Panel Discussion: Unsettling the Spirits with KC Adams, Erika DeFreitas, Chris Dorosz, and Paul Robles

Following the digitization of the Hamilton Family Fonds in 2001, local, national and international artists alike have been attracted to the uncanny photographs within this remarkable collection. Unsettling the Spirits will consider how racialized and queer artists have addressed the archive. Join artists KC Adams, Chris Dorosz, Erika DeFreitas, and Paul Robles, who will discuss the role that ghosts and intuition play in their art making.

KC Adams (flying overhead in circles eagle woman) is Anishinaabe, Inninew and British, living in Winnipeg. She is an award winning relational maker, a creator whose work connects to Indigenous epistemology. Recognizing her role as an educator, activist, community member and mentor, Adams creates work exploring technology and its relationship to her identity and knowledge systems. Working conceptually, her practice spans adornment, clay, drawing, installation, painting, photography, printmaking, public art, video and welding.

Erika DeFreitas is a multidisciplinary Scarborough-based artist whose 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.

Chris Dorosz is a Canadian-American artist based between San Francisco and Winnipeg. Dorosz has cultivated a hybrid painting-sculpture-photographic practice through which he explores the mutability of the physical world. Dorosz is a professor at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco where he teaches colour theory.

Born in the Philippines, Winnipeg artist Paul Robles is widely acclaimed for his intricate cut paper works. Exploring themes of race, gender, and cultural identity, Robles’ works maintain a careful tension between tradition, delicacy, trauma, and grief as he combines the delicate craft with animist familiars, folklore, and ghosts.

Catherine van Reenen is a Ph.D. student in the University of Manitoba’s Department of Religion. Her research straddles the boundaries between media history and religious studies by focusing on the specific practices of mediation through the categories of ‘religion,’ ‘science,’ ‘magic,’ and ‘technology’—are constructed, negotiated, and maintained. Her doctoral project will explore these issues through a study of spirit communication in twentieth-century Canada, focusing primarily on Dr. T.G. Hamilton’s psychical research.