Hopping the Fence Hopping the Fence

Maria Simmons is a hybrid artist from Hamilton, ON. She investigates potentialized environments through the creation of multidisciplinary sculpture and installation. Her work embraces contamination as an act of collaboration. She holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo and a BFA from McMaster University. She has recently exhibited at Xpace, The Plumb, Platform, Ed Video Media Art Centre, and the Hamilton Artist Inc.

Our conversation was recorded in Ohròn:wakon, or so-called Hamilton, Ontario, within Treaty 3 territory, on the land of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe.

Welcome to this bonus episode of the podcast. Today’s episode features an ambient recording of Maria’s 2021 installation of her work Rat Plastic Wood. Enjoy!

Rebecca Payne is a queer rural artist who is trained in painting, drawing and printmaking. They have an appreciation for banal and liminal spaces and practice sitting with fleeting moments that—in one year, one day, one minute—will pass and may never happen again the same way. Their current work explores transitional themes of experiencing loneliness, awkwardness, and the atmospheres within banal spaces.

Maya Ben David (MBD) is a Toronto-based Jewish-Iranian artist. Working in video, installation and performance, she creates worlds and characters that aid her ongoing exploration of anthropomorphism, cosplay and performative personas.

Daura Campos is a Latinx, self-taught, lens-based artist and curator based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Her photographic practise challenges traditional image-making processes, revealing itself as more than a meta-commentary with a subtext that prompts broader conversations on the implications of existing in a dissident body.

Her What the Luck series was awarded by Adolescent and exhibited in Experimental Photo Festival, Visual Space, Make Room and has been displayed on billboards in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Toronto. Earlier works have been published globally on Curated by Girls, Container Love, The Soon Project, and others.

Xiao Han is an artist and curator based in Wuhan and Saskatoon. Using photography, Han’s research-creation projects investigate diaspora, identity, gender issues and cross-cultural interpretation. As an independent curator, Han has curated numerous exhibitions collectively with artists and art institutions in Canada and China. Han's public art "Yee Clun’s Lost Story'' was permanently installed, in the summer of 2017, in Regina Arts Park. This project reflects the lost story of immigrant and restaurant owner Yee Clun in Regina in 1924 when he challenged the racist "Saskatchewan's White Women's Labour Law ''.

Xiao Han (Madam X) is an artist, curator and writer. With photography, Han’s artwork focuses on sexual exploration through the BDSM culture. Han organizes an online-based community with BDSM-Art activities. With this community, Han does interviews and story writing to share experiences of unique interests.

Jocelyne Junker is a Métis artist born in Saskatchewan. Her practice explores how photography and painting can become entangled in performative gestures that affect the formulation of self-identity. Through photography, she questions representation and engages with constructions of identity in the public sphere by creating a visual language that co-opts media and challenges its original context. She received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, in 2018. She’s currently on the board of Access Gallery and resides in the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəyəm (Musqueam), Sḵwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil- Waututh) Nations.

Our conversation was recorded in Hamilton within Treaty 3 territory on the ancestral land of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe nations under the Dish With One Spoon wampum agreement.

This episode of Hopping the Fence contains use of the dated term “split personality”. See the show notes for an explainer on Dissociative Identity Disorder.