An acclaimed multimedia performance artist, Joan Jonas is also a major figure in video art. From her seminal performance-based exercises of the 1970s to her later televisual narratives, Jonas’s theatrical portrayal of female identity is a unique and intriguing inquiry. Trained in art history and sculpture, Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the mid-1960s. In works that examined space and perceptual phenomena, she merged elements of dance, modern theater, the conventions of Japanese Noh and Kabuki theater, and the visual arts. Jonas first began using video in performance in Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972), in which a live camera and monitor functioned as both a mirror and a masking device, a means of transforming and layering images, space and time. Her classic early works, including Vertical Roll (1972), explore the phenomenology of the video medium — its one-on-one directness and function as a mirror — to create a theater of the self and the body. In 2015, Jonas represented the US in the 56th Venice Biennale. Her installation for the five galleries of the United States Pavilion, They Come to Us without a Word, was commissioned by the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Jonas also created a new video performance, with music by Jason Moran (They Come to Us without a Word II, in conjunction with her installation for the US Pavilion at the Biennale.

Tiziana La Melia (b. 1982) is a Vancouver-based artist and writer. She was born in Palermo, Italy, and raised on a rural farm in Winfield, BC. Her work is known for its ability to dissolve distinctions between painting, sculpture, performance, poetry and installation, and for creating evocative and complex narratives that move between language and form, the written and the visual. La Melia completed her BFA at Emily Carr University and her MFA at the University of Guelph. In 2014, she was a writer-in-residence at Gallery TPW, Toronto, and that same year won the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. La Melia’s poetry and images have been published in C Magazine, The Organism for Poetic Research, West Coast Line, Capilano Review, Agony Klub, Charcuterie, Moire, Art 21 and The Interjection Calendar. She is the author of three books, lettuce lettuce please go bad (Talonbooks, 2024), The Eyelash and the Monochrome (Talonbooks, 2018) and a collection of her writing and poetry, Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect: Selected Writings (Publication Studio and Blank Cheque Press, 2015/18). La Melia has exhibited at Magasin III, Stockholm, Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels, François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, Galerie Division, Montreal, Mercer Union, Franzkaka and Cooper Cole, Toronto and the Vancouver Art Gallery, CSA Space, the Apartment, Western Front and Unit 17, Vancouver.

Krista Belle Stewart (Syilx Nation, b. 1979) is a visual artist and citizen of the Syilx Nation currently based in Berlin and Vienna. Stewart works primarily with video, photography, sculpture and performance, drawing out personal and political narratives inherent in archival materials while questioning their articulation in institutional histories. Her work has been shown at solo exhibitions at Goethe Institute Seattle (2021); MOCA, Toronto (2020); Nanaimo Art Gallery (2019); Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2019); Teck Gallery at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver (2018) and Mercer Union as part of the 28th Images Festival, Toronto (2015). Group exhibitions include Kunstverein in Hamburg (2021); Eva International, Limerick (2021); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2020); CTM Festival, Berlin (2020); ISCP, Brooklyn (2017); Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal (2017) and Vancouver Art Gallery (2016). Screenings and performances include Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2022 and 2017); MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, Manhattan (2021); UnionDocs, Brooklyn (2019); 221A, Vancouver (2018) and Plug-In Institute, Winnipeg (2017). Stewart’s work is currently part of Galerie Barbara Thumm’s online platform New Viewings. She is an MFA graduate from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY and is presently a PhD in Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria.