Series
Emerging Artists

After a 10-year hiatus, FADO’s emerging Artists Series is back in 2025!

A much-loved staple of FADO’s programming year from 2003 to 2014, FADO’s emerging Artists series was created to provide a platform for younger artists to develop and present a performance piece in a professional context, often for the first time. As the series developed, the opportunity it provided extended to nurturing new performance curators. Each new project in the series has interpreted in its own particular way the central term of its mandate reformulating who/what should be considered ‘emerging’ in the context of performance art practice as presented through the FADO frame.

For the 2025 Emerging Artist Series, ‘emerging’ is discarded as a label that reveals age, defines time spent or as a qualification of perceived depth of experience. Instead, from February through May two curators and three series researcher residents develop performance installations, performance events and research projects that bring the notion of ‘emerging’ into relationship with community and forms of practice.

2025: On View | curated by Jordan King
2025: not knowing is the most intimate | curated by Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan
2025: EAS LABists: Christina Anna Trutiak, James Knott, Vanessa Godden
2014: 11:45 P.M. | curated by Kate Barry
2013: .sight specific. | curated by Francisco-Fernando Granados
2011: Extra-Rational | curated by Gale Allen
2009: Misinformed Informants | curated by Lisa Visser
2008: Vivência Poética | curated by Erika DeFreitas
2007: Enter-gration | curated by Nahed Mansour
2005: Open Airway | curated by Elle McLaughlin
2005: Feats, might | curated by Alissa Firth-Eagland
2004: Home Repair by One Night Only
2004: Game City | curated by Craig Leonard
2003: Gestures | curated by Tanya Mars

FADO’s Emerging Artists series was initiated in 2003 by Canada’s own performance art matriarch and educator Tanya Mars, who recognized that the best way to encourage young artists was by offering them a professional presentation opportunity. Her vision was one of mentorship, targeting an interesting mix of new and emerging artists, many of them former students, whom she commissioned to develop new works responding to a thematic context. The first event, curated by Mars, included ambient, conceptual and cabaret-style performance art gestures. This event later developed into the Emerging Artists Series. FADO’s intention with this on-going series was to nurture new work and ideas, provide direction and mentorship, and showcase the work of the city’s newest perspectives in performance art.

As the series developed, it became clear that this was an opportunity to nurture not only emerging performance artists, but also emerging curators, allowing FADO to encourage new curatorial voices in performance art, and introducing FADO to new communities of artists (and new artists to FADO). The series has continued to develop and change, later including the work of artists not just from Toronto, but regionally as well. This way, the series exposes local audiences to the range of performance work happening in the emerging performance scene across Canada.

Artist
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay

Canada
https://www.nemerofsky.ca/

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is a Montréal-born media artist. Since 2000 his video practice has brought together song, self-reflexive performance for the camera and lyrics from pop music as vehicles for examining the singing voice, multiplicity, the untranslatability of emotions into language and the ways in which emotional expression changes shape when mediated by technology and popular culture. His work has been exhibited both in film festivals and gallery contexts across Canada, Europe and East Asia. In 2004, the Plug In ICA organized Neverending Song of Love, a survey exhibition of his video works to date.

Artist
Alissa Firth-Eagland

Canada

Artist Alissa Firth-Eagland graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design Integrated Media Department in 2003 where her studies focused on curatorial practice, critical writing, performance art and conceptual video art production. Committed to critical analysis and discussion, she is currently exploring the curator’s commission as an artistic practice. She uses curatorial practice to create space for innovative methodologies & fringe trajectories, commissioning experimental works from artists. She’s recently organized exhibitions for Tranz<—>Tech 2003 Toronto International Media Art Biennial, the first annual Toronto Alternative Arts Fair (2004) and The 2004 Junction Arts Festival. The Junction Arts Festival exhibition Sorry for the Inconvenience (co-curated by Firth-Eagland and Emelie Chhangur) was recently nominated for 2004’s Best Curated Exhibition at the Toronto Untitled Art Awards. From April 2005 to March 2006 she will be working and conducting independent research at the Walter Phillips Gallery as she has been invited to participate in a Curatorial Work Study position through the Banff International Curatorial Institute.

Artist
Daniel Cockburn

Canada
https://zerofunction.com/

Daniel Cockburn is a video artist, writer and closed caption editor. He has been making monologue-based film/video works since 1999. His works have been exhibited at various venues Canadian and international, including: Media City; Cinematexas; Images Festival; Cinematheque Ontario; Rendezvous With Madness Film Festival; Video Art Plastique; 25HRS; The Venice International Short Film Festival; Moving Pictures Festival of Dance on Film & Video; Kasseler Dokumentarfilm und Videofest; and the Portland Documentary and Experimental Film Festival.

