Tag: Prism of Fire

Co-presented by Alleyway Gallery and FADO Performance Art Centre

How to find Alleyway Gallery

Friday, May 22 | 6:30pm
Dermot Wilson
Fan Wu
Gwen MacGregor
Quan Steele
Marilyn Yogarajah

Saturday, May 23 | 3:00pm
Christopher Petersen
Isaak Fong
Johannes Zits
lo bil
lwrds duniam

Prism of Fire performance series, curated by Johannes Zits, features 10 artists offering distinct responses to this fractured landscape against the backdrop of the city.

Positioned in a downtown laneway, the billboard Through the Prism of a Fire pulls a distant, damaged landscape into sharp focus. This large-scale image of a wildfire’s aftermath, clear-cut terrain swept into devastation, becomes the anchor for a series of performances in the final stretch of the CONTACT Festival in May.

Through forms such as spoken word, sound, fleeting installations, and subtle gestures, the artists stage live conversations between the scorched forest and the urban space that holds it. Working with the laneway’s acoustics, interruptions, and constraints, each artist initiates their own brief bridge between altered forest and public life. Together, these actions reimagine the billboard as a site of exchange where memory, place, and embodied presence meet in the tense space between destruction and renewal.

© Johannes Zits, Through the Prism of a Fire, 2024. Billboard.

Through the Prism of a Fire reflects on the growing intensity of wildfires across Canada, capturing the aftermath of a 2024 blaze in the Cariboo region of British Columbia, on Lhtako Dene Nation territory. While fire is a natural part of the forest’s life cycle, increased and sustained human activity has disrupted this balance. Industrial logging, monocultures, and conventional forestry practices have stripped away the diversity and resilience that once allowed ecosystems to recover.

Alleyway Gallery
CONTACT Festival

Christopher Petersen is a dancer and performance artist. Their work focuses on the physical body in space and attempts to allow an audience to stare into bones and flesh, the exertion of bodies, and the bodies of stillness. Christopher is unsure of most things but cannot stop.

© Gwen MacGregor. Photo Johannes Zits.

Gwen MacGregor is a Tkaronto based artist, geographic scholar, teacher and community organizer who identifies as an “unsettler.” They work in installation, video, photography and drawing. MacGregor has received awards such as the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist of the Year and the Canada Council International Studio in New York. Her work is in a number of collections including the Nickle Galleries in Calgary, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Oakville Galleries, Artbank, and the Royal Bank Collection.  MacGregor has a PhD in Cultural Geography from The University of Toronto and an Honours BA in Art Hsitory from York University. 

© Fan Wu. Photo Hamish Ballantyne.

Fan Wu is a poet, performer, and pedagogue. His current research revolves around Daoist sound and spiritual practice and its concepts of subtlety and effortlessness. His performance work has been shown at Art Metropole, Buddies in Bad Times, the plumb, and SummerWorks. He collaborates with artists of many disciplines, including Thom Gill, Evan Webber, Phil Hamilton, and Kieran Adams.

© Quan Steele. Photo Bob Steele.

Quan Steele is a multidisciplinary Vietnamese artist based in Toronto whose practice spans painting, sculpture, performance, ephemeral land art, and site-specific installations. Over the past two decades, she has presented her work in solo, group, collective, and juried exhibitions across Canada and has participated in residencies in White Bear (Temagami, 2022 and 2024); Sooke, Vancouver Island (2024); and Mountain Island Arts in Wells, BC (2025). A member of the Ontario Society of Artists, Broken Forests Collective and Etobicoke Art Group, her work explores environmentalism, the human–nature relationship, and the passage of time, using art as a catalyst for curiosity, awareness, and meaningful change. is a Toronto based dancer and performance artist. Their work focuses on the physical body in space and attempts to allow an audience to stare into bones and flesh, the exertion of bodies, and the bodies of stillness.

© Dermot Wilson. Photo Lisa Murzin.

b. Dublin, Eire

Artist and curator Dermot Wilson lives in northern Ontario. He works in various media including video, audio, time-based installation, digital imaging and performance to create works that include meditations upon his relationships with the community and the environment. Dermot has performed in galleries, bars, artist-run centres and on various outdoor sites in many communities across Canada, South America, Asia, USA and Europe. His noise/spoken word performances challenge institutional conventions and promotes dialogues about ownership and environmental abuses.

