On Americanity & Other Experiences of Belonging

June 14 to December 9, 2023 

Curated by Analays Álvarez Hernández and Colette Laliberté 

This exhibition brings together two curators, eight artists, their artworks, and audiences around the notion of “Americanity'' and what it stands for today. This concept has been historically and generally used to name a shared cultural belonging to the American continent. Yet, does Americanity imply the same whether a person lives in Bacatá (Bogotá), Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang (Montréal), or Tsi Tkarón:to (Toronto), and whether they were born in Abya-Yala (America) or on another continent? 

On Americanity and Other Experiences of Belonging aims to foster a bodily understanding of the concept that challenges and changes people’s perception of the continent. It seeks to put into dialogue its inhabitants beyond divisions such as Global North and Global South, North America and South America, or centre and periphery.  

The artists in this transcontinental exhibition consider the complex colonial histories across Abya-Yala and explore the possibility of shifting existing continental identities and experiences of belonging through their engagement in ever-continuing horizontal dialogues and creative mechanisms. The conversation generated by delving into the concept of Americanity becomes more theoretically and visually significant against the current global backdrop, which is shaped by migrations, Indigenous land recovery, systemic racism, constantly changing technologies, environmental disasters, and health crises. 

On Americanity and Other Experiences of Belonging Online Exhibition Publication

Curators 

Analays Álvarez Hernández  

Analays Álvarez Hernández is an art historian, independent curator, and assistant professor at the Université de Montréal. She holds a BA in Art History from the Universidad de La Habana, and an M.A and Ph.D. in Art History from the Université du Québec à Montréal. From 2016 to 2018, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. Her research activities focus mainly on public art, alternatives exhibitions venues, diasporic and Latinx-Canadian artists, and decolonial issues. As an independent curator, Alvarez Hernandez has organized several exhibitions mostly in Havana, tsi Tkarón:to (Toronto) and Tiohti:áke/Mooniyang (Montreal), such as The Recipe: Making Latin American Art in Canada (Sur Gallery, 2018; OBORO, 2020,) and Au fil des îles, archipels (Centre d’exposition de l’Université de Montréal, 2022; Musée régional de Rimouski, 2023).   

Colette Laliberté  

Working across various media, Colette Laliberté's conceptual approach to abstraction includes drawings, digital prints, paintings, and site-oriented wall artwork. Although the aesthetic of the forms is integral to her pictorial language, abstraction serves as a gateway to establishing a physical and emotional relationship with materials and shapes, invoking narrative, and inviting reflection on a given subject.    

Born in Sherbrooke, Québec, Colette Laliberté moved to tsi Tkarón:to (Toronto) in 1985 after living at the Banff Centre for the Arts as Young Artists in Residence. She received her BFA from Université du Québec à Montréal and her MFA from Windsor University. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and abroad. She has also participated in residencies in France, Spain, New York, and Ontario at the Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario in Sudbury; The Durham Gallery in Stouffville, Ontario; and Duntara, Newfoundland.  

She is an Associate Professor Emerita at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U). She has curated Penance and Devotion at the Glendon Gallery, York University, Ontario; August and Portrait Oval, Artcite, Windsor, Ontario and “Valérie Gill and Barbara Claus” at Mercer Union, tsi Tkarón:to (Toronto), Ontario.  

Artists 

Patricio Dávila   

Patricio Dávila is an artist, designer, researcher and educator based in Toronto, Canada. His creative practice explores locative media projects, essay videos, landscape film, new media installations, and participatory community projects. Recent projects include: Shadows!, Powers of Kin, Chthuluscene, Tent City Projections, The Line, and In The Air Tonight. He has created curatorial projects including Multiplex Essay Film Festival, and the Diagrams of Power exhibition, public workshops and a book published by Onomatopee Projects (NL). His creative research practice focuses on the politics and aesthetics of participation in the visualization of spatial issues with a specific focus on urban experiences, mobile technologies and large-scale interactive public installations. He is also co-author of Critical Visualization: Rethinking the Representation of Data, published by Bloomsbury (UK). Dávila is currently Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Arts at York University. Patricio is co-director of Public Visualization Lab / Studio.   

Immony Mèn   

Immony Mèn is an artist, educator, and community-based researcher. He is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science at OCAD University. As an artist, he has exhibited nationally and internationally and has been awarded municipal, provincial, and federal arts council grants to support his work. His research focuses on developing a theoretical framework for understanding (specifically Khmer/Cambodian) diasporic experience through media praxis, critical race theory, and various forms of community engagement. Men’s practice takes the form of research-creation projects such as interactive installations, interdisciplinary performances, social artworks, and participatory community projects. Works include Receipts, Fabulous Ones, Post-Colonial Hot Ones, Traversal Residency, Passing through the Heart, Shadows!, Cite, Chthulucene, Powers of Kin, Everything in Place, and Taking Care of Business. Immony is co-director of Public Visualization Lab / Studio.   

