POP-UP SHOWCASE
July 25, 2024
Installation view of Emerging Creators Incubator Echoes of a Circle, exhibition at the Art Gallery at Evergreen, Evergreen Cultural Centre, 2023. Photo Rachel Topham Photography.
2024 EMERGING CREATORS INCUBATOR
CHISOM AKOMAS | Chisom Akomas is a Nigerian actor and musician residing in the unceded land of the kʷikʷəƛəm First Nation. Born in Nigeria, he moved with his family to Coquitlam, Canada at the age of seven. He graduated from the Film Acting Conservatory at New Image College in 2021, and has since been featured in various short films and a feature film. In his music ventures he writes, engineers, and performs his music around the lower mainland. Akomas uses his artistic mediums to explore themes of spirituality, individuality and freedom. He hopes to share his journey of self-discovery with others while making the world a better place.
A MARATHON OF HOPE performance, found objects, video montage, study permits, original music, original poems, boxes, table, chair, stool, paper mâché objects and hope
While in the Emerging Creators Incubator, I experimented with something I’ve never done before: I decided to use music I recorded and engineered to create a performance. For this piece, I brought in personal items and made props for the show. I experimented with different materials I could use for my main prop, which at first was going to be a sphere, but evolved into a bowl made of paper mâché. Why a bowl, you ask? I chose a bowl because it’s open—a bowl has a solid base and a limitless top, just like us humans. During the residency, I’ve been working on 2 bowls, a sphere, 2 songs, 2 poems, something to represent “hollow” gold and a video. I curated a couple of my songs that fit the story of my journey becoming an artist, contrasted by the destruction of the world. The world around me has been going through cycles of destruction. It all looks bleak, but I’m confident we are headed towards a beautifully integrated world.
Content Warning: Please be advised that there are some images in this work that depict war and violence.
2024 EMERGING CREATORS INCUBATOR
KELSEY STEEVES
| Kelsey Steeves is a mixedmedia artist and art educator who lives and works on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəyəm (Musqueam), Sḵwxwú7mesh (Squamish) səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and kʷikʷəƛəm (Kwikwetlem)
Nations. She works with painting, assemblage, installation and writing to investigate the relationships between intergenerational trauma and structural socioeconomic inequalities.
Drawing on personal lived experience and a previous career in social work, her work functions as an archive of both true and imagined experiences. She often incorporates construction materials in her practice giving nods to her childhood homes and the politics of broken and rundown houses in Vancouver, where so many can afford so little.
UP, THE WALL, (2024–)
wood, drywall, cement, flashe, watercolor, oil pastels, ceramics and found objects
Kelsey Steeves’s up, the wall (2024–) is a site-specific installation that explores housing as a site of artistic excavation as well as documentation of one’s life. The piece draws on Steeves’s lived experience and the aesthetics of the homes she grew up in as part of her investigation into substandard and low-income housing. Steeves explores the impact of poverty and class divisions on individual and collective well-being by using building materials and found and constructed objects that serve as makeshift heirlooms. The installation is located in a typically unseen area, reflecting a societal disregard for the gentrification of low-income spaces.
2024 EMERGING CREATORS INCUBATOR
JULIAN LEGERE | Julian Legere is a bisexual and genderqueer, European/Acadien settler on occupied Coast Salish territories. His practice articulates and inserts queerness in the Western classical tradition through interdisciplinary engagement with contemporary queer performance, moving fluidly across theatre, poetry, dance, drag, kink and burlesque.
Motivated by a politically urgent need to reassert queer expression as subversive and threatening, Legere is interested in queer eroticism, assimilation and erasure, and relational liberation. His intention is to confront audiences with the presence and cyclical violent erasure, of queerness across Western histories and cultures, emphasizing the trickster qualities that have allowed our survival.
LEARNING TO SURRENDER - DEVELOPING A NEW APPROACH TO ART MAKING
I’ve always created art by deciding what I want to make and engineering process to make it.
During the Emerging Creators Incubator, I searched for a less capitalist/ product-driven approach. Adapting a more practice-oriented paradigm led me to surrender control over outcome through an iterative, laboratory-style process. By setting concrete, immediate challenges, I forced myself to create without knowing exactly what I was making. For example, attempting to make a work that is an ecosystem resulted in a performance installation of cookies in various stages of being eaten. I also designed a ‘lab report’ so I could reflect critically and compare each day-long creative process. The report includes questions about the audience, the environment, the materials and the form of each work.
