Artists in Conversation moderated by Ann MacDonald

In this conversation artists Krys Verrall and Gita Hashemi talk about their current projects, their link to Doris McCarthy Gallery and the thematics and processes that connect them.

Krys Verrall’s current project, “The Farm and the City and the Radio” is an interactive sound work about what feeds and connects us. Over the summer and fall of 2020 Krys with Big Pond Small Fish arts organization worked with farmers, artists, a community radio station and the Doris McCarthy Art Gallery to create eight short sound works, three “Farm Tour Videos” and two ASL accessible videos.

Gita Hashemi’s upcoming “A Fool’s Year in Paradise” is a yearlong meditation on land, gender, colonialism and art-making, constructed around four periods of residency, corresponding with seasons, at Fool’s Paradise, Torontonian painter Doris McCarthy’s studio residence. Through real and imagined conversations with McCarthy, IBPOC womxn artists and Indigenous knowledge keepers, this project re-imagines “landscape,” collectivizes the personal, and creates and compiles a site-specific analog, digital and living archive.

Krys Verrall is a founding member of Big Pond Small Fish. She has been instrumental in developing the organization’s philosophical approach to collaboration with vulnerable participants and those who typically encounter barriers to artmaking. Her approach elicits and then collaboratively develops the stories, drawings and perspectives of participants into experimental choral, art and video productions.

Award-winning artist, curator and writer Gita Hashemi’s experimental transmedia practice spans over thirty years, and encompasses work that draws on visual, media, performance, site specific and live art strategies. Exploring social relations and the interconnections of language and culture, Hashemi’s work centers on marginalized histories and contemporary politics.