sean procyk’s Macro dose is a psychoactive installation where giant mushrooms fruit from discarded mattresses. These bioluminescent fungal forms tower over spectators, emanating sonic vibrations at the threshold of human perception. This surreal encounter may induce wonder, general concern and/or amusement. While creating the work the artist was thinking about processes of migration, displacement, infestation and colonization.

The artist’s practice focuses on creating immersive public engagements through site-specific installation, architecture and community workshops. Each project responds to its regional context, with a particular focus on the relationships that exist between landscape, community and ecology. His work explores processes of ecological succession, land-based disturbance, human alienation and collective action. He works primarily with found, reclaimed and natural materials.

sean procyk is an artist and playground designer. His home and interactive studio are located in Hamilton, ON. His works have been exhibited at Hamilton Artists Inc., Latitude 53, Stride Contemporary Art Gallery, Elemental Festival, Convergence Conference on Art and Technology in Banff and Nuit Blanche Toronto.

St Marie φ Walker’s When you think of me… draws attention to the social and psychological forces that construct our sense of self. The qualities that we choose to define us also conceal many of our vulnerabilities, contradictions, and insecurities. The rise of a virtual dimension and its carefully curated profiles and threads more easily house our constructed self, but also the internalized conflicts of human nature.

St Marie φ Walker — Denise St Marie and Timothy Walker — are a collaborative dyad. Their collective work is primarily influenced by debate and dialogue on topics in philosophy and psychology. Together they investigate the terms and conditions of human perception in order to evaluate how belief systems manifest. The pair met in London, ON in 2005 where they were both developing their own artistic practice. Since then they have installed work in Japan, China and different parts of North America, including Las Vegas, Chicago, Detroit, Victoria, the Canadian Prairies, the Niagara Region, Windsor, London, Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. They have signed past work with the pseudonym TIMEANDDESIRE. Initially working in Print-based Art Intervention, they have since grown to include Social Practice and New Genre Public Art. Combined they have acquired these interesting acronyms: BFA, BEd., MFA; BA (Phil.), MFA. They have been shown in various galleries and outdoor exhibitions and have received numerous grants both independently and jointly, which they have used to deliver quality experiences for other humans. Some venues include: CAFKA, Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Toronto, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Art Mûr, Art Souterrain (Montreal), Markham Museum, the Art Gallery of Windsor, Art Gallery of Waterloo, Thames Art Gallery, Malaspina Printmakers (Vancouver) and Idea Exchange (Cambridge). They were also highlighted in CBC’s Artist series This Artworks! In 201, St Marie φ Walker travelled to New York on the Keith & Win Shantz International Fellowship. In 2018 they were dually awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal in Fine Art for their achievements at the University of Waterloo. They are currently based out of the Tri-Cities area Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo.

Hiba Abdallah’s In Retrospect is a text-based billboard that offers a public observation and declaration. The statement aims to provide a jump off point for questions rooted in the critical and vital consideration of the current and future state of our communities. Where we are we now? What are we hoping to change? What are we willing to fight for?

Hiba Abdallah is an artist and organizer who frequently works with others. Her projects are embedded in social practice and often use text as a way of exploring topics of locality and civic agency. Abdallah received her BFA from the University of Windsor in 2012 and MFA from the University of Guelph in 2017. Recent exhibitions and public projects include “Everything I Wanted to Tell You” for Nuit Blanche Scarborough, “Neighbourhood Trust” with Lakeshore Arts and Myseum Toronto, “It can only be this place” at the Doris McCarthy Gallery, “Rehearsing Disagreement” for the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, and “A List of Antagonisms” at Centre[3] in Hamilton.

In Retrospect is presented in association with The McMaster Museum of Art in support of public art initiatives at McMaster University and throughout the city of Hamilton.