Recent installations include: Escarpment Erasure Mega-horn (Escarpment Corridor Alliance); Iterations/Emanations (KINO Gallery and Wroclaw University Gallery, Wroclaw, Poland); and Random Acts of Joy (TOTE Gallery, Campinas, Brazil). Hyperboreal is his ambient sound/spoken word performance collective. He has performed spoken word rants in urban sites across Canada since 1996 and is currently performing site-specific sound art works in clearcut or endangered forest sites.

© Marilyn Yogarajah. Photo Alex Herrera.

Marilyn Yogarajah (they/any) is an artist whose practice centers on rhythm, specifically sound and poetry. They have a background in teaching music, and an education in sociology and gender studies. Marilyn plays in multiple bands across the city, including but not limited to not a band, martian crisis unit, output 1:1:1, and teething. They also founded spectrum soundbath in 2020 which is a collaborative community based sound meditation practice. They write poetry under the moniker queertamil and can be found on bandcamp under threesixmarilyn. Land back always and death to empire.

© lwrds duniam, Pachamama Triptych Spell, 2023.

b. 1984, Perú
www.lwrds.ca

lwrds duniam (they) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, researcher, educator, and 2019 OCAD University graduate (BFA Integrated Media) living and creating in Tkaronto. Born in Callao, Perú in 1984, lwrds has been calling Turtle Island home since 2002. With a studio practice guided by Afrodiasporic and Indigenous Cosmologies, their ARTivism is grounded in disability justice, Decolonial Critical Theory, and is anti-racist, anti-oppressive, sex-positive, and trauma-informed. 

lwrds has presented work nationally and internationally, and attended international residencies in Brazil, Czechia, Ireland, Mexico, South Africa, and the US. In 2024 they won the Transformative Territories award of the COAL Prize—Creative Europe Programme and were invited to produce site-specific work at ArtMill in Czechia (2025). They are a founding member of the Trans Africa Collective and recently joined the international action group Broken Forests—Fireweed.

© Isaak Fong. not an agent provocateur (still), 2025. 

Canada

Isaak Fong (b.1999) from the prairies and foothills of Alberta, explores familial relationships and instances of the imprecise. 

© Johannes Zits. Photo Peter Onyschuk.

Canada
www.johanneszits.com

As a performance-based artist, Johannes Zits’ work is grounded in an ethical commitment to engaging with the natural world, not as a passive backdrop but as an active, responsive collaborator. Moving between live performance, still photography, and video, he expands the notion of the performer to include the materials he works with, exploring how body, image, language, and land shape and inform one another. Through sustained attention, gesture, and care, he invites an embodied dialogue with more-than-human entities and ecologies, asking how we might listen to, move with, and respond to the environments we inhabit.

Since graduating from York University in 1984, he has performed and exhibited his art extensively across Canada and around the world, in such places as Zendai Contemporary, Shanghai; ATEA, Mexico City; and International BNL of Asuncion, Paraguay. His work is in public collections such as Copenhagen Contemporary Museum, The Alberta Arts Foundation, and York University.

© lo bil, Constellations Of Critical Bodies. Photo Lorenza Cini.

Canada
www.lo-bil.tumblr.com

lo bil is a Toronto-based performance artist who experiments with making unrepeatable risky-heart performances involving spontaneous utterance, impulse-based scores and inter-relational proposals with audience. 

lo has performed at 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, AGO First Thursdays, Luminato online, Rhubarb!, Summerworks, Fringe, Nuit Blanche, Duration & Dialogue, p.s. We Are All Here, Pi*llOry, LADA DIY (UK), and at academic conferences in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, Chicago, Mexico City, Vienna and Amsterdam. lo is a Kathy Acker award recipient, a winner of FADO Live Art Award at Summerworks Performance Festival and has received Ontario Arts Council and Chalmers funding. lo is also an educator in performance and movement across disciplines. lo also hosts SCRAPE – a performance art relay, a regularly occuring performance art event in Toronto.