Artist
Keith Cole

© Keith Cole. High Tea with Keith Cole and Jeanne Randolph, FADO, 2022. Photo Henry Chan.

Canada

Keith Cole is a Toronto-based artist, performer and writer. He holds a BFA from York University (1989) and an MFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design (2012). His interdisciplinary artistic practice is a collision of the forms of theatre, dance, film and performance, and the intersections they create. Cole has appeared in films, television and performance events worldwide and is a recipient of a Harold Award (1999) a National Tap Dance Award (2004), the Roberto Ariganello Award (2007) a Dora Award Nomination for Outstanding Male Performance in a Musical (2008) a Pink Triangle Award (2000), XTRA! Magazine Mouthiest Queer Activist Award (2010). In 2010 Keith Cole was a leading contender in Toronto’s Mayoral Election. He placed 8th in the overall election putting him in the top 10 of well over 80 candidates. He has written for FUSE Magazine, KAPSULA Magazine, The Dance Current, XTRA! dailyxtra.com, Fab Magazine, The BUZZ and has contributed writing to three academic anthologies. In 2014 and 2015 NOW Magazine readers voted him Toronto’s Best Performance Artist. As an independent scholar his research work explores gossip, hearsay, rumours, theft, speculation and appropriation within the contemporary art world. 

Artist
Stacey Sproule

Canada
https://cargocollective.com/staceysproule/

Stacey Sproule is an emerging performance/installation artist.  She has exhibited locally for the last couple of years. Trained as a painter she works with a concern for the formal elements essential in the execution of 2-dimensional work, but working in 3-dimensions. Her work focuses on memory, fictions, and the point where one becomes indistinguishable from the other. Working from a deep pool of somewhat arcane skills, Stacey’s work encompasses her many areas of expertise at once. Past works have put to use her seamstress skills, her cooking skills, and even her musical talents.

Artist
John Marriott

Canada

John Marriott is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Toronto, Canada. His performances, interventions, videos, installations, sculptures and images have been featured in exhibitions and festivals nationally and internationally in venues such as The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto 1995, 1996), The Impakt Festival (Utrecht, 2003), 25HRS (Barcelona, 2003), The Rotterdam International Festival of Film and Video (Rotterdam, 2003), The 7a*lld International Festival of Performance Art (Toronto, 2004), The ZKM (Karlsruhe, 2004) and The Toronto Sculpture Garden (Toronto, 2006).

Artist
Suzanne Caines

Canada

Suzanne Caines received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1993 and a Bachelor of Education in 1999, graduating with distinction. She graduated with her Masters of Arts (Fine Arts) from Chelsea College, the London Institute in 2004. Caines has held several solo exhibits and has participated in group exhibitions and festivals in public galleries in North America and Europe these include Trampoline, Berlin Germany, Reception Space/Meals and SUV’s, London, England,The Projection Gallery, Liverpool, England,The Nunnery Gallery, London, England, Transmediale 2006, Berlin, Germany and VertexList Gallery, Brooklyn, New York. Caines has received several Canada Council Grants, Nova Scotia Arts Grants and has participated in several international residencies including CAMAC Marnay Sur Seine, France, The Future Idea of Art, The Banff Center, Canada, local artist in residence at CFAT, Halifax, Nova Scotia and Binaural, Portugal. She is currently working on issues surrounding locality and what that means to a community. 

Artist
Diane Borsato

Canada
www.dianeborsato.net

Diane Borsato is a visual artist working in performance, intervention, video, installation, and photography. She has exhibited nationally and internationally with exhibitions and performances at galleries and museums including Skol, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Montreal), Gallery TPW, the AGYU, and the The Power Plant (Toronto), eyelevel (Halifax), TRUCK (Calgary), Saw Gallery (Ottawa), Artspeak (Vancouver), and a residency at Villa Arson, National Centre for Contemporary Art in Nice, France. Diane Borsato is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary studio at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario.

Artist
Diana Lopez Soto

Canada
www.dianalopezsoto.com

Mexican artist Diana Lopez Soto graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art in 2005. She is an active performer, dancer and artist working with video, performance installations and public interventions. Diana is a founding member of Norma, an art collective formed by eight artists who over the past five years have produced installation and performance works that employ absurdity, physical endurance and repetition in an exploration of collective identity and cultural anxiety. As a professional dancer, she has danced for Firebelly Productions  at the Vancouver International Dance Festival (2004), the “Calgary Biennale Celebration” (2005) and other theatre/dance productions by Kira Shaffer.

She has worked for Circus Orange in Aviator, a public theatrical/circus dance and pyrotechnical performance installation that took place at Dundas Square for “Just for Laughs Festival” (2007). Diana is an active environmentalist and human rights advocate who moved from Vancouver to continue her art career at her studio quarters and organic farm in Ontario. Her work investigates patterns, human relationships and movement among, within and outside of our social/cultural and physical entities. Engaging the viewer through playful gestures that evoke self awareness, she crafts time-based journals, installations or performances inspired by her studies of everyday physical, intuitional and spiritual patterns in her life.

Performance
Vivência Poética curated by Erika DeFreitas

FADO Performance Art Centre’s 2008 Emerging Artists Series, Vivência Poética, pairs established artists with emerging artists in the creation of a collaborative performance work.

ARTISTS
Diane Borsato & Stacey Sproule
Keith Cole & Diana Lopez Soto
John Marriott & Suzanne Caines

The curatorial premise of this project required an emerging and an established performance artist to collaborate jointly, and in turn with participants within the space in which they work/present. I am interested in the relational aspects within the collaborative process between artists, and how it specifically pertains to questions of authorship, communication, tension, and pedagogy. I am certain that these collaborations will challenge the concept of relational aesthetics as it is outlined by Nicolas Bourriaud in his text Relational Aesthetics.

Erika DeFreitas, curator
Series
Emerging Artists

Initiated in 2003 by Tanya Mars, FADO’s Emerging Artists series was created to provide a professional platform for emerging artists to develop and present a performance piece, working within a curatorial framework. FADO’s intention with this 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.

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 FADO’s on-going Emerging Artists series which was designed to highlighting the work of Toronto-based emerging performance artists.

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.

The Emerging Artists series was a staple of FADO’s programming year from 2003 to 2014, and was always one of the most popular events in FADO’s performance art calendar.

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

In 2024 and 2025, the Emerging Artist series returns! Stay tuned for details.

Artist
Erika DeFreitas

Canada
www.erikadefreitas.com

Erika DeFreitas’s multidisciplinary practice includes performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, drawing and writing. Placing emphasis on gesture, process, the body, documentation and paranormal phenomena, DeFreitas mines concepts of loss, post-memory, legacy and objecthood. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including: Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery; Gallery TPW, Toronto; Project Row Houses and the Museum of African American Culture, Houston; Fort Worth Contemporary Arts; and Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita. She is a recipient of the 2016 Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Finalist Artist Prize, the 2016 John Hartman Award, and was longlisted for the 2017 Sobey Art Award.

Artist Orange

Just as a performance artist uses their body as their medium, this is a fragrance composed entirely of the orange tree: fruit, leaves, bark, roots, and flowers. Artist Orange performs itself.

Top Notes

neroli, blood orange

Middle Notes

fresh orange juice, petit grain

Base Notes

orange twig, orange seed