Mark Igloliorte is an artist born in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and grew up in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador. His artistic work is primarily painting and drawing. He has exhibited in group and solo shows  across Canada. Recently, Igloliorte has participated in national and international exhibitions such as Beat Nation, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC,  Le Nouveau Pleinairisme, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec, QC,  drift, (Solo), curator Ryan Rice, The Toronto Free Gallery, Toronto, ON and The Québec Triennial 2011 The Work Ahead of Us, Musée d'artcontemporain de Montréal, Montréal QC. He has been the recipient of a number of awards and grants including the Lillian Vineberg Award in Painting and Drawing, The Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council Visual Arts Grant, and aCanada Council for the Arts Emerging Artist Grant. Igloliorte is represented by Gallerie Donald Browne.

As an Inuk, Igloliorte’s work draws from his Labradorian background and communities of Happy Valley-Goose Bay and Hopedale. He has been recognized as a Labrador Inuit Role Model by the Nunatsiavut Government.  In the summer of 2008 and 2009 he worked with several groups of Inuit Youth delivering painting and drawing workshops funded in part by The National Aboriginal Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy (NAYSPS).

He holds both a Bachelor of Education (Intermediate/Secondary) from Memorial University of Newfoundland and a Bachelor of Fine Art, Major in Fine Art from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and a Master’s of Fine Art, Studio Art - Painting and Drawing from Concordia University School of Graduate Studies. Igloliorte is an Assistant Professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Scott Benesiinaabandan is an Anishinabe intermedia artist that works primarily in photography, printmaking and video. Scott has recently completed  international residencies at Parramatta Artist Studios in Australia (2012), Context Gallery in Derry, North of Ireland (2010) and is most recently been awarded the University Lethbridge/Royal Institute of Technology iAIR residency 2013,  along with international collaborative projects in both the U.K and Ireland. He is currently in Montreal, and recently completed a Canada Council New Media Production grant through OBx Labs/Ab-tech and Concordia.

In the past four years, Benesiinaabandan has been awarded multiple grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Manitoba Arts Council and the Winnipeg Arts Council.

Benesiinaabandan has taken part in several group exhibitions across Canada and the United States, most notably in  Harbourfront’s Flatter the Land/Bigger the Ruckus (2006), Subconscious City at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (2008) and with more recent solo exhibitions, unSacred, at Gallery 1C03 ( 2011) and in Sydney,  Mii Omaa Ayaad/Oshiki Inendemowin (2012).In September, 2013 Benesiinaabandan will take part in Ryerson Image Centre’s Ghost Dance exhibition.

Vanessa Dion Fletcher employs porcupine quills, Wampum belts, and menstrual blood to reveal the complexities of what defines a body physically and culturally. She links these ideas to personal experiences with language, fluency, and understanding. All of these themes are brought together in the context of her Potawatomi and Lenape ancestry, and her learning disability caused by a lack of short-term memory. Her work is held in the Indigenous Art Center Collection in Gatineau, Quebec. In 2016, Dion Fletcher graduated from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago with an M.F.A in performance. She is the recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts International Residency in Santa Fe, New Mexico U.S.A. 

Through performance, film, and photography, Lori Blondeau interrogates the influence of popular media and culture, both contemporary and historical, on definitions of Indigenous identity. A Cree/Saulteaux/Métis artist from Saskatchewan currently based in Saskatoon, Blondeau’s constructed personas portray provocative, tough, and powerful women.

Asiniy Iskwew (2016)—whose Cree words translate to “Rock Woman”— continues the artist’s interest in rocks connected to Indigenous traditions, such as petroforms (large stones or boulders outlining anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, or geometric forms), and rock art (paintings on or carvings into rock surfaces). In this series of photographs, Blondeau celebrates and gives homage to Plains Indigenous rock formations, significant ancient sites created for sacred and rite-of-passage ceremonies, and for recording battles and histories. She draws from oral histories of Mistaseni—a 400-tonne sacred boulder marking an important Indigenous gathering place that the Saskatchewan government dynamited in 1966 to make room for a man-made lake. Capturing performative interventions in the landscape, the images depict the artist standing statuesquely atop glacial boulders, draped in blood-red velvet cloth. Strong and solemn, her figure reflects the resilience of Indigenous cultures.

Situated in Devonian Square, a meeting place with a man-made pond in the centre of Ryerson’s campus, the photographs are seamlessly adhered to the contemporary site’s two-billion-year-old boulders imported from the Canadian Shield. The location resonates with its complex connections to the ancient sites of Blondeau’s research, as the Square serves as a gathering area, but one that is artificially constructed for an urban environment. This divergence points to issues of displacement and environmental preservation, offering a potent reminder of Toronto’s pre-colonial history and the controversial treaties that renounced Indigenous rights to ancestral lands. Here, Blondeau occupies the site—as if summoning its spirits—and proclaims (her) Indigenous history and irrefutable connection to the land.

Presented in partnership with Ryerson Image Centre and Ryerson University

Lisa Myers is a Port Severn/Toronto-based artist whose artistic practice considers the relationship between geography, food, and memory.

Military vehicles sit next to a barricade along a stretch of Quebec highway bordered by the forest, near disputed land close to the Kanesatake reserve and the small town of Oka. Tensions are high and violence seems imminent.

The scene is familiar, but you're not watching an evening news clip from 1990, when the Oka Crisis caught the attention of Canadians and the world. This is TimeTravellertm, a video art series looking back at key moments in history from a distinctly First Nations perspective.

Perhaps even more unusual, the series is an example of machinima, a style of animation created inside a video game. In this case, the game is Second Life, the enduring virtual world launched in 2003.

TimeTravellertm is the brainchild of Montreal-based artist

Skawennati

, who recently finished the nine-episode series after six years of work. Episodes are screening in Toronto at the Ryerson Image Centre as part of the

university's exhibition Ghost Dance: Resistance. Activism. Art.

Nicotye Samayualie was born on November 23, 1983. She is the daughter of Kudluarjuk Ashoona and Johny Tunnillie Samayualie. Nicotye’s grandmother, Keeleemeeoomee Samayualie was a well known graphic artist whose prints were represented in the Cape Dorset annual print collections throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

Nicotye is fascinated by patterns and arrangements of disparate objects in nature and man-made materials. Many of her drawings depict everyday items such as the contents of a pantry shelf, a table of shiny fishing lures or boxes of camping supplies.

Nicotye has had her original drawings shown at the Toronto Art Fair and in 2013 her work was featured in an Italian publication, “Annie e le Altre”, an ambitious scholastic study that explored the role of women artists in Cape Dorset.