Artist
Brian Joseph Davis

Canada
https://brianjosephdavis.com/

Brian Joseph Davis is a video artist and writer. His work has recently screened at the Geografias Suaves Video Festival in Mexico and his film Arrival won first place in the DFAIT IN Video Competition. It will open the new Canadian Embassy in Berlin in April 2005. His book Portable Altamont will be published by Coach House Books in Fall 2005. He also writes for Eye Weekly and Broken Pencil. His video work uses documentary to examine social groupings as imaginings and the documenting of them as impossibilities. He’s currently working on a feature length biographical documentary that only utilizes psychics hired from the backs of newspapers. He turns affirmations into negations for breakfast.

Performance
Feats, Might curated by Alissa Firth-Eagland

ARTISTS
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
Brian Joseph Davis
Daniel Cockburn

For Feats, Might, curator Alissa Firth-Eagland asked artists known primarily for their video works to “unplug” their performative ideas, stepping out from behind the camera and onto the live stage.

Performance art vs. video? by Paul Couillard

Perhaps more than any other genres, performance art and video have set the stage for visual art developments in the 21st century. Fuelled by—and also fuelling—the conceptual and technical breakthroughs of art activity over the past several decades, these two time-based practices are at the forefront of changing ideas about what art can and should be. They are also forms in which Canadian artists have consistently excelled. While the formal communicative strategies of these two media are, on the surface, almost oppositional—the obsessive detail of the close-up vs. the immersive composition of bodies in a shared environment; the fragmentary distillation of editing vs. the immutable pace of real-time; the magical layering of audio and visual tracks vs. the immediacy of live presence—both are instrumental in an evolving debate about our visions of ourselves and the universe in which we live. Both serve as reflective facets for exploring our everyday behaviour and for influencing social dynamics. Both offer compelling possibilities for expression.

Curatorial Statement by Alissa Firth-Eagland

Daniel Cockburn’s videos are cleverly self-referential without being didactic. They are deliberately sleek and crafted, even produced, but it is Cockburn’s performances within these productions that intrigue me most; his personae are disconcerting in their honesty and familiarity. I find there are many blind spots for me in all his onscreen characterizations. A notable mutability of portrayer and portrayed is evident in particular in his work, The Impostor (hello goodbye): there’s a mysterious blurring of fact and fiction. I am always left wondering how much of his onscreen personalities are, in fact, him.

For his work We Are Made of Stars, Brian Joseph Davis interviewed people who believed they resemble celebrities. The work reveals complex character layers within each individual who applied. Some look nothing like their doppelgangers. Some brandish their celebrity look-alike’s gestures and mannerisms. While Brian is not physically present in his work, his performance is evident in his orchestration of the interview scenario. His concept management is that of a devil’s advocate—neither the interviewees nor the viewer are privy to all the details. And of course his editing is very personal—gently culling their tics, speech patterns, and their very human traits while also revealing their learned celebrity mannerisms.

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay’s work struck me a few years ago when I watched the two new titles he had created during a residency in Banff and after his first stay in Berlin. I was blown away by how much they both played off of, and expanded on, the previous title of his I had seen at New Toronto Works in 2002, Je Changerais D’Avis. Live to Tell felt newer than itself, slick and plastic, its aesthetic deliciously euro. But it also felt intensely sincere. It aroused questions for me about the possibility for artists to use references from popular culture without appropriating—forging something instead of just deconstructing. Nemerofsy Ramsay’s work doesn’t take from pop culture and mainstream media any more than it gives to them. These three artists’ work hinges on each of their own personal dwellings within the ephemeral medium of video, rendering it tangible through varied manifestations of presence and absence. Whether in their lack of physical appearance or their charismatic inhabitation, we witness their emotional restraints and emanations. We see poised spectres haunting the video signal and frame with impeccable timing. They’ve each inspired the question: “What kind of work would you make if you were to perform live?” These are their responses.

Co-presented by MOCCA. With thanks to V tape and The Great Hall.

Video screening @ 8:30pm
We Are Made of Stars
, Brian Joseph Davis, 2004, 11:00
The Imposter (hello, goodbye), Daniel Cockburn, 2003, 8:48
Live to Tell, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, 2002, 6:00

Performances @ 9:00pm
Report on an Unidentified Art Event Audience
by Brian Joseph Davis
Visible Vocals by Daniel Cockburn
Constellation by Nemirov and Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay

Performance Yellow

This fragrance opens us to the question, has the show started? It's winter, the theatre is colder than the street and the room is filled with people and all their winter smells: wet faux leather, down, too much shampoo, and beer breath. The atmosphere is a trickster. Am I late, am I early?

Top Notes

yellow mandarin, mimosa

Middle Notes

honey, chamomile, salt

Base Notes

narcissus, guaiac wood, piss, beer