories that shape us. Circles is grounded in the Cree teaching of closing circles after opening them and using this concept as a practical and spiritual practice for balance and peace; reflecting on universal questions of where we come from and where.
Sarah Houle
Sarah Houle is an artist and performer from Paddle Prairie Métis Settlement in Northern Alberta. Her practice is collaborative and time-based, evolving from personal mythology, familial roots, and material explorations to encompass film, animation, installation, sound and performance. A continuous thread follows her work: bold, pastel colours, beadwork motifs, and recurring characters of the Shapeshifter, Bird Boy, and Little People. Sarah makes her home in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, but family – near and far – is integral to her process, both as subjects and collaborators. She draws from ancestry and creates in community, never alone as she explores hidden worlds. Mentorship is an increasingly important part of her practice, sharing in the abundance of communal wisdom and collective work. Her roles as an artist, mother, bandmate, collaborator, and community member evidence Sarah’s belief in interconnected relationships, stretching across place and time.

GHOSTS, 2024. 5m 26s.
GHOSTS is an experimental short film that examines the spectral nature of digital surveillance through a fragmented digital montage. Drawing from research into the haunting legacy of spirit photography and the politics of surveillance, the film uses footage from public webcams and insecure security cameras to construct an autobiography of an anonymous, disembodied “anyone.” The footage is processed using video machine learning techniques, collaging these images into algorithmic animations that blur the boundaries between self and other. Through this approach, GHOSTS challenges the role of digital surveillance in shaping our understanding of identity. The film draws an aesthetic connection between early mechanical photography and contemporary surveillance technologies, suggesting that both systems share a capacity to produce images of absence, distortion, and disembodiment.
Max Dooher
Max Dooher (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist and computational designer based in K'jipuktuk / Halifax, Nova Scotia. Interested in the histories which exist in the spaces between people and technology, Max creates screen-based applications and media installations which engage the public with modes of inquiry into shared space, often through augmented realit(ies)y and processes of collective archiving.
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