Estey Ducuara  

Estey Ducuara lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia. He is a visual artist and graphic designer. He studied Visual Arts at the Academy of Arts of Bogotá (ASAB) at Francisco José de Caldas District University. He also studied Drawing at La Manzarda School of Arts and specialized in Creation, Communication, and the Art Market at the Node Center for Curator Studies in Berlin, Germany. Ducuara's work focuses mainly on issues of a political nature, such as the struggle to construct the Latin American identity, the excessive extraction of natural resources, and the fight for the conservation of territory. Currently, he is a member of the Proyecto Faenza collective based in the city of Bogotá. He is also the director and founder of CASADUCUARA, Laboratorio de Arte, a non-profit entity that exhibits the work of local and foreign artists of emerging and medium trajectory and whose space is led by the local Contemporary Art Circuit Node 51.  has had individual and group exhibitions in Colombia, Brazil, Cuba, Martinique, and Mexico.  

His latest exhibitions include Parallel Purposes, Museum of Contemporary Art of Bogotá (MAC), 2021; Other Voices, Other Places, “between other people’s walls,” Udara Polo, Bogotá, 2021; Animal Social_Temp, LGM Gallery, 2021; and The International of Engraving and The Incurables, Verona Studio, Bogotá, 2021.   

Eddy Firmin   

Born in the French Caribbean, Eddy Firmin is a decolonial artist-researcher. He holds a Ph.D. in Arts Studies and Practices from the Université du Québec à Montréal, a Master’s degree from the visual art school of Le Havre-Rouen (France), and a Bachelor in art and design from the Campus Caraïbéen des Arts (Martinique).    

Firmin is interested in the politics of knowledge sharing and the epistemic conflicts they engender in the colonized artist. Influenced by secular Afro-Caribbean practices, his art and research delve into artistic expressions of transnational identity to bring forth a vision of an alternate modernity, a culture of orality reinventing and adapting its codes and systems when faced with the fast pace of our current world. Firmin strives to remediate the codes of a Caribbean ancestral custom, le Gwoka (at the crossroads of dance, song, storytelling and music). Le Gwoka is part of the very large family of Afro-Caribbean customs created to resist colonial violence, such as Paracumbé, Guineo, Bèlè, Calenda, Bomba, Tambú and many more. This imperative necessity to transfer ancestral codes to modern visual media derives from the fact that his home islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique did not give rise to a visual tradition to which one can refer, because of the restrictions of slavery on such small territories.   

He coordinates the publication of the digital decolonial magazine Minorit’Art and has recently launched Af-flux, the first Black Transnational Biennale, in Québec (2021). He has taught at NSCAD University (Halifax) and Concordia University (Montréal).   

Fredy Forero      

Fredy Forero was born in Bogotá, Colombia. He graduated from the Francisco José de Caldas District University in 2009 with a master’s degree in visual arts, focusing on digital media and video. His artistic process interposes the figurative and the abstract as a primary tool to link the viewer directly to his work. Furthermore, the public relationship with his pieces is not passive. His interest in new media is present in his research through experimentation between different materials and using electronic devices to activate his images. Forero constantly searches for new mechanisms that generate specific dynamics in his artistic proposals. He reaffirms his language by articulating a dialogue between contemporary and traditional media. His work has been exhibited locally and internationally in venues such as the National Museum of San José in Costa Rica (2012), the Bolivian Art Biennial SIART (2016), and the Centro Colombo Americano in Bogotá, Colombia (2017).    

Alexandra Gelis    

Alexandra Gelis is a Colombian-Venezuelan artist living between Canada, Panama and Colombia. Her practice is research-based, process-oriented and multidisciplinary; it includes film, photography, drawing, media installation with custom-built interactive electronics and sound. Her projects incorporate personal field research to investigate the ecologies of different landscapes by examining the traces left by various socio-political interventions. Gelis explores, documents and re-creates ecologies that take shape between plants and people and between plants and their multi-species interrelationships. Gelis has expanded her practice to working collaboratively with youth and diverse communities in the Americas.    

She has exhibited in film festivals and exhibitions internationally in the Americas, Europe and Africa and she has given talks in Kassel at DOCUMENTA Institute, Germany, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico, University of Zurich, and many arts and food sovereignty conferences.  Gelis has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, The Paavo & Aino Lukkari Award, Musagetes Arts Foundation and rare Charitable Research Reserve.    

Caroline Monnet   

Born to an Anishinaabe mother and a French father, Caroline Monnet is from Outaouais, Québec, and is now based in Montréal. After studying at the University of Ottawa and the University of Granada in Spain, she pursued a career in visual arts and film. Her work is regularly presented internationally and can be found in prestigious museum, private, and corporate collections. Monnet has become known for minimalist yet emotionally charged work that uses industrial materials and combines the vocabulary of popular and traditional visual cultures with the tropes of modernist abstraction to create unique hybrid forms. She is represented by Blouin Division Gallery.  

