PIA’s Artist-Direct (AD) Committee is proud to announce the six grantees of our first funding year (in alphabetical order—see full details below):
Ernesto Cabral de Luna
Camille Jodoin-Eng
Aaron Jones
Morris Lum
Xuan Ye
Lan “Florence” Yee
About PIA’s Inaugural Artist-Direct Year
After years of development, in 2024, PIA launched this inaugural program to address the lack of funding for artists, recognizing that the barriers they face in Toronto are abundant and growing. With the soaring cost of living, shortage of studio spaces, and reduced opportunities for artists to create and showcase their work, this looming crisis is undoubtedly an urgent threat to our arts community. PIA’s Artist-Direct program is our response to these obstacles. We couldn’t be more proud to share the details of our inaugural winners below. PIA’s website will be updated with a new Artist-Direct section in the coming week. Read more below regarding the budget, selection process, and how the Artist-Direct Committee narrowed 69 applications down to 6!
The Committee would also like to immensely thank all artists who submitted! Thank you for your time and efforts in applying, and interest in partnering with PIA. PIA is committed to offering this program again in January 2025. Stay tuned for more updates.
Want to support the Artist-Direct Program? PIA’s biennial fundraising event, ARTrageous, is raising funds to support the multi-year implementation of this Artist-Direct initiative. Buy your tickets today!
Inaugural Artist-Direct Grantees
Below, the 6 inaugural grantees are listed, accompanied by their respective projects. This grant aims to support not only their proposed exhibitions but also their overarching practices. With this in mind, the details of the proposed projects are subject to change as their projects evolve.
ERNESTO CABRAL DE LUNA
PIA is proud to support the practice of Ernesto Cabral de Luna and his project “Mining For Some Sort of Continuity” as a part of a group-show taking place at Xpace Cultural Centre (Toronto, ON) on view now until Jul. 6, 2024. This group exhibition is titled Soul Jubilee curated by Philip Leonard Ocampo. “Mining For Some Sort of Continuity” draws inspiration from 20th-century Mexican Retablos—votive paintings crafted on tin sheets and circulated among the lower “mestizo” classes. Focused on exile and the ephemeral nature of memory, the series interrogates the repercussions of colonization: primarily the constraints on movement across borders. Central to this exploration is the examination of personal archives’ ability to shape and preserve an immigrant’s individual and cultural identity beyond their native home. Utilizing corrugated metal as a recognizable material from the “global south,” the artist examines the political implications of migration, repurposing the scrap material and embedding it with significance by transforming it into a canvas for the preservation of memories.
Artist Website | Gallery Website
CAMILLE JODOIN-ENG
PIA is proud to support the practice of Camille Jodoin-Eng’s and her upcoming exhibition at Patel Brown Gallery (Toronto, ON) taking place on Nov. 21 – Dec. 21, 2024. Jodoin-Eng’s exhibition will be centred around themes of sustainability within artistic practice, material accumulation and excess inherent to consumerism, a warming planet, and our spiritual connections to the sun and earth. She posits: What power does it give, and what can it take away? What is deemed waste by our society of material accumulation and physical excess, and how can waste take on a new life? How do artists engage in the meaningful creation of tangible objects under capitalist and consumerist systems? The work will function as science fiction, creating stories of the future to reflect on the questions and observations of the present and hopes to inspire viewers to be inspired by the boundless power of the sun as a transformational force and contemplate their own potential for transformation.
Artist Website | Gallery Website
AARON JONES
PIA is proud to support the practice of Aaron Jones and his upcoming exhibition Sky Mirage at The Bentway produced by Ontario Culture Days for Nuit Blanche 2024 (Toronto, ON), taking place Sept. 20 – Oct. 15, 2024. Happening under Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway, the artist will create and install a reflective balloon akin to a blimp, suspended in the air. This inflatable marvel will act as a celestial mirror, affording viewers the opportunity to behold their own reflections against the backdrop of the urban vista. The reflective surface will cast an illusion of soaring through the heavens, seamlessly blending reality with fantasy. The exhibition site will be transformed into an immersive and interactive haven, with the reflective balloon serving as its centerpiece. Visitors will be invited to engage with the artwork, interacting with their own reflections while contemplating the splendor of the surrounding urban environment.
