Rebecca Belmore (Lac Seul First Nation (Anishinaabe), b. 1960) is a multidisciplinary visual artist. Belmore is widely recognized for her performance, photographic and sculptural work that makes connections between bodies, land and language with ongoing social and political realities faced by Indigenous communities. Questions of authority, narrative and truth resonate throughout her practice. In 2005 she was the first Indigenous woman to represent Canada in the Venice Biennale. Her work has appeared extensively in exhibitions both nationally and internationally, and her solo exhibitions include the Belkin Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Justina M. Barnick Gallery.  Belmore has received numerous honours and awards, including the Hnatyshyn Award (2009), the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts (2013) and Gershon Iskowitz Prize (2016). She attended the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, and has received honourary doctorates from OCAD University (2005), Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2018), and NSCAD University (2019).

Audrey Capel Doray (b. 1931) is a Canadian artist working in a variety of mediums—painting, printmaking, electronic art, murals and films. She received a BFA from McGill University and went on to study at Atelier 17 in Paris and at the Central School of Art in London. After moving to Vancouver in 1957, Capel Doray taught at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University) from 1959 to 1961. In 1962, Capel Doray joined Alvin Balkind and Abraham Rogatnick’s New Design Gallery, an influential art space that presented live theatre, visual art, films, concerts, lectures and poetry readings. Capel Doray was a major figure in the Vancouver scene of the 1960s and was engaged with experiments in new media, interactive and kinetic art and electronic communications. She and her late husband, Victor Doray, were community leaders, involving themselves in Intermedia and other experimental formations influenced by philosopher Marshall McLuhan. A recipient of four Canada Council awards, Capel Doray’s work is held in numerous private and public collections, both nationally and internationally. Her work is described in North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century as combining “robust social criticism with her own interpretation of humanist theory” and dealing with pop art and the feminist archetype, themes of “perpetual motion and endless transition”, and the interplay of sound and light.

Helen Goodwin (British, 1927-1985) was a dancer and choreographer who played a crucial role in the development of dance and the place of the “live arts” in Vancouver with the body as an ideal medium for depicting movement within visual arts. Goodwin taught at the University of British Columbia in the Physical Education and Theatre Departments beginning in 1955. She was active in performing and in presenting the work of experimental choreographers to Vancouver audiences through her participation in organizing programs such as Festival of Contemporary Arts at the University of British Columbia. In 1966, Goodwin became involved with the fledgling Sound Gallery, an artist-initiated space credited as having hosted Vancouver’s earliest multimedia performance in March 1966. The Sound Gallery become Motion Studio in 1967 and Goodwin’s dance troupe WECO became TheCo. Goodwin and TheCo joined with a group of visual artists, musicians, poets, dancers, architects, and filmmakers to found Vancouver’s Intermedia Society in 1967. Before the Intermedia Society and TheCo wound up in 1971, Goodwin and her collaborators had held many highly successful performance events and festivals of local and international acclaim throughout Vancouver and at UBC including Intermedia Nights (1968), a five-day festival which included TheCo’s performance of Plus Minus 216 and the Intermedia Dome Show produced by Intermedia at the Vancouver Art Gallery (1971) which included Goodwin’s Dance Night / Dance Loops. TheCo’s final performance was Goodwin’s Environmental Opera presented at Spanish Banks in 1971 featuring many Intermedia affiliated artists. On December 18, 1985, Goodwin walked into the ocean near Spanish Banks and drowned. A wake was held the following week nearby. On December 21, 1987 at 3:45 pm, a performance of Winter Solstice was performed in memory of Goodwin at the UBC Museum of Anthropology.

