Cindy Baker's BiG Thing
50th Birthday celebration
Friday, June 20, 2025
PERFORMANCE LINE UP
Latitude 53
12-5 PM
Migueltzinta Solis
Mitchell Chalifoux
roses (Roseanna Joy Nay)
Marilyn Arsem
Michelle Lacombe
Harley Morman
mile zero dance
7 PM Caberet
Jen Mesch
Terrance Houle
Mikiki
Jess MacCormackLaura Ohio
Cindy Baker, Mary-Anne McTrowe, and Shanell Papp – The Three Graces
Committed to ethical community engagement and critical social enquiry, Cindy Baker's interdisciplinary research-based practice draws upon 25 years working, volunteering, and organizing in the communities of which she is part, engaging with queer, gender, race, disability, fat, and art discourses. Helping found important community and advocacy organizations over the course of her career, including the Saskatoon Diversity Network and the Artist-Run Centres and Collectives Coalition of Canada, notable awards include Toronto International Body Image Film & Arts Festival's Body Confidence Canada Award, and Toronto's South Asian Visual Arts Collective (SAVAC)'s Collaborator of the Year Award.
About the Artists
Marilyn Arsem has been creating and performing live events for more than forty years and has presented her work in thirty countries around the world. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, she also teaches performance art workshops internationally. In 1975 Arsem established a collaborative of artists now known as Mobius Artists Group, who create experimental art in all media. From 1987 to 2014 Arsem taught performance art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A book on her work, Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, was published in 2020 by Intellect Books of the UK. Her website is http://marilynarsem.net.
Mitchell Chalifoux is a visual and performance artist based in amiskwaciy waskahikan or so-called Edmonton, on Treaty 6 territory. Their art practice spans fibre arts, printmaking, and performance, and often searches for queerness and gender creativity in future gazing and historical forms. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alberta. His work has been in exhibitions at SNAP and Latitude 53, and they have performed with CRIPSiE and at the Venice International Performance Art Week. They are active in the disability arts and inclusive dance communities locally, and in warm weather, Mitch spends time tending to plants and weeds in their garden.
Terrance Houle (Niitsitapi/ Saulteaux) is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary media artist and a member of the Kainai Nation/ Blood Tribe. Involved with Aboriginal communities all his life, he has travelled to reservations throughout North America participating in Powwow dancing along with his native ceremonies. His work ranges from subversive to humorous absurdity to solemn and poetic artistic expressions. His work often relates to the physical body as it investigates issues of history, colonization, Aboriginal identity and representation in popular culture, as well as conceptual ideas based on memory, home, and reserve communities. Houle works in whatever media strikes him, and has produced work in photography, painting, installation, mass marketing, performance, music, video, and film. Houle's work has been exhibited across Canada, the United States, Australia, the UK and Europe. Since 2014, Houle has been working on an ongoing collaborative project titled GHOST DAYS. GHOST DAYS evokes colonial and non-colonial histories that exist in the light of night as in the darkness of the day, and awakens a collaboration with artists, audience, and spirit. Currently, He has co-directed a short animation Otanimm/Onnimm with his daughter Neko Wong Houle which toured Film festivals 2020- 2024, In Los Angeles, NYC, Toronto, New Zealand, Vancouver, Oxford & many more. Recently their short film won the prestigious Golden Sheaf Indigenous Award at Yorkton Film Festival and is Neko's First Award in Film at 17 years old. Houle is based in Calgary, Alberta.
Michelle Lacombe lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/ Montréal, Quebec, Canada. Since obtaining her BFA from Concordia University in 2006, she pursued a practice that focuses specifically on her body via action and corporel modification. Her work has been presented at various performance events, exhibitions and conferences in Canada, the United States and Europe, as well as in Mexico and Argentina. She is the winner of the Bourse Plein sud 2015, and the Prix en arts actuel du MBANQ 2025. Her artistic practice is paralleled by her commitment towards supporting performance art and other undisciplined forms of art-making. She has co-organized a number of independent events and, since 2011, has been the director of the VIVA! Art Action festival.
Jess MacCormack is a queer, mad artist and white settler working on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Their art practice engages with the intersection of institutional violence and the socio-political reality of personal trauma. Working with communities and individuals affected by stigma and oppression, MacCormack uses cultural platforms and distribution networks to facilitate collaborations which position art as a tool to engender personal and political agency. Working in various mediums – graphic novels, digital art, performance, installation, community art and video – their work explores queer politics, embodiment and criminalization.
