In this, our final episode of the ten-part series, we present this epic and extra special piece which comprises a series of interviews recorded by Maria Hupfield, who worked with us in Tkaronto over the long duration of the "People's Map" project. Maria collected these interviews over the summer and fall of 2022 with Sylvia Plain, Chris Mendoza, Anong and Lux Beam, and her father, master boatbuilder John Hupfield, Sr.

An extra special thanks to Sonia Rivera, who edited the episode and wove together these very special in-the-field and on-the-water interviews which happen to take the form, together, of a meditation on craft, making, Indigenous knowledge, and ways of being in and with water.

Anong and Lux Beam, recorded July 28, 2022 over breakfast
Chris Mendoza, recorded July 17, 2022 in the Don Valley River
John Hupfield Sr., recorded July 16, 2022, at my kitchen table Toronto
Sylvia Plain, recorded July 13, 2022, outside on St. Clair, Toronto

Guest Bios

Anong Migwans Beam is a painter, mother, paint-maker, and curator, living and working in her home community of M’Chigeeng First Nation on Manitoulin Island. After studying art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, OCAD University, and the Institute of American Indian Arts, she returned home to be a studio assistant for her father, Carl Beam. Her painting practice is in large-format oil on canvas. She is the founder of Gimaa Radio, Ojibwe-language radio CHYF 88.9FM. She maintains an independent curating practice, and served as director of the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation before leaving to focus on her own practice and the art of paint-making. She is the founder of Beam Paints, where she combines an early education in Indigenous pigments from her parents Carl and Ann Beam, with a lifelong interest in art and colour.

Maria Hupfield is a transdisciplinary maker working with Industrial felt at the intersection of performance art, design and sculpture. She is a 2020-2022 inaugural Borderlands Fellow for her project Breaking Protocol at The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School and the Center for the Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, and was awarded the Hnatyshyn Mid-career Award for Outstanding Achievement in Canada 2018. She has exhibited and performed her work through her touring solo exhibition The One Who Keeps On Giving (organized by The Power Plant) 2017-2018, and solo Nine Years Towards the Sun, at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, 2019-2020.

John Hupfield Sr. is a master boat builder, owner of Lost in the Woods Boatworks (1991 – currently retired), and Maria Hupfield’s father. He provided restoration and construction of small boat crafts in Carling Township, Ontario Canada. He is Anglophone Canadian born in Montreal Quebec from Southern Ontario and husband to the late Peggy Miller, Anishinaabe belonging to Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario Canada. He is a graduate of the Media Studies at Sheridan College, Oakville, in 1973, and worked security as a resident of Rochdale College, Toronto, 1969-70.

Chris Mendoza is an artist and educator whose work moves between performance, sculpture, image-based work, and writing as affective inquiries into belonging, inheritance, and embodied relations to place. Chris values presenting work and performing both in and outside of formal art spaces—the former of which include the FOFA gallery (Montreal); University of Toronto Art Museum; Craft Ontario; Crutch Gallery (Toronto); and the Icelandic Textile Center (Blönduós).

Sylvia Plain, from Aamjiwnaang First Nation, is a community ambassador, water walker, researcher, birch bark canoe building apprentice and founder of the Great Lakes Canoe Journey. Plain is the owner and operator of the Great Lakes Canoe Journey Education Program, which was founded in 2014. Sylvia has been a Research and Policy analyst in the environment sector for ten years working for First Nations communities and political organizations in Ontario.

In this week's episode, Dylan Gauthier speaks with Toronto-based writer, educator, and curator Amish Morrell about learning wilderness, frozen rivers, thawing glaciers, gear, Cape Breton artists, and – naturally – the Don River.

Guest Bio

Amish Morrell is an educator, curator, editor and writer. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences & School of Interdisciplinary Studies at OCAD University in Toronto. He has graduate faculty appointments in the Visual & Critical Studies BA Programme, the Criticism & Curatorial Practice, Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories, and the Interdisciplinary Art and Material Design MFA and MA programmes. From 2008 to 2017 he was Editor and Director of Programs at C Magazine, one of North America’s foremost visual arts magazines. He received a PhD from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto in 2006, where he was a research fellow at the Centre for Media and Culture in Education, and a member of the Testimony and Historical Consciousness Project, led by Dr. Roger Simon. During his PhD he wrote a dissertation on historical re-enactment in contemporary photography. Between 2006 and 2016 he taught at York University, Ryerson University, and the University of Toronto. At C Magazine he developed numerous public programs, including lectures and workshops held in partnership with organizations including The Toronto International Art Fair, The Power Plant, Mercer Union, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Art Metropole and the Toronto Art Book Fair. He has also curated exhibitions for the Doris McCarthy Gallery, The Confederation Centre for the Arts and the Cape Breton University Art Gallery, and developed experiments in alternative forms of public engagement, including Nightwalks with Teenagers, with Mammalian Diving Reflex; The Sauna Symposium with Hart House at the University of Toronto; and Reading the Bruce Trail with Public Studio.

Along with artist Diane Borsato, he leads Outdoor School, an ongoing project that combines social practice-based art, outdoor education and critical land-based practices. Outdoor School includes a course taught each year at the University of Guelph, an exhibition at the Doris McCarthy Gallery in 2016, public projects including an annual mycological foray and other guided outdoor activities, and in the summer of 2018, a five-week artist residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Upcoming Outdoor School projects include a book in partnership with the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for the Arts and The Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Other projects include research on the avant-garde and counterculture in Cape Breton since the 1960s. His most recent writing includes an essay about Indigenous philosophies of sustainability in the work of artist Ursula Johnson, published in C Magazine and an interview about art and survival on Cape Breton Island with video and installation artists Amanda Trager and Erik Moskowitz, published in Visual Arts News.

In this week's episode, Dylan Gauthier speaks with Toronto-based artist and educator Chris Mendoza and artist, curator and writer Parker Kay, who is also founder and director of the non-profit gallery space Pumice Raft. Incorporated in 2018, Pumice Raft's activities begin from an ecological activist approach to the display of visual art and the facilitation of related education. This means that the guiding principles of the organization are rooted in a conception of place that begins with the protection of people and the planet. Recorded in the fall of 2022, Gauthier spoke with Mendoza and Kay about their ongoing engagement with the Don River and the ravines, and their recent series of public events, field trips, and performances – Implicit Choreographies & Relational Topographies – a processional public program sited within the Don River Valley led by invited artists, researchers, and writers in the Summer and Fall of 2022.

(The episode begins with an excerpt of Chris walking up the Don River recorded by Maria Hupfield, referred to in Episode 7: upstreaming with Maria Hupfield and Charlene K. Lau which also feeds into Episode 9, comprising interviews conducted by Hupfield, to be released later in March).

Guest Bios

Parker Kay is an artist and writer. He is also sometimes known as Pumice Raft.

Chris Mendoza is an artist and educator whose work moves between performance, sculpture, image-based work, and writing as affective inquiries into belonging, inheritance, and embodied relations to place. Chris values presenting work and performing both in and outside of formal art spaces—the former of which include the FOFA gallery (Montreal); University of Toronto Art Museum; Craft Ontario; Crutch Gallery (Toronto); and the Icelandic Textile Center (Blönduós). Chris holds a BFA from Concordia University, a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto and currently resides in Tkaronto/Toronto.