Dallas Cant, Artist-Researcher
Dallas Cant is an interdisciplinary visual artist who has recently completed a B.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg. They are interested in exploring how queer performance practices and curatorial methodologies can work to centre sex workers and ongoing calls for decriminalization. Dallas recognizes the creative form as medium of resistance and incorporates video, poetry, and textile sculptures in their work. Currently, Dallas is co-curating SWARM with Dr. Roewan Crowe, an online exhibit presented with the University of Winnipeg’s Gallery 1C03. Dallas’s video work has screened in spaces like PLATFORM centre for Photographic & Digital Arts, Images Festival and Gimli Film Festival. Photo by Callie Lugosi
Roewan Crowe, Artist-Researcher
Roewan Crowe is energized by acts of disruption and radical transformation. Born under the big skies of Saskatchewan and raised in scofflaw Alberta, Crowe left the prairies to deepen her engagement with art and feminism. After completing doctoral studies at the University of Toronto, a return to the prairies inspired art and writing centered on queer feminist reclamation practices asking questions about site-specificity, whiteness and queer settler identities. This work includes: digShift, a decolonizing and environmental reclamation project using performance and multichannel installation to explore the shifting layers of an abandoned gas station; Lifting Stone, a queer femme performance/installation creating intimate poetic encounters; and the queer Western Quivering Land , a gritty feminist meditation on the possibilities of art to reckon with the ongoing legacies of violence and colonization. As part of the artist collective, CONSTELACIONES, she traveled to the Atacama Desert in Chile to perform and create a monument, an unauthorized sound sculpture with ceramic forms created by Monica Martinez. Dr. Roewan Crowe and Dr. Helene Vosters co-edited the open access digital book, Return Atacama: Engaging Histories of Political Violence Through Performance and Durational Witnessing which assembles the many movements, reflections, and practices from this project. Her paid gig: Associate Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Winnipeg.
Lorena Sekwan Fontaine, Associate Professor
Lorena Sekwan Fontaine (LL.B., LL.M., Ph.D) is Cree-Anishinabe and a member of the Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba, Canada. She is the Indigenous Academic Lead and an Associate Professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies at The University of Winnipeg. Her research includes Indigenous language rights, linguicide and the legacy of the residential schools. Her most recent research includes Nindibaajimomin: A Digital Storytelling Project for Children of Residential School Survivors, and most recently, the Mite Achimowin (Heart Talk) Research Project, which uses oral history and arts-based research approaches to explore culturally-rooted knowledge concerning oppressive mechanisms influencing the caring for one’s heart among First Nations women. She has also worked with the Assembly of First Nations as an advisor on Aboriginal languages for a number of years.
Franchesca Hebert-Spence, Curator
Franchesca Hebert-Spence is a MA candidate in Curatorial Studies with a BFA in ceramics from Ishkabatens Waasa Gaa Inaabateg, Brandon University Visual and Aboriginal Arts program. Hebert-Spence’s grandmother was from Sagkeeng First Nation, Manitoba, and her research focuses on identity both as an Indigenous woman as well as a feminist. Hebert-Spence began her art journey as a maker who has created an empathetic lens within her curatorial praxis. Kinship is a common theme within her projects and those responsibilities direct the engagement she maintains within her community.
Kaliesa Delilah Mcgillvray, Artist-Researcher
Kaliesa is a Scottish/Métis multidisciplinary artist and student pursuing a B.A. in Religion & Culture at the University of Winnipeg. Her art practice is informed by her ancestry and the act of remembering through embodied labour. She is interested in beadwork, painting, and video, where small fragments hold webs of memories and histories. Currently, Kaliesa is a research assistant for the greenhouse artlab and collective SWARM, learning through research-creation methods invested in nurturing earth’s complex kinship systems. She is focused on an on-going project where she creates varying species of bees with beads as gifts for members of her metaphorical hive.
Hailey Primrose, Artist-Researcher
Hailey Primrose is a Queer/Métis artist, musician and feminist thinker whose ancestral homelands are shared between the Red River Settlement and One Arrow First Nation. She has spent her life exploring various art forms including illustration, collage, multimedia and primarily resonates with singing (nikamowin). Currently she is working on a contribution to SWARM with Dr. Lorena Sekwan Fontaine (University of Winnipeg). Together they will be exploring connections between bee ecology, kinship, and Indigenous language resurgence. She is also pursuing a BA in Women’s & Gender Studies with a minor in Indigenous Studies at the University of Winnipeg.