Jess Mac’s digital art has been shared through various platforms, such as Artforum International, Hyperallergic, Canadian Art, VICE Creator’s project, White Hot Contemporary Art, Bitch Magazine, PAPER Magazine and Art F City. Their animations have been screened internationally at festivals, some highlights include MIX-26 the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, LA Film Fest at UCLA, Transcreen Amsterdam Transgender Film Festival, Inside Out Film and Video Festival and Mix Brazil Film Festival of Sexual Diversity. Their interdisciplinary practice has been supported and exhibited by the Academie der Künste der Welte (Cologne, Germany), arbyte (London, UK), articule (Montréal, Canada), Western Front (Vancouver, Canada) and many other local and international galleries.
They have an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University (2008) and were an Assistant Professor of Studio Arts at Concordia University (2010-2013). Jess is currently an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and is working towards their PhD in Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University.
Mary-Anne McTrowe was born and raised in southern Alberta, where she earned her B.F.A. at the University of Lethbridge in 1998. She went on to pursue graduate studies at Concordia University in Montreal and received her M.F.A. in studio art in 2001. Her work has spanned a number of different media including performance, installation, and textiles, and in her practice she explores objects that are in states of transformation, focusing on the question of how things that are familiar to us can be made unfamiliar; how a change in context can render something temporarily strange and perhaps even unrecognizable. McTrowe was a member of the now-retired folk art-ernative duo The Cedar Tavern Singers AKA Les Phonoréalistes with Daniel Wong, was a founding member of Trap\door Artist Run Centre, and currently works as a Technician in the Art Department at the University of Lethbridge.
Jen Mesch is an experimental dance artist who works in themes of solitude, satire and the natural world. She was a self-taught dancer until she started seriously studying technique in adulthood. She holds degrees in dance and botany and multiple credentials in echocardiography. She has held various odd jobs including manual labour at a large-scale commercial greenhouse, secretary for a Mortuary Science program, test material controller in Phase I pharmaceutical research, cytology prep aide, and working for Ralph Lauren fragrances in New York where she assisted with the launch of Ralph Lauren Romance at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1998. While in New York she studied dance at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio and spent countless hours at New York Public Library reviewing reel-to-reel footage of modern and post-modern dance works that were otherwise inaccessible at the time. Soon after moving to Edmonton in 2009, she started volunteering for University of Alberta paleontology as a fossil preparator, and at dig sites in Alberta. In 2022, Jen’s sister did a DNA test with some surprising results. Knowing few family names or true origins, she discovered that her ancestors in the Americas range from Irish immigrants settling in Quebec City, to Polish, Galician, German and Hungarian immigrants in Chicago and parts of southern Michigan. This is a developing and largely unpleasant story. What she can say is that it’s difficult to fathom how any of us made it here and are alive today, and it is in this spirit that she celebrates the birth of Cindy Baker.
Mikiki is a performance and video artist and queer community health activist of Acadian/Mi’kmaq and Irish descent from Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland, Canada.
Mikiki has worked as a high school Sex Educator, a Bathhouse Attendant, Drag Karaoke Hostess, in various capacities in the Gay Men’s Health and HIV response, in Harm Reduction Outreach and HIV testing all over Canada.
Mikiki is irregularly found hosting their Golden Girls screening and queer cultural studies lecture series Rose Beef and recently produced One Brief History of Drag; a quarter century retrospective of their drag performance work at The Rooms Provincial Gallery realized and interpreted by a dozen artists local, national and international.
Harley Morman takes a playful approach to considering the social relations among artists and institutions. In considering the aesthetics of transformational change, his performative artistic research scampers around the intersections of low craft, digital photography, and design. A settler on Treaty 7, Morman grew up in traditional Dakota territory along what is now the Minnesota River. After emigrating to Saskatoon in the late 90s, he studied sociology at the University of Saskatchewan (2003) and worked in non-profit communications and administration and as an artist. He earned both an MFA in Art (2016) and PhD in Social, Cultural, and Political Thought (2024) from the University of Lethbridge, where he is currently a sessional instructor in Sociology. Recently, Morman’s solo exhibition Don’t Dream It, Be It was at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in 2024; lenticular image series Let’s Do the Time Warp Again was featured in the Art Gallery of Alberta’s RBC Gallery in 2021. Morman is trans and lives with multiple sclerosis; now based in Lethbridge, he enjoys riding his red tricycle as well as falling off of it.
Roseanna Joy Nay (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist living and practicing in Treaty 6 territory. They are currently care-taking on their family ranch an hour West of amiskwacîwâskahikan ‘Edmonton’. This fall, they will attend Concordia University (Montreal) as an MFA candidate in Intermedia.