I’m excited to apply this to Tender Madness, an ambitious new project exploring queerness through Tchaikovsky’s music and Walt Whitman’s poetry in my upcoming residency with Plastic Orchid Factory. I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of work these impulses will generate— hopefully something I can’t even currently imagine.
2024 EMERGING CREATORS INCUBATOR
IZZY BULL BEAR
| Izzy Bull Bear (They/them) is originally from Mohkinstsis Calgary, Alberta, belonging to the Siksika Nation of the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy), they came to the unceded land of xʷməθkʷəyəm (Musqueam), Sḵwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (TsleilWaututh) Nations nearly five years ago to pursue theatre, driven by a deep-seated passion for storytelling. Since then, Bull Bear has been working primarily as an actor in theatre, a medium which has allowed them to pursue their other talents such as poetry, dance, playwriting and music.
THE GIRL WHO THOUGHT SHE COULD FLY performance, original composition
During the Emerging Creators Incubator, I have been primarily working on utilizing my poetry and writing in tandem with music to tell a story, and learning to understand my creative process when manifesting art into existence. I was in constant search of a finished piece, but the thing about art is that it’s like the self—ever changing and constantly evolving. I think that is the way I like to create: if something isn’t working, I’ve learned to really embrace that limit and pivot, because you never know when you’ll find gold. Through this experience and others, I have gained a much clearer picture of my creative process moving forward. The performance I’ve created for the Pop-Up Showcase is simply the story of a warrior. My goal in crafting this piece was to remain true to what I know and, most importantly, to care for and nurture the warrior within my mind.
2024 EMERGING CREATORS INCUBATOR
YASMINE HAIBOUB | Yasmine Haiboub is an artist, and facilitator currently based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəyəm, Skwxwú7mesh and səlilwətaʔɬ. Her practice is interdisciplinary and focuses on community engagement and sculptural works. Haiboub engages with her immediate surroundings through performative gestures, interactive sculptures, and mass accumulation of familiar objects, creating new narratives in public and private spaces. Her main interest is exploring intersectionality through self-awareness, care, hospitality and play.
UNTITLED
During this residency, I’ve immersed myself in researching how images document our histories and explore the complexities of identity and art. Amidst the rhythm of reading, felting, and reflective walks, I navigated the balance of my main job and side hustles, all the while contemplating the simultaneous unfolding of time. This zine reflects the research and reflections I’ve been working on to encapsulate the essence of “we” and “I” through considering alternative forms of documentation. I’m interested in documenting the places where people traditionally share food and commune—specifically gatherings around rugs and the dinner table. Engaging with diverse artists at Evergreen has enriched my exploration, offering new perspectives on process as I engage in conversation with theatre for the first time. This journey unveils layers of connection and discovery, weaving a vibrant narrative of exploration as I reflect on my capacities, sort through past and present work, and explore what it means to be in community.
2024 EMERGING CREATORS INCUBATOR
SYBIL XIAOYUN SHEN | Sybil Xiaoyun Shen (she/her) is an emerging Chinese-Canadian interdisciplinary artist, writer and performer, who grew up in Port Moody after immigrating to Canada and is now based in Vancouver.
Intrigued by the corporeality of breath, Shen pixelates the human experience into syllables and attempts to use words as building blocks to reconstitute the moving universe. Her works focus on the materiality of mental activities and the fragmentation of narrative structures, while attributing increasing importance and validity to the realm of virtuality. Currently, she is working on a series of themed poetry pieces, which will then be strung together into a handmade book.
3 ACTS OF LOVE
(AS AN ADJ.), (2024-) multimedia performance, fruit, installation with ink, paper, glass, tape, fabric and miscellaneous utensils
Conceived through intimate conversations with friends, 3 acts of love (as an adj.) (2024-) by Sybil Xyshen is an attempt to redefine love not as a noun or action, but a state of being stripped of conventional expressions. This triptych combines elements of film, poetry, live act and installation to depict a transgressive image of love as “romance crimes,” what the artist defines as actions evoked by the extremity of romantic feelings. The desire to incorporate concepts of free association and synesthesia into her works urged Xyshen to seek ways of working with multiple planes and dimensions during the Emerging Creators Incubator. A twist on the traditional three-act theatre structure, this multimedia performance is an investigation of the parallels between criminal interrogation and the confrontation of audience versus performer. 3 acts of love (as an adj.) reminds us that love is a renegotiation of boundaries and asks us to reclaim romance as something more intimate, intuitive and instinctive than what might be socially accepted.
Content Warning: Please be advised that this work contains references to crime, mature content and interrogation.