Willow Rector, Artist-Researcher
Willow Rector is a multimedia artist whose art practice is fuelled by the interplay between scholarly and archival research and the acts of artistic creation. Her research processes are rooted in her early career studying and teaching English Literature at the university level and have provided a solid foundation for her visual art practice since its inception in 2006. Additionally, she has studied various media through courses and mentorship programs at Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA), the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and Martha Street Studio. Deepening her understanding of the various ecologies in which she lives is a foundational influence of Rector’s visual art practice. Her early series of embroidered handbags, Handing on History (2006-12), commemorates the lives and work of women writers and artists with botanical embroideries because she discovered that the barriers faced by those women paralleled the privation and obscurity that plagued generations of female botanical artists as well as the plundering of the plants they depicted. In 2012, her understanding of human/ non-human dynamics shifted as she began work on TRAPPED (2012-present), her series of hand embroidered animal pelts. The key compositional goal for each sculpture is to re(place) the animal in the ecosystem from whence it was taken by hand embroidering the native landscape of that animal and integrating that embroidery with the pelt. Currently, she is conducting an extensive research project exploring the popularity of herbaria in European cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 2018, she created a photographic portrait series of a rare eighteenth-century botanical book, which relays the artistic beauty of the book itself, while bearing witness to the loss of plant species and documenting the effects of human interaction on the book itself. As it evolves, this body of work will integrate the botanical drawing, photography, and hand embroidery skills that define Rector’s artistic practice. Rector’s work has been highlighted in solo exhibitions in Manitoba and the Yukon, and she has participated in group exhibitions across Canada. She has received grants from the Manitoba Arts Council and the Winnipeg Arts Council.
Maram Rocha, Artist-Researcher
Maram Rocha is a queer academic alchemist, and research assistant to Dr. Pauline Greenhill, as well as the Greenhouse ArtLab/ SWARM collective (under supervision of Dr. Roewan Crowe) at The University of Winnipeg. He came from Brazil with his spouse, mostly due to the extreme anti-diversity political climate in their home country. With a former BSc degree in Biological Sciences, his interests shifted into Psychology and Gender Studies, as he participated in activist collectives at the University of Sao Paulo. Now a student and research assistant at UW, he is interested in investigating narratives through Textual Analysis, especially concerning popular culture. Currently, he is working alongside Dr. Greenhill on a project involving the same kind of analysis.
Past greenhouse artlab Collaborators
Christina Hajjar, Social Media Consultant
A queer femme first-generation Lebanese-Canadian, Christina Hajjar is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and organizer. Through poetry, performance, installation, and zines, her practice grapples with diaspora, intergenerational inheritance, and memory. She is passionate about collaboration and skills-sharing as tools of community-building and resistance! Hajjar is a 2018-19 recipient of the Foundation Mentorship Program at MAWA (Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art) and was a 2017-18 recipient of Cartae Open School at aceartinc. Hajjar co-runs Flux Gallery and co-edits the Flux Writing Program to cultivate emerging art and writing practices. Hajjar is co-creator of zines Whiny Femmes (with art and writing by queer femmes of all genders) and Carnation (with art and writing addressing displacement and diaspora). She has recently completed undergrads in Women’s and Gender Studies and Business and Administration at the University of Winnipeg. Hajjar is based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Treaty 1 Territory, the traditional territory of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation. https://christinahajjar.com/
Helga Jakobson, SWARM collaborator
Helga Jakobson is an artist living on Treaty One Territory. In 2017, she received an MFA from AKV St. Joost (The Netherlands) in conjunction with courses in the Transdisciplinary New Media program at the Paris College of Art (France). She has participated in residencies across Canada and Europe, has given lectures in France, the United Kingdom, Colombia and Canada. She was selected for the Emerging Excellence Award by the Manitoba Arts Council in 2019 and by V2_for their Graduation Edition (in recognition of being one of the five most promising graduates of 2017 across Europe working in New Media), and has mentored through Creative Manitoba, Video Pool and as a substitute mentor for MAWA’s Foundation Mentorship Program. She is currently working and researching with the SWARM Collective on bee eco-cultures in the age of chthulucene, as well as exploring, amplifying and reflecting on the barely visible, tangible or audible.
Jen Sebring, Artist-Researcher
Jen Sebring lives in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 Territory, as a queer white settler, and chronically ill feminist writer, artist, and researcher. She is completing a BAH in Women’s and Gender Studies and plans to continue her studies post-graduation. Her work largely contends with the many ways we understand, grapple with, and represent narratives of illness. Often working with feminist, queer, or disability theory as a conceptual framework, Jen is committed to exploring the complexities of inhabiting marginal, and at times, multiple identities, and the ways these identities are made visible or invisible. Although her practice is primarily situated in photography, she is often expanding her repertoire and experimenting across disciplines, methodologies, and mediums. Recent research and artistic projects have included explorations into experiential learning and human-nonhuman relationships, which foreground collaborative processes of art-making, knowledge production and community building; textile work situated in theories of feminist embodiment, affect, and geography; and autoethnographic research centred in feminist queer crip frameworks. Jen is excited to be apart of SWARM, and looks forward to the generative thinking and making that will stem from collective artistic processes.