Josh Clendenin
Josh Clendenin is a performer and educator working between the United States and Canada, whose practice inquires into the phenomenology of performance, what happens in the body when language is produced by the mind and body. Working across English, French, and Irish, he treats multilingualism as a somatic condition. His solo Folamh holds linguistic insecurity as social anxiety in the body; Babel en Bhablóin, devised across eight languages, builds speech from breath to sound and translates poetry from the Révolution tranquille as a practice of (re)discovering identity through improvisational somatic movement. A yoga practitioner and teacher, he draws on that lineage as a principal technique for inquiry.
Lauren Michelle Levesque
Lauren Michelle Levesque (she/her) is an artist, researcher and associate professor in the School of Leadership, Ecology, and Equity at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Her creative practice includes sound, poetry, and textiles. She has published in academic journals such as Art/Research International, Research in Drama Education, and Studies in Social Justice. Her poetry and photographs have also been featured in the journals Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and drifting sands: a journal of haibun and tanka prose.
Carl Stewart
Carl Stewart is a weaver and teacher living and working in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
For close to 40 years Stewart has employed traditional hand-weaving techniques to explore the fundamental role textiles play in the crafting of queer culture and identity. As a cis-gender queer man practicing within a perceived “feminine” domain, his work challenges heteronormative and gendered structures of power by celebrating, memorializing, documenting and commemorating the intimate, the fabulous, the egregious and the tragic.
Stewart’s work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums across Canada and the United States.
His work hangs in the collections of Canada Council Art Bank, the City of Ottawa, the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.