Difference of a Shared Spirit

Maria Hupfield (she/her), a transdisciplinary artist, crosses boundaries at the intersection of performance art and design. She is deeply invested in embodied practice, Native feminisms, and ethical collaborative processes. Her work positions the art object as active belongings, with sculptures becoming performers in a form of object choreography between artist, audience, and art gallery; her works are engaged in an ongoing series of relations with community, places, ideas, and materials. She is an urban off-reservation member of the Anishinabek People belonging to Wasauksing First Nation in Ontario. Hupfield is the inaugural City of Toronto artist in residence and was awarded the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Prize 2023. Her art travelled nationally with “Beat Nation”, grunt gallery, Vancouver; as a solo project “Nine Years Towards the Sun” at the Heard Museum, Phoenix Arizona USA; and internationally with “The One Who Keeps on Giving”, The Power Plant, Toronto. Her work was also shown at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Galerie de l’UQAM, Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada, NONAM – Nordamerika Native Museum Zurich, National Museum of the American Indian, Museum of Arts and Design in New York, Abrons Arts Center, Center for Art – Research and Alliances (CARA), BRIC House Gallery, The Bronx Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and SITE SANTA FE amongst others. Hupfield is represented by Patel Brown Toronto and Galerie Hugues Charbonneau Montreal.

Olivia Shortt (they/them; Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation, Ireland) is a weirdo, noisemaker, video artist, wannabe fashion icon, curator, and composer.

Shortt has been described as a “glittering, rising star in the exploratory music firmament” by Musicworks Magazine and named by the CBC as one of “6 Indigenous composers you need to know in 2024”. Shortt has performed at The Whitney Biennial (NYC), The Holland Festival (Amsterdam) and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC). Iconic moments include appearing and playing saxophone on CBC Kids’ ‘Gary the Unicorn’ and lending their voice off-screen in Stephen King’s ‘In the Tall Grass’ and Season 3 of ‘Chucky’.

SA Smythe is a multi-instrumentalist, storyteller/memory worker, transdisciplinary educator and critical theorist concerned with the thrival of our relations beyond every border. Smythe’s transmedia practice weaves black trans poetics, sound composition, performance, light sculpture, and archival ephemera. Their collaborative and solo works have been developed at international artist-composer residencies and featured in exhibitions and multimedia installations, experimental film, poetry anthologies, and at literary and performance festivals including: the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, FADO Performance Art Centre, and the Banff Centre in Canada; BASE Milano, Palazzino indiano arte/CANGO (Florence), Mattatoio Museum (Rome), and Villa Lena Foundation in Italy; Kampnagel (Hamburg); Africa Writes Literary Festival (co-headliner, London [UK]); and GXRLSCHOOL Los Angeles, Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts, The Church (New York), and the Lindemann Performing Arts Center (Brown Arts Institute) in the States. They were a 2023-24 MacDowell Fellow in Multimedia Installation and recipient of the 2022 Rome Prize for Modern Italian Studies. Currently based between Tkarón:to and Italy, Smythe works at University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information as Assistant Professor of Black Studies & the Archive and Director of the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis.