The Great Glassies Corporation Performance and Conversation

Saturday, February 18, 6pm

Alvis Choi a.k.a. Alvis Parsley will present The Great Glassies Corporation, a performance that speculates on the near future of race and identity. After the performance, Choi and artist Elisha Lim will address questions arising from their work: how do artists of colour talk about happiness, connection, and humanity? How do anti-racist communities care for each other in the face of developments like the racism that influenced the US election while acknowledging the precarity, burnout, and pain of activist labour? How do we avoid fighting white supremacy with other supremacies? What can art and performance do in a contemporary discourse about race that often repeats histories of crisis?

Comments are closed.

Biographies

Alvis Choi a