ThisPlace Vancouver

Emilio Rojas

Emilio Rojas was born in Mexico City, (ca.1985) he is an interdisciplinary artist, working primarily in performance, film, video, photography, installation, and sculpture. His works explore the relation between the artist and his audience, interacting and exchanging roles, while involving the communities that surround the spaces he engages with. Rojas requires the participation of the viewer, in order to set in motion the metaphors that unveil the intricacy of his art. The intrinsic relation with the body has been both his subject matter and medium. Exploring the mental and physical limits of his being, Emilio re-evaluates language, gender, activism, traditions, identity, ritual, displacement, migration and sexuality. Besides his artistic practice, Emilio is also a yoga teacher, translator, community activist and anti-oppression facilitator with Migrant and Queer Youth. Emilio Rojas is currently living in Vancouver, Canada, where he is exploring collaboration, with a focus in social practice and public interventions and alternative exhibition spaces running a residency program with his mother in his house in Mexico City.

He holds a BFA from Emily Carr University in Film Video and Integrated Media. His performance, video works have been exhibited in United States, Mexico, Canada, Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia. He has attended residencies at The Banff Centre, Elsewhere Museum, The Surrey Art Gallery, The STAG, The Hammock Residency and Casa Coral in Isla Mujeres. Rojas also participated at the 54th Venice Biennale as part of the Pirate Camp: Stateless Pavilion, a residency program for young international artists. This year, he participated in the summer residency lead by Tacita Dean, organized by Fundacion Botin, in Santander, Spain. He has exhibited extensively in Vancouver at the VIVO Media Arts, Grunt Gallery, The Surrey Art Gallery, Access, 221A, Gallery Gachet, Western Front, BLIM, and the LIVE Performance Biennale. His work is represented by Galeria Nuble in Santander, Spain.

www.performancero.com

Igor Santizo

Igor Santizo is an artist and teacher living in Vancouver. As a teacher and facilitator, he introduces: creative process, foundational principles and cultural literacy in general, while encouraging students with their creative potential, emerging selves and budding art practices.

As an artist he has sought a complimentary dialogue between: metaphysical principles and material forms. Currently, he is exploring through ink drawings: variations of an abstract motif, as allusion to chthonic force. These ink drawings are ways to give a signature shape to abstract forces like: formlessness, energy, points, aggregates, coils, folds, waves and forms ascending / descending -into visual vocabulary.

Guadalupe Martinez

Guadalupe Martinez is an Argentine artist based in Vancouver since 2008. She obtained her BFA at the Instituto Universitario Nacional del Arte in Buenos Aires and is currently pursuing an MFA at University of British Columbia, in Vancouver.

Her research, currently supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, combines three-dimensionality, performance, and site-specificity creating work that mnemonically activates found materials; and reanimates their meaning into new structures of signification and resistance.

Guadalupe Martinez has attended residencies at The Banff Centre for the Arts (AB), Hammock Residency (BC), The STAG (BC), Elsewhere Collective (NC), The Vermont Studio Center (VT), and Dorchester Projects in Chicago (IL).

Since 2011 she has been a member of the Board of Directors for LIVE Biennale, Vancouver´s performance art festival, and is currently working as a Teaching Assistant at UBC.

Her work has been shown locally at The Commons, Satellite Gallery and grunt gallery among others. And internationally in Argentina, Mexico, US, and Italy.
www.guadalupemartinez.com

Michael de Courcy

Michael de Courcy was born in Montréal in 1944. He studied at the École des Beaux Arts in Montréal and the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design). He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and is represented in many public and private collections, including those of the Vancouver Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada. He has lectured and given workshops at cultural institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of British Columbia, and the Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

In the late 1960s, during his formative years as an artist, de Courcy was a core member of the Vancouver artists collective known as the Intermedia Society. Over the past 40 years, generally using photography, he has worked in various combination with printmaking and publishing, public art initiatives and installations, and web-based media projects. de Courcy asserts, “Art-making is, for the most part, an activity which connects me in meaningful ways to the world at large, to my community, and to my family. The focus of my work has consistently been on place, social identity, and everyday life. As interaction with the public has always been a prime motivation, I have worked to discover new and effective means (often beyond the conventional gallery setting) to position my work within my community in a relevant way.”