Dorothy Iannone (1933-2022) is best known for her exuberantly transgressive, sexually explicit, mostly autobiographical image and text works exploring “ecstatic unity.” Iannone was born in Boston, MA where she attended Boston University and Brandeis University majoring in literature. She began painting in 1959 and traveled extensively with her husband James Upham in Europe and Asia. From 1963 until 1967, they ran a cooperative gallery in New York, and in 1966 they live for some months in the South of France, where Iannone began a close friendship with Robert Filliou and other artists from the Fluxus community. On a trip to Iceland in 1967, she met and fell in love with German-Swiss artist Dieter Roth, and they lived together in different European cities until 1974. In 1976, Iannone moved to Berlin after receiving a grant from the DAAD Berlin Artists’ Program, where she lived until her death. Solo exhibitions of Iannone’s work have been held at the New Museum, New York (2009), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2006) and Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2005). Her work was included in the 4th Berlin Biennial in 2006, curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnik and the 2006 Whitney Biennial. She has produced numerous artist books and is the subject of several monographs including Dorothy Iannone: This Sweetness Outside of Time (2014); Dorothy Iannone: Censorship and the Irrepressible Drive Toward Love and Divinity (2015) and Dorothy Iannone: A Cookbook (2019). Iannone’s work is held in significant international collections, including at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

Jess (American, 1923-2004) was a San Francisco-based collagist and painter. He was born Burgess Franklin Collins in Long Beach, California and educated as a chemist before being drafted into the military. Jess worked as a radio-chemist with the Army Corps of Engineers, spending three years at the Atomic Energy Laboratory where he had a small part in the Manhattan Project to develop the first atom bomb. In 1946, Jess was discharged from the military and soon after renounced sciences for what he saw as more constructive pursuits. Jess enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1948, at which time he dropped his last name. During this period, Jess met poet Robert Duncan who would become his lifelong partner and frequent collaborator. They were an influential force in the San Francisco artistic community, bringing together painters and poets, organizing exhibitions and readings. Jess’s early work is influenced by his teachers, painters Clifford Still, David Park and William Corbett, as well as by his interest in French post-impressionist painting. Jess later became known for his “paste-up” technique, a method of making intricate and elaborate collage and “copies” of Victorian illustrations. Jess’s collage work draws on themes such as eroticism, the male body, the occult, chemistry and alchemy, which often used old book illustrations, comics and print advertising as raw material. Jess worked reclusively and prolifically on paintings and paste-ups throughout his lifetime.

Liz Magor (Canadian, b. 1948) is a Vancouver-based artist and associate professor at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Magor studied at the Vancouver School of Art (1970-71), Parsons School of Design (1968-70) and the University of British Columbia (1966-68). Over her career Magor has been recognized through several prestigious art awards such as the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario (2014); The Audain Prize for Lifetime achievement (2009); the Governor General of Canada Award (2001) and York Wilson Endowment Award (2000). Magor has had major exhibitions at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2016); Art Gallery of Ontario (2015); Peephole, Milan (2015); Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver (2014); Triangle, Marseille (2013); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2008); The Power Plant, Toronto (2003); Vancouver Art Gallery (2002); Documenta (1987); and the Venice Biennale (1984), among others. Magor is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver, Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto and Marcelle Alix, Paris.

Writer, filmmaker, artist, Sam Perry was born in 1939. As a student at the University of British Columbia in the early 1960s, Perry came into contact with the experimental multimedia work of David Orcutt, who supported Perry’s growing interest in film animation. By the mid-1960s, Perry’s film and image projections would play a key role in the events at the Sound Gallery and the Motion Studio. In addition, Perry spearheaded the Tripps Festial (July 29-31, 1966), a multimedia sensorium of music, film, slides, and moving liquid utilizing over fifty projectors and 25,000 square feet of screen. Performers included Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin), the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Daily Flash, and poet Michael McClure. Perry’s interest lay in such an environment’s ability to transform a participant’s consciousness. The addition of light and film projections to musical performance was an attempt to alter the traditional relationship between audience and entertainer, shifting the focus away from the individual performances to the collective production of new realities. Perry took his own life in 1966.