Board of Directors 2010-2011

Miriam Ginestier (President and representative for the RAIQ with Culture Montréal) is the Artistic Director of Studio 303, a centre dedicated to the development and promotion of contemporary dance and interdisciplinary arts practices. She is also a dancer, videomaker, DJ, independent producer and is an active member of Out Productions, a gay and lesbian theatre company.

Aaron Pollard (Vice-President) is one half of 2boys.tv, a duo that creates videos and multimedia performances. His performance and video works have been presented in Canada (Halifax, Toronto, Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary, Vancouver) as well as in Italy and Spain. Aaron Pollard is the technical director at OBORO, a centre specializing in the production and dissemination of new media and contemporary arts practices.

Anne Bertrand (Secretary-Treasurer) received her degree in Visual Arts from the University of Ottawa in 1986 after obtaining a degree in classical studies, having studied Medieval Languages and Literature. Since then she has steadily worked behind the scenes in the visual arts milieu being an administrator for Artexte from 1993 to 1995 and again from 2001 to 2004 (with an formative detour in the private and community sectors in between). In 2004 she became the Administrative Coordinator for SKOL and in 2005, the Artistic Coordinator. She is particularly interested in actively acknowledging the specific, and specialized, skills of visual artists and in their economic development. As an artist she produces lightly imprinted assemblages composed of quotidian materials charged by their quality of ‘everyday-ness’ and chosen for their forms, colours and rhythmic motifs.

Éric Létourneau (Administrator) is an intermedia artist who practices concrete performance, live electronic music and the creation of constructed situations. Active in the arts milieu since the 1980s, and working under several pseudonyms, he has presented some fifty performances, concerts and installations in more than ten countries around the globe.

Émilie Bouchard (Administrator) is the General Coordinator and Administrator for Des mots d’la dynamite (Les Productions Nathalie Derome), a production company founded by Nathalie Derome that presents interdisciplinary art works. She is also a visual artist working in traditional and electronic printmaking, photography and installation.

Michael Toppings (Administrator) is a language artist whose text-based works are rendered through the visual (installation, architecture), performing (performance, theatre) and literary arts (book works). His themes are dramatic and banal, tragic and bathetic, referencing social realism while inverting popular culture. His interdisciplinary, multi-genre works that fuse narrative and gesture, portraiture and identity are research into the architecture of language (verb, adjectives, nouns) as it pertains to meaning and definitions - what a thing means and what it does not – that is to say all definition involves exclusion; in determining exactly what a thing is, we thereby implicitly determine what it is not. To define a concept is to declare by one and the same act what it does mean and what it does not (The Logical and the Translogical by Phillip Wheelwright). Ultimately, he considers his works to consist of the act of publishing and are therefore, regardless of discipline, all publications.

Michael Toppings’ most recent work includes The House Project, Male Herd, The Manufacture of Zero, and most recently Single Dwelling Monologues. Aside from his own word-centric productions, Toppings is also a curator and programmer, and is a founding member of Petri’s Quadrille, a Saskatchewan-based arts/science collective.