Deirdre Lee is a poet, performer and maker of art, food, medicines and magic. Her work is intertwined with her complicated and sometimes confusing reality as a racialized, neurodivergent woman, and explores her perspectives on identity and healing. Lee lives in Kjipuktuk, in Mi’kma’ki, the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq and the home of Black arrivants for more than three centuries.
Jay Pahre is a queer and trans settler artist, writer and cultural worker currently based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Weaving between drawing, sculpture and writing, his work queries trans and queer nonhuman ecologies as they intersect with the human. Originally from the midwestern US, Pahre has turned his work back toward the shifting ecologies of the Great Lakes and Great Plains regions. He received his BFA in painting and BA in East Asian studies in 2014, and his MA in East Asian studies from the University of Illinois in 2017. He went on to complete his MFA in visual art at the University of British Columbia in 2020. His work has been exhibited across the US and Canada. He was selected for the 2020 Transgender Studies Chair Fellowship at the University of Victoria, as well as the Helen Belkin Memorial Scholarship (2020) and Fred Herzog Award in Visual Art (2019) at the University of British Columbia.
Jagdeep Raina is an artist and emerging writer based in Guelph. Raina holds an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and is a 2021 RITM fellow at Yale University. Raina has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine; the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; the Camden Arts Centre/Slade School of Fine Art in London, England; and the Mariam Dawood School of Visual Arts and Design in Lahore, Pakistan.
Emma Sharpe is a writer and editor based between Montreal and Toronto. She holds a BFA from NSCAD University and an MA in communication and culture from Ryerson and York Universities, where she received a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship to pursue her ongoing project Feeled Recordings. She has been a member of the Toronto Art Book Fair steering committee, a teaching and research assistant at Ryerson University, a communications and development associate at Art Metropole, and a curatorial intern at the FOFA Gallery of Concordia University and SOMA’s contemporary art centre in Mexico City. She is the staff copy editor for Blackflash Magazine, an editor of English content at SSENSE, sits on the editorial committee of Phile Magazine and Peripheral Review, and was Canadian Art’s 2019–20 Winter Editorial Resident. Her writing has most recently appeared in C Magazine, Blackflash and Canadian Art.
Canadian Art is grateful for the philanthropic support of our Spotlight Donors: Debra and Barry Campbell, Shanitha Kachan and Gerry Sheff, and Eleanor and Francis Shen. Their generous multi-year investment demonstrates their commitment to the future of emerging writers and artists. Read this issue’s national survey of Spotlight artists here.
Cover of the Winter 2021 issue of Canadian Art, Cover Image: Anna Torma, Party with Dionysos 2 (detail), 2020. Photo: Istvan Zsako.
Left: Jay Pahre, Skinwelt, 2020-ongoing. Steel, grass, dimensions variable. Photo: Jay Pahre. Right: Jagdeep Raina, Let me taste purple silk monsoons in these bathinda fields (detail), 2020. Embroidered tapestry, Sainchi Phulkari on muslin, 45.7 x 50.8 cm.