Ximena Velásquez Sánchez    

Visual artist, researcher, and professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Bogotá, Colombia, Ximena Velásquez Sánchez holds an M.A. in Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and Ph.D. in Visual Arts from the Universidad Estadual de Campinas, Brazil. Her work focuses on the family photographic archive, the photochemical processes of the image, the feminine world and the form of the landscape as experience. Since 2001, she has participated in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Some of Velásquez Sánchez’s recent exhibitions include If the ears of Humboldt and Bonpland spoke, FUGA Gilberto Alzate Avendaño Foundation, Bogotá, 2022; SLAM-Latin American Symposium of Media Art, Bogotá, 2021; Desmontajes (dispositivos como plagas), and ARTBO/SALAS, Bogotá, 2019. She was the Artist in Residence at the Cerveira Biennial Foundation in Portugal, in 2017, and has been selected to participate in numerous international art events such as the 19th International Art Biennial of Cerveira (2017); Iberoamericanos, La Paz, Bolivia (2012); Videobrasil, International Festival of Contemporary Art, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2011); ARTBO, Bogotá International Art Fair 2012. She has also received several grants and prizes including the Production grant for established artists, Ministerio de Cultura Colombia, 2021. 

Upcoming Free Public Events 

Opening Public Reception  – Wednesday, June 14, 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.  at Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond Street West  

Join us in-person for the public exhibition launch of On Americanity and Other Experiences of Belonging. All welcome.   

Workshop: “Becoming and moving”  – Saturday, July 29, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.  at Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond Street West   

"Becoming and moving" is a plant-based movement improvisation workshop in response to Alexandra Gelis' installation "Migrant Superpositions: convertirse en." Participants will explore themes of migration, discrimination, transformation, and the control of both humans and plants, in a collaboration with dancer and choreographer Victoria Mata, artist/designer Maxyne Baker, and Alexandra Gelis.     

*Please note the plant-based movement will include partial nudity.*

Tickets are Limited. Register here: https://bit.ly/3rg5g9b

Curators Tour with Analays Álvarez Hernández and Colette Laliberté – Friday, September 8, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.  at Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond Street West   

Join the exhibition curators on an in-depth curatorial tour of On Americanity and Other Experiences of Belonging.

Register here: https://bit.ly/47rXUA7

 Please note this tour is in Spanish & French.

Curators Tour with Analays Álvarez Hernández and Colette Laliberté – Saturday, September 9, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.  at Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond Street West   

Join the exhibition curators on an in-depth curatorial tour of On Americanity and Other Experiences of Belonging. Curators conduct the tour in English.

 Register here: https://bit.ly/43NFzdv

Lunchtime Talk with Alexandra Gelis – Wednesday, September 13, 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.  at Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond Street West   

Join us for an Artist Talk with Alexandra Gelis

*This event has been post-phoned

Nuit Blanche at Onsite Gallery 2023 - Saturday, September 23 to Sunday, September 24 from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. at Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond Street West

We invite you to join us as we celebrate the latest iteration of Up Front: Inuit Public Art @ Onsite Gallery on the mesmerizing occasion of Nuit Blanche 2023 from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. on Saturday, September 23 through to Sunday, September 24

Lunchtime Talk with Estey Ducuara and Alexandra Gelis – Thursday, October 26, 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m.  at Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond Street West   

Join us for an Artist Talk with Estey Ducuara and Alexandra Gelis

Please note this event is in Spanish with English interpretation.

Register for tickets here

Workshop : Passing Through the Heart – Friday, October 27, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.  at Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond Street West   

This workshop is informed by the ongoing collaboration between Patricio Dávila and Immony Mèn, who collect recipes and approaches to cultural food practices from immigrants and refugees in Canada. The workshop aims to build an understanding of how diasporic voices and recording technology can form intimate markers for narratives of settlement, refuge, remembering and loss.  

Register for tickets here

Crossed Perspectives On Americanity in Francophone Contexts  – Friday, November 17, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.  Live Streamed Online  

In light of their life and intellectual journeys, speakers Louise Vigneault and Eddy Firmin, with moderator Analays Álvarez Hernández, examine the notion of Americanity in different spaces of the Francophonie. What does it mean to be aware of one's Americanity and others in Québec or Guadeloupe? The discussion will be conducted considering historical and current colonial and geopolitical conditions.   

Please note this event is only in French.

Register for tickets here

Anchoring Experiences of Belonging Through Creative Practices in Arts Based Participatory Learning  – Thursday, November 30, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.  Live Streamed Online  

A panel of OCAD U IBPOC faculty members will deliver fast-paced presentations in this online event about anchoring the sense of belonging through creative practices in arts-based research and practice. The presentations are followed by a live Q & A moderated by Onsite Gallery’s Programs & Community Coordinator Susan Jama.  

Register for tickets here.