BIO
Michelle Bunton is a multi-media artist/emerging curator/residency facilitator/arts worker/derby jammer residing as an uninvited guest in Katarokwi-Kingston. They currently work with the Vulnerable Media Lab and are an instructor for Ayatana’s Biophilium: Science School for Artists, and previously held a curatorial position at Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Recent projects include curatorial project Drift: Art and Dark Matter, SÍM RESIDENCY ICELAND, Wee Bit Off Centre, and Playful Encounters. They hold a BFA from Western University alongside a UBC Award of Achievement in Creative Writing.Bunton insists on collaboration as a necessary condition of artistic-making, prioritizing kinship-building with both human and non-human agents in their practice. Bunton’s work is a playful and at times absurd cross-pollination of sport, gender, speculative fabulation and femi-queer science. Recent work turns to the more-than-human intelligence of slime mold/lichen/fungi, asking: How might these organisms lead us on diffractive, rhizomatic paths to generative sites of multi-species care? How might we in turn co-conspire adaptive and affective strategies of resilience?
ARTIST COLLECTIVES
Tear Jerkers is an artist collective creating works dealing with themes of public intimacy, shared embarrassment and queer karaoke. Currently they are working on a project series called Everything sounds like crying eventually. Michelle Bunton and GHY Cheung are artists currently based out of Katarokwi-Kingston and Hong Kong respectively - they met while attending an artist residency (YOGS) in 2017.Wee Bit Off Center is an embryonic art centre and a gathering place for its own imagining. This project brings together interested publics to blue-sky art institutions. Guided by research into art institutions and a utopian mood, we collectively shape and rehearse institutional practices, organizational structures and spatial arrangements towards a forward-dreaming, forever-emerging, always-disappearing art centre. We are curious where we might end up when we orient our art institutions differently, towards, say, polyvocal stewardships, alternate metrics of failure, more iterative ways of working. Co-Directed by Michelle Bunton, GHY Cheung, Em Harmsen, Faten Nastas Mitwasi, Mehvish Rather and William Carroll. WBOC was initiated by Tear Jerkers (Michelle Bunton and G H Y Cheung).
Small Potatoes is a micropress, creative network, and programming initiative operated by four artists—Michelle Bunton, GHY Cheung, Ella Gonzales and Carina Magazzeni. We are interested in supporting creative projects by fellow artists / writers / scholars that take the form of printed matter—in collaboration with these peers, we make chapbooks, zines, and artist books. We believe that collectively making and sharing work generates the intimacy necessary for networks of care within our communities. Our micropress takes its name from the idiom “small potatoes,” referring to its tiny roots and dedication to remaining a small operation. It also pokes fun at the idea of a small object being insignificant. Instead, Small Potatoes embraces the small-scale, local, and amateur. We are dedicated to the modest DIY ethos associated with printed ephemera—we believe this way of working lends itself to skill-sharing, alternative channels for circulating work, and stranger, queerer, less-commonly broached themes.