Artist Website | Exhibitor Website
MORRIS LUM
PIA is proud to support the practice of Morris Lum and his upcoming project at the Toronto Biennial of Art (Toronto, ON) from Sept. 21 – Dec. 1, 2024. This project will be comprised of freestanding large scale photographic light boxes that will be exhibited in the Oak Room at Union Station. Central to Lum’s work is the evolution of Chinese heritage within North American communities. As a photographer, he maps immigration patterns of first and second generation Chinese Canadians and Americans and documents the way cultural identity is expressed in architecture, which in turn reveals a sense of place for the Chinese community. Utilizing a large format camera, the artist has documented the Chinatowns in Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Manhattan, New York, Boston, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Lum has often travelled back and forth to these Chinatowns to record the rapid architectural and economic changes these communities have faced. These images are visual records of the cityscapes in which Lum highlights historical and contemporary cultural fixtures such as small “mom-and-popshops”, Chinese restaurants, and community organizations.
Artist Website | Biennial Website
XUAN YE
PIA is proud to support the practice of Xuan Ye and their current exhibition I OWNED A TONGUE at Ed Video (Guelph, ON) on view now until Jun. 14, 2024. I OWNED A TONGUE is about hacking the alphabetic writing apparatus as a technology in an algorithmic narration of cybernetic feedback and data economies. In the exhibition, the software writes on its own, interfaces invite you to decipher and gesture, neon signs emit ringing sounds while scrolling antonym pairs, and speech voices are indigestible data that insist on unlearning. Meanings dangle in the collective dreams we are all in, where networked machines relay signals from the other side of reality. Lost tongues are found anew as contexts are displaced, detached, and divinated from their normalized mundane.
Artist Website | Gallery Website
LAN “FLORENCE” YEE
PIA is proud to support the practice of Lan “Florence” Yee and their upcoming exhibition Which came first, the home or the stranger? at Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto, ON) on view Jun. 13 – Jul. 20, 2024. Yee’s practice has long been concerned with the act of reproduction—copying, re-tracing, commodifying, and forging. These processes mirror the artist’s investigation of diasporic iconography from their childhood homes in tandem with the globalized desires that drive their replication. The artist’s use of oil painting on canvas follows this pattern by intentionally displacing the original paper-based ink artwork through a shift in materiality. The displayed paintings are surrounded by stacks of folded cotton canvas that expose only the edges of unstretched paintings, hinting at what is still unknown and unseen in the gaps of our archives.
Artist Website | Gallery Website
Adjudication Information
The AD Committee, with a spending budget of $30,000, selected the six successful artists from an incredible pool of 69 applications. Over three 2-hour adjudication meetings, submissions were rigorously reviewed and juried with three main assessment criteria in mind: artistic merit, impact, and experimentation + innovation. Each successful artist has been awarded $5000 in support of an upcoming exhibition happening in 2024 in the GTA. Artist-Direct is the third funding stream existing in tandem with organization-led projects, as chosen by PIA’s Project Development Committee who awarded $247,500 in grants in 2024. The goal of PIA’s Artist-Direct grants are to provide funds directly to artists to cover supplies, studio rentals, exhibition expenses, production costs, and up to 50% of the grant can be used to pay for their time and labor. Priority was given to emerging and mid-career artists, as well as artists from equity-seeking groups.
We would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to the Artist-Direct Committee for their time, energy, and diligence in shepherding the first year of this program.
Farnoosh Talaee (Co-Chair)
Kate Wivell (Co-Chair)
Barbara Macdonald
Yvonne Fleck
Rebecca Carbin
James Warren
Jennifer Morton
Jill Reitman
Joanne Thring
Kornelia Milborne
Leila Lax
Lynn Hubbs
Elizabeth Lawler (Ex-Officio)
Lauren Charyk Silverberg (Ex-Officio)
Judy Jarvis (Ex-Officio)
Interested in learning more about the Artist-Direct Committee? Email us here.
