Though we have separate art practices, we find inescapable intersects in our work, which manifest through our performance art practice. Beauty has become ungraspable. Sublime beauty was once only instigated by nature, but has become something that constantly bombards our lives through advertising, television and print media. In our combined art practice we are looking for a so-called “third space” that exists without all of this outside stimulation. In our performance work we find our bodies, an unobstructed, quiet space to express our own images and to ask questions about all of this out side information. Reducing the noise allows us to reduce ourselves to a point of gesture and extreme presence; reducing to a point where we become an image. At this point we can begin telling without saying.

Jaime Warn (Canada) is a Chippewa/Muncey Delaware artist and mother based in Lethbridge Alberta. She completed her MA on the Trickster in Contemporary First Nations Art and works as a sessional for The University of Lethbridge lecturing on the history of North American Indian Art. Warn’s practice has recently shifted from painting to performance further exploring trickster strategies.

Emily Promise Allison (Canada) is an emerging Calgary artist with an investigative focus on the interdisciplinary relationships between visual art, theatre and audience.

Desiree Nault and Jake Klein-Waller (Canada) have a vested interested in the inevitable death and the liminal spaces we wander through on the way there. Born into a culture devoid of ritual we are lost together, because we need these deserts to cross, and ceremonial markers to guide us along the way. Desiree and Jake both know desperation. While we lack ritual, we still persist on attempting to control the uncontrollable.

I want to use my art as a framework for the audiences own thoughts. I don’t want to work with symbols. I don’t want to put too much narrative on stage. My wish is that the audience can fill the play or performance with their own thoughts. I want to give them an aesthetic start picture where they can project their own story on to it. I don’t want to talk about big topics, such as love and death — if the audience wants to read my art like this, they are allowed to. But it’s important for me to create worlds where each one of the audience member can connect with their own body and mind. They shouldn’t have knowledge or experience in specific themes. They shouldn’t ask themselves why this or that is going on on stage. They should enjoy, the should be amazed — they should allow themselves to dream away. My art should invite the audience to feed into their own cosmos of thoughts.

Sarah Christensen (Canada) works with various media and tactics to indulge deeper into a place of understanding the formulaic constructs imposed by traditions of Western education and institutions, searching to recognize the familiar undertones of belonging. Christensen is in her last year of her undergraduate degree at the University of Lethbridge, and has been exhibiting her work since 2004.