United Way Canada and the Pantone Colour Institute have joined forces to create Unignorable, a new colour specifically designed to highlight societal issues impacting Canadians and encouraging community action to address them. The colour, a friendly and engaging orange coral that stops viewers in their tracks, demands attention to the issues it represents and with its high physicality, induces us to act. It is part of a national campaign to help make local issues unignorable. The aptly named light-and-haze installation Unignorable, created in collaboration with creative agency TAXI, debuted at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche 2018. It aims to prompt individuals to engage with underacknowledged issues and undertake difficult conversations within their communities. The installation, like its namesake colour, is meant to represent the social ills and the continuous work the United Way and its various member agencies and community partners do to mitigate these issues.

Art[4] Change: Indigenous Women Speak is a collaborative animated video by artists Monique Aura Bedard, Tia Cavanagh and Alex Jacobs-Blum that seeks to re-interpret a garment through different visual aesthetics; movement, photography, beadwork and will be projected onto a building during Supercrawl. This project aims to reclaim the past through story and truth connecting to the residential school legacy, in the belief that multigenerational healing is a pathway to empowerment and resiliency for all generations. 

This project is made possible by the Canada Council for the Arts. 

Monique Aura Bedard is an Onyota’a:ka (Oneida) artist, currently based in Tkaronto. She graduated from the University of Lethbridge with a BFA (Studio Art) and is a DTATI Candidate. Through her art practice, Aura uses murals, art as healing workshops, mixed media, and digital illustrations to discuss intergenerational healing, identity, empowerment, and mothering. She looks to community to collectively explore personal storytelling and truth-sharing.

Originally from the northern shores of Lake Huron in Ontario, Tia Cavanagh has lived and studied in Havelock, Norwood, Peterborough, Montreal and Toronto. Achieving her BFA at OCAD university she now studies at Trent University working on her Masters degree in Canadian and Indigenous Studies. Cavanagh is a multi-disciplinary artist using materials such as paint, wood, fabrics, sculpture and projection. For her, storytelling, process, discovery and new meaning are at the core of art making. With these aspects at the root, she continues to explore approaches and understanding through the creative lens of an Indigenous woman drawing upon Indigenous research methodologies.

Alex Jacobs-Blum is a band member of Six Nations of the Grand River Territory of the Lower Cayuga Nation and Euro-Canadian. Navigating the Indigenous-colonizer hyphen of her identity through transformative experiential learning and critical self-reflective storytelling. Nationally Jacobs-Blum’s work has been exhibited at Gallery 115 at the University of Ottawa, the Woodland Cultural Centre, Brantford and Critical Distance, Toronto. Internationally has shown at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. She is also the recipient of the Canon Award of Excellence for Narrative. Alex holds a Bachelor of Photography from the Sheridan Institute of Technology (2015).

Staged at Supercrawl 2018, Christopher McLeod’s participatory art installation Project EMERGENCY asked two simple yet complex questions of 1,491 participants, “What’s the emergency? What are you concerned about?” The top three emergencies that emerged from that sample were environment, health, and safe streets. How concerned are you? And what are you willing to do about it? At Supercrawl 2019, McLeod revisits that terrain in EMERGENCY Pt2., Structures of Action. Come speak to one of our hosts, make a pledge to action, pick a colour, and stick that pledge right onto the pillar beacon. There are five levels of action for each emergency topic.

Featuring special performances by
Hamilton Youth Poets:

Friday September 13, 8:00pm-8:30pm

Saturday September 14, 12:00pm-12:30pm
Saturday September 14, 4:00pm-7:30pm
Saturday September 14, 7:00pm-7:30pm

Sunday September 15, 12:00pm-12:30pm
Sunday September 15, 4:00pm-7:30pm
Sunday September 15, 7:00pm-7:30pm

Christopher McLeod has been exhibiting nationally since 1998 and internationally since 2009. He has a BA in Studio Art from McMaster University and completed his MFA from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was Artist in Residence two years running at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, and his interactive sculptures have been exhibited at Nuit Blanche. His work has also been featured at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, BlackFlash and Water Canada Magazine, Propeller Gallery, and the McMaster Museum of Art. His art practice explores ecological themes through publicly presented projects focusing on creating social and environmental awareness. Christopher McLeod has just recently completed Great Art for Great Lakes, where he directed eight participatory public art projects by eight Ontario artists.

