Artists
Bodies of Water
(b.1990, Mumbai, India) is a contemporary visual artist, educator, researcher and administrator based in Toronto, Canada. Born and raised in Mumbai, Akshata has lived in Vadodara and the UK. Her works reflect upon her lived experiences of moving homes, cities and countries. Through a lens of immigration, war, displacement, home and belonging. She works towards co-creating with her viewers an immersive experience and interactive art installations which consists of drawing, painting, ephemeral temporary sculptures and art in virtual reality. She was an Assistant Professor at Parul University in Vadodara, where she taught drawing and painting in India before moving to Canada. She works as the Program and Gallery Manager at Arts Etobicoke, a Toronto based not for profit organization that supports local artists and runs educational programs along with curating shows in the Storefront Gallery and is very invested in community arts through her job and art practice. She is a newcomer to Canada and soon after she arrived in 2017, she became active in the arts scene, widely showing her interactive art with several communities across Toronto.
Bodies of Water
Mirna Chacín
Mirna Chacín is a Venezuelan-born Canadian visual artist who immigrated in 2011, looking for the inclusion and equality that Canada gives the LGBTQ2+ community. Shortly before immigrating, The University of Zulia, her alma mater, awarded Mirna The Francisco Hung’s Gold Medal for her artistic achievements in Venezuela.
In Toronto, Mirna was awarded the Community Impact Award by TheMennonite New Life Centre of Toronto for her outstanding contributions in telling the stories of newcomer inclusion through photography.She was also a recipient of The Newcomer and Refugee Artist Mentorship grant by the Toronto Arts Council, The Ontario Art Council and the Toronto Arts Foundation. Mirna’s artwork reflects her experiences around death, loss and grief, uprooting, belonging, history, and traditions.
Bodies of Water
Shabnam Afrand
Shabnam Afrand is a multi-disciplinary visual artist and educator, born and educated in Tehran, Iran. As part of the Iranian diaspora, Afrand explores concepts of identity, relocation and pressing sociopolitical discourses at the intersection of personal and collective memory while she aims to destabilize preconceived material associations through the use of repurposed wood, found objects, and precious metals like bronze.
Afrand obtained her Master of Fine Arts degree from Azad University in 2001. She then later taught in the faculty of Fine Arts at Azad University in 2010 and moved to Canada in 2013. In 2017 and 2018, Shabnam received Toronto Arts Foundation’s RBC Arts Access Fund. She has received Toronto Arts Foundation RBC Space Award twice and the Toronto Arts Council Newcomer Refugee Artist Mentorship Grant. She currently teaches abstract painting and mixed media at the Toronto District School Board.
Bodies of Water
Peter Owusu-Ansah
Ghanaian Born (1979) Peter Owusu-Ansah is Deaf visual artist. Being Deaf means seeing is how he understand life. Seeing produces reactions on their own. He believes he can communicate through our eyesight without words. He had explore the curiosity of see life through paintings, photographing and manipulating photographs into pop art. He just find out what it looks like if he do it. In 2009 when he zoomed in one of his pop art works, he was wowed by some colourful pixels. He became deeply curious about the greatest colours imaginable in the universe. He had worked toward experiencing the sight of many great colours using photoshop. He emerged in the art scene in 2018. His works had been shown around Canada and mostly on instagram. He lives and works in Toronto.
Bodies of Water
Onaman Collective
Onaman Collective was founded in 2014 by Christi Belcourt, Isaac Murdoch, and Erin Konsmo, a group of Indigenous artists and environmentalists who engage in art-based activism. With a focus on environmental causes as they relate to First Nation communities across Canada, Onaman Collective promotes the power of grassroots organizing and raises the voices of communities engaged in water and land protection actions.
Christi Belcourt
Christi Belcourt is a Michif artist whose cross-disciplinary works in painting, beadwork, and video explore and celebrate the natural world. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and the Thunder Bay Art Gallery. She is a past recipient of the GovernorGeneral’s Innovation Awards and the Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.In 2014 she was named Aboriginal Arts Laureate by the Ontario Arts Council.
Isaac Murdoch
Isaac Murdoch is an artist, illustrator, author, and a respected storyteller and holder of traditional knowledge. He is from the fish clan and Serpent River First Nation. Much of his work involves the preservation of Anishinaabe cultural practices and he leads workshops around transferring traditional Indigenous knowledge and histories to younger generations. He, along with Christi Belcourt, wrote The Trail of Nenaboozhoo and Other CreationStories, a compendium of legends of the Ojibway creator spirit and other creation stories.
