Jessica Gabriel is a queer multidisciplinary artist from the Sunshine Coast, BC, currently working as a shadow puppeteer, theatre maker, and art model in Vancouver on unceded Coast Salish territories. She has a painting degree, a clown diploma, a permaculture design certificate, and since 2003 is co-artistic director of Mind of a Snail Puppet Co. Her practice centers on mixed media and assemblage; drawing from debris and found materials in the immediate environment. She approaches art and life through the playful lens of “compost-modernism” where ideas are continually being mulched and recycled, rotting, dying and made new again. Jessica creates experimental improvised sounds using old cassette tapes under the name tay_ploops. She holds a BFA from UBC and studied at l’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. A professional art model at Emily Carr University, Langara College and more. She is trained in Pochinko-style clowning and is a founding member of the ASSEMBLY: a local intersectional feminist clown collective.

Quin Martins is a Vancouver-based multidisciplinary artist and writer whose practice encompasses painting, photography, collage, and music production. His process is intuitive and experimental, consistently pushing the boundaries of his chosen materials. Martins holds a BFA in visual arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design andrecently had a short story published in Off the Map: an anthology for Vancouver writerswith lived experience of mental health issues.

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Jessica Gnyp works with a range of materials and media including digital and analogue photographic techniques, scanning, digital processes, video, drawing, sculpture and installation. Jessica Gnyp received an MFA from the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia a BFA in photography from Emily Carr University and a BA in anthropology from the University of Victoria. She is a fellow at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin and completed a residency at Salzburg International Summer Academy, Austria. She has received Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council awards as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Graduate Scholarship. She has taught as Visiting Assistant Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland and currently teaches at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Surrey BC.

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Víctor Ballesteros is an artist and filmmaker based in Vancouver, Canada. During his time at the McBride Fieldhouse artist residency, Ballesteros has further developed his project Arauco Plywall (2023–present), which inquires into the production of plywood and its use in the architecture of galleries and museum display. The use of this material in art exhibitions, through backing in regular and modular walls, shelving, and projection screens, is of particular interest to his practice, as it provides a critical lens through which to examine the geopolitics and extractive economies of the Americas in relation to the history of art display and exhibition architecture.

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