Performing under the name ‘roses’, they consider themselves through a gender-fluid and plural perspective—as an artist and a noun: a person, place, and thing. Their work spans sculptural, painterly, drawn, textile, and costume-based forms. They create performative contexts, building spaces through material, gesture, and referent. Their themes explore intergenerational relationships and exchanges, looking to queer rurality in the prairies—past and present.
Roses’ holds a BFA from the University of Alberta. They have presented work with Shooting Gallery, Lowlands Gallery, Parallel Space Gallery, Latitude 53, Mile Zero Dance, Mile Zero Dance, and participated in the Salem Art Works residency. Most recently, roses contributed a small batch of hand-made fragrances to Latitude 53’s Capsule Machine Project—scents created through spellcraft and ritual-based performance inspired by prairie essences and motifs.
In 2021, they were mentored by Cindy Baker as a part of the MAG Exchange Mentorship Program hosted by the Mitchell Art Gallery. They co-curated The Horizon of Being, a queer performance art residency (Cooking Lake, AB) with a focus on creating a performance-exchange-based-economy rooted in reciprocity and care. The pair have been collaborating ever since.
Laura Ohio (b. 1991) is a Canadian visual artist working with video, sculpture, and performance. Her practice engages the physical body, personal archives, and architectural spaces to confront the psychic pressures of everyday life. Ohio's inquiry draws from feminist theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and philosophy as well as her own environment and socioeconomic conditions, moving between grand narratives and ideology to more intimate psychological terrains and embodied experiences. Her work emphasizes precarity, provisionality, scale, and psychological space to investigate the nightmares and fantasies underpinning shared concepts of intimacy, alienation, and belonging. Recent works explore altered states of consciousness related to grief, loss of control, and heightened sensory awareness. Narratives and points of fracture emerge and shake loose from logical frameworks, opening up moments of temporal awareness that invite viewers to engage with the fragility and impermanence of life.
Ohio studied visual art and anthropology at the University of Alberta and received her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 2023. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally, at venues including Automata (Los Angeles, CA), Antimatter (Victoria, Canada), June Street (Los Angeles, CA), Baxter St at Camera Club NY (NYC, USA), Film Diary NYC (NYC, USA), Iowa City International Documentary Festival (Iowa City, USA), Alchemy Film Festival (Hawick, Scotland), Bideodromo (Bilbao, Spain), Porn Film Festival Berlin (Berlin, Germany), Rivulet (virtual, USA), Mile Zero Dance (Edmonton, Alberta), and Winnipeg Underground Film Festival (Winnipeg, Canada). She is currently living and working between Los Angeles, CA and Edmonton, AB.
Shanell Papp is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist and MLIS candidate at the University of Alberta. She holds a BFA from the University of Lethbridge and an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. Papp’s practice investigates the body, death, institutional power, and the uncanny through textile-based sculpture. Her renowned work Lab—a life-sized crocheted anatomical model—reflects her long-standing engagement with medical history, forensic science, and traditional craft techniques.
Papp has a strong academic and creative interest in museums, archives, and libraries, often using her work to explore systems of knowledge, preservation, and display. Her fascination with horror films and practical effects also informs her aesthetic—drawing on the visual language of props, sets, and bodily illusion to create immersive, unsettling experiences. She is currently developing a site-specific “textile haunted house” installation for Edmonton’s historic Duggan House, set to open in Fall 2025. Recently, she has begun integrating research on artificial intelligence and archives into her broader practice, following her participation in the UpperBound AI conference. Her work continues to challenge and reframe the boundaries between art, artifact, and the architectures of fear and knowledge.
Migueltzinta Solís is a trans Chicanx interdisciplinary artist, writer, scholar, filmmaker, educator, Tarot practitioner, and consultant. He was raised in California and Oaxaca by parents involved in the Chicano/a Movement during the 80s and 90s. He works at a unique intersection of creative arts practice, critical studies, and research creation. Migueltzinta writes across multiple genres and forms, working towards counter-institutional poetics for knowledge mobilization. Theme parks, amateur porn, Indigenous futurities, parallel realities, divination technologies, colonial imaginaries, queer materialities, and (un)belonging have been recurring themes. Materially, he has worked in performance, video, photography, leather, textile, installation, and painting. Migueltzinta holds an MFA in Art and a PhD in Cultural, Social and Political Thought from the University of Lethbridge/Iniskim in Treaty 7, traditional Blackfoot territory.