Building on a youth-inspired charter of rights for parks, Artasia – Culture for Kids in the Arts’ annual arts initiative for children — empowers young people to care for the environment through arts, technology, and story exchange. By activating and caring for local greenspaces, children consider the interconnectedness of living things. With help from a herd of recycled aluminum caribou (created in collaboration with artist Dave Hind), their ideas migrate from the playground to the planet.

Mindful of the land and its stories, children explore concerns about habitat, plant varieties, pollinators, and endangered species. Arts activities transform questions into civic action, as children assemble creatures to carry their voices and views. Kids get digital by 3D scanning their artworks, and designing a virtual environment to meet the needs of human and non-human beings alike.

In concert with a McMaster-based research team, Artasia 2019 culminates in a 3D virtual park, housing the visions of more than 500 kids from around the region. The students of Artasia invite you to join them as they deepen their engagement with parks and the environment.

Walk along in Virtual Reality as communities are connected together via digital footpaths and waterways. The Artasia 2019 app launches during Supercrawl on September 14 and 15. The #ArtPark installation welcomes visitors via an Oculus Quest VR headset into a world of landscapes, insects and creatures – real and fantastical – carrying the voices of children with underlying themes of parks planning. Development of the #ArtPark has blossomed in partnership with a research team at McMaster University led by Dr. David Harris Smith. Further valuable input from Environment Hamilton around local plant species and pollinators has similarly aligned with CKA’s community arts approach.

Artasia is a thematic annual arts initiative, bringing children together, community-wide, to discover the transformative power of the arts. The pillars of the Artasia program are art education, civic engagement, environmentalism, innovation, and storytelling. Artasia touches over 500 young people each summer and is designed with an understanding of the importance of creativity to development, and the ideas of young people, both of which are vital to shaping strong healthy communities. This innovative program encourages collaboration, mutual learning and the multi-generational sharing of knowledge, with children, secondary school students, new generation emerging artists and practicing artists working together to uncover the potential in our community.

Spaces are shaped by the people who occupy them. Public space is any area available to the public that is open to experience and enjoy. We own public space. We make it what it is.
THIS IS NOT A PARK is a pop-up opportunity for the public to enjoy an urban park experience through engagement and human activation. A sign reading “This Is A Park” illuminates when participants enter the space. Without the presence of people, the sign turns off, reading “This Is Not A Park.” The portable park demonstrates that urban space comes to life when in use and that any public space has the potential to be enjoyed, even in the most unlikely of places. THIS IS NOT A PARK brings to light and celebrates our city’s underused spaces.

Project partners include LED Solutions and Historia Restoration. Project supporters include Marshall Electric, and The Cotton Factory.

Adrienne Crossman’s Flags consists of a series of three large handmade outdoor flags. On one side, they read: DEVIATE, SUBVERT and RESIST, and on the back they each read: EXIST. These sentiments serve as calls of resistance to oppressive structures and ways of being, and frame existing as a form of resistance for queer and marginalized bodies. They speak to the undigested ghosts of the political queer past and the increasing momentum at which queer politics and identity are ever changing. 

Adrienne Crossman is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and curator working in Hamilton, Ontario. They hold an MFA in Visual Art from the University of Windsor (2018), and a BFA in Integrated Media with a Minor in Digital and Media Studies from OCAD University (2012). Their practice investigates the liminality between the digital and the physical while highlighting queer sensibilities in the everyday. Crossman is interested in how the terms trans* and non-binary apply to media as well as gender and they are interested in the queer potentiality of the non-human. Adrienne has completed residencies in Syracuse (NY), Montréal (QC), Artscape Gibraltar Point on the Toronto Islands (ON), and Studio Beat (studio-beat.com), and has exhibited at: Patel Projects (Toronto, Ontario), Idea Exchange (Cambridge, Ontario), 8eleven (Toronto, Ontario), Studio L’Eloi (Montreal, Quebec), Moscow Biennale for Young Art (Moscow, Russia), the Art Gallery of Windsor (Ontario), and The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale (thewrong.org). Adrienne is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art in the School of the Arts at McMaster University in Hamilton.

Crossman’s work is made possible through funding from the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.