The Source: Rethinking Water Through Contemporary Art

born and raised in Montréal in 1970 and now resides in Toronto. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in printmaking, sculpture, installation and video performance. Bariteau is a graduate of Concordia University in Montréal (1999), and obtained her Master of Fine Arts degree at York University in Toronto (2007). She has exhibited her work extensively, both nationally and internationally. In 2014 she was a visiting artist in the Department of Art and Design at the National Taipei University of Education in Taiwan, where she exhibited her recent work. Bariteau has also shown her work in Belgium at the Frans Masereel Centre (2012); in Australia at the International Multi-disciplinary Printmaking Conference (2011); in New York City at the International Print Centre (2010); in Russia at the 6th annual Novosibirsk Graphic Art Biennial (2009); and in Japan at the Tokyo Screen Print Biennale (2009). Bariteau has received several grants and awards for her work. Most recently she was the recipient of the 2014–2015 Nick Novak Fellowship at Open Studio in Toronto. Her work can be seen in private and public collections, including Foreign Affairs Canada and the National Library of Québec. Bariteau teaches printmaking at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.

born in Chilliwack, B.C., in 1981 and is currently based out of Vancouver. Boisjoly is a West Coast
Indigenous artist of Haida and Québécois descent whose work connects these worlds and speaks to the complexities of contemporary Indigenous experiences in a present-day context. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Emily Carr Institute of Art+ Design in Vancouver (2006) and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia (2008). His recent solo exhibitions include “From age to age, as its shape slowly unravelled…” at VOX in Montreal (2015); Interlocutions at Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa (2014); (And) Other Echoes at Simon Fraser University Gallery in Vancouver (2014); Raymond Boisjoly at Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver (2013); and As It Comes at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (2013). Boisjoly has participated in numerous group exhibitions and projects including Pleinairismat the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff (2013); Tools for Conviviality at the Power Plant in Toronto (2012); Phantasmagoria at Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver (2012); and Raymond Boisjoly, Jordy Hamilton, Laura Piasta: Studies in Decay at Or Gallery in Vancouver (2011). He was awarded a Fleck Fellowship from the Banff Centre in 2010, and in the fall of 2015 served as lead faculty for “In Kind” Negotiations, a thematic residency at the Banff Centre. Boisjoly is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver. Boisjoly is ECUAD: Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studio in the Faculty of Visual Art + Material Practice at Emily Carr University, Vancouver.

an interdisciplinary artist working out of St. Catharines, Ontario, where she was born in 1953. She holds an Honours Bachelor degree in Fine Arts from York University in Toronto (1975). Chitty also studied at the Canadian International Institute of Applied Negotiation in Ottawa (1997) and the University of Waterloo (1998). In her work, site, corporeality, temporality and attention to process are threaded through, and her projects expand on ideas, emotions and sensations regarding what it means to be in a body, a place, with others. Chitty’s work primarily entails performance and video-based installations involving sound. She has created public artists’ gardens, constructed photographs and has worked with community-based strategies, all of which span the gallery, the stage and the public realm. Chitty is known as an innovator in early Canadian performance art and as a video artist, with exhibitions including the 11e Biennale de Paris (1980) and the opening of the new National Gallery of Canada (1988). Streaming Twelve is part of a body of work, begun in 2008, which engaged with the North Niagara watershed. Her most recent work is the 2015 performance Lucius’ Garden. She is currently expanding this body of work with the website, walking project and exhibition Confluence Field Trips, to be presented in early 2016.

born in Tehran, Iran, in 1972 and moved to Canada in 1992. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree
from the University of Western Ontario (2010) and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo (2003). As a culturally diverse artist living in Canada, she navigates, through her recent art practice, the terrains of cultural translation and explores the processes involved in cultural transfer and transformation. Esfahani has recently exhibited in Human Nature at Carleton University Art Gallery, and the Kenderdine Art Gallery at the University of Saskatchewan (2015). She is also a recipient of grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council and the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund. As part of the SSHRCC grant, Esfahani participated in a research/creation group entitled Immersion Emergencies and Possible Worlds: Engaging Water as Culture and Resource Through Contemporary Art. In 2015 she was nominated for the Jameel Prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England. Currently, Esfahani is a lecturer at the University of Waterloo and works from her studio at Kitchener’s artist-run centre, Globe Studios. Her work is represented in public and private collections, including the Canada Council Art Bank.

a native of Kashmir, India, born in 1983; he currently resides in Delhi, India. Garoo received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Western Ontario in London (2011) and his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from Delhi University. The repetitive actions he uses throughout his practice present an emptiness that is emulated on the surface of the work. Of interest to him is the past resurfacing in the present: what can be situated within the is and the was. More fundamentally, Garoo is invested in working between that which manifests before us and that which is non-manifest. His desire is to express ideas beyond the strictly utilitarian, which makes his use of ordinary objects all the more complex.

an artist, curator and teacher/academic. He was born in Winnipeg, in 1957, and currently resides in London, Ontario. Mahon studied at the University of Manitoba (1983) and the University of British Columbia, where he received his Master of Fine Arts degree (1991). His work includes print-based projects that engage with historical and contemporary aspects of printmaking, and involves responding to gallery and museum collections, as well as establishing community-based art initiatives. Mahon’s artwork has been exhibited widely in Canada, at Museum London, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery, and internationally, including at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, China (2005) and in Barthète (Toulouse), France (2011). The SSHRC-funded projectArt and Cold Cash, which involved artists from southern Canada and Baker Lake, Nunavut, was produced and exhibited between 2004 and 2010 at MOCCA in Toronto; MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie; Platform in Winnipeg; Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina; and a book was published by Toronto’s YYZ in 2010. Mahon was in residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York in 2007, and the Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium and at La Maison Patrimoniale de Barthète in France, both in 2011. Recent exhibitions include McMaster Museum of Art (2013); Robert Langen Art Gallery at Wilfred Laurier University (2013); and Gallery 1C03 at the University of Winnipeg (2014). The catalogue Water Structures, with an interview by Robert Enright, was released in 2014.

born in Halifax, N.S., in 1978, and currently lives and works in Toronto. He completed his PhD at the University of Western Ontario (2014) and holds a Master of Fine Arts degree (2007), as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts, from the University of British Columbia (2002). His work draws attention to photography’s relationship to the scientific, as well as to the materiality of photographs. Alongside his art practice, Miner works on writing, facilitating exhibitions and the artist project Moire. Recent solo exhibition projects include Album Gallery in Toronto (2015) and the McIntosh Gallery in London, Ontario (2013). Selected group exhibitions include, most recently, Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton (2016); Gallery 44 in Toronto (2015); the Beijing Center for the Arts in Beijing (2009); Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver (2007); and Kulturforum Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, Germany (2001). Miner is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award (2014), the Toronto Arts Council (2014) and, most recently, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, both in 2015.

born in 1966 in Sutton Coldfield, U.K., and is currently based out of central Paris and Les Moulins in Seine-et-Marne, France. She graduated with an Honours degree in Fashion-Knitwear Design from Nottingham Trent University (1989). After moving to Paris, Orta began practicing as a visual artist in 1991, exhibiting her work in galleries and museums internationally. She is currently Chair of Art and the Environment at the University of the Arts London, where she has been a Professor of Art and the Environment at the London College of Fashion since 2007. Orta was the inaugural Rootstein Hopkins Chair from 2002 to 2007 at the University of the Arts London, and head of Man and Humanity at the Design Academy Eindhoven, a pioneering, socially driven and sustainable master’s program she co-founded, from 2002 to 2005.

born in 1953 in Rosario, Argentina, and is currently based out of central Paris and Les Moulins in Seine-et-Marne, France. He studied at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario in the Faculty of Fine Arts (1979) and in the Faculty of Architecture (1980). Orta was a Fine Arts lecturer there and a member of CONICET, the Argentinean national council for scientific research, until 1984. He then received a scholarship from the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs to pursue a Diplôme d’études approfondies at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he now resides.

a multimedia artist who was born in Chongqing province, China, in 1953. He currently resides in Vancouver, B.C., working with painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography, video, digital imagery, text, performance art and installation. Gu Xiong has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, in solo and group exhibitions, as well as realizing public art commissions. He has participated in the 55th Venice Biennale Parallel ExhibitionVoice of the Unseen: Chinese Independent Art 1979–Today (2013); Border Zones: New Art Across Cultures at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver (2010); Post Avant-garde Chinese Contemporary Art: Four Directions of the New Era in Hong Kong (2007); the Shanghai Biennale (2004), where he was one of four Canadian representatives; and the groundbreaking exhibition China Avant-Garde at the China National Museum of Fine Arts in Beijing (1989). His work is represented in institutions such as the National Gallery of Canada, China National Museum of Fine Arts and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Gu Xiong has published books, exhibition catalogues and book covers, and worked as curator for exhibitions by Canadian and Chinese artists. His artwork has received significant critical recognition, including reviews in the international art magazines Flash Art and Art in America, as well as the New York Times.

born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1962. He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at York University in Toronto (1986). Reid was Director/Curator of Rodman Hall Art Centre at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, from 2012 to 2016. From 2009 through 2011, he was Executive Director of the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, one of Western Canada’s premiere venues for contemporary art. He has also served as Director/Curator of the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound from 2001 to 2009, Curator of the Art Gallery of Mississauga from 1992 to 2001, and Associate Curator at the Ontario Crafts Council from 1990 to 1992. In 2002, Reid attended the prestigious Museum Leadership Institute at the Getty Leadership Institute hosted by the J. Paul Getty Trust at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of over sixty exhibition catalogues and several published art books. In 2013, he won the Ontario Association of Art Galleries’ Curatorial Writing Award for his text in the catalogue Simone Jones: All That Is Solid, and won again in 2015 for his curatorial text in Mary Anne Barkhouse: Settlement/Regency.

EPCOR Chair for Water and Climate Security at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. He is the author or co-author of numerous high-profile works on water. In his work, Sandford is committed to translating scientific research outcomes into a language that decision-makers can use to craft timely and meaningful public policy, and to bringing an international example to bear on local water issues. Sandford is also senior advisor on water issues for the Interaction Council, a global public policy forum composed of more than thirty former heads of state, including Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien, U.S. president Bill Clinton and prime minister of Norway Gro Brundtland. Sandford is also a Fellow of the Centre for Hydrology at the University of Saskatchewan and a Fellow of the Biogeoscience Institute at the University of Calgary. He sits on the advisory board of Living Lakes Canada and is a member of the Forum for Leadership on Water (FLOW), a national water policy research group centred in Toronto. In 2013, Alberta Ventures magazine recognized Sandford as one of the year’s fifty most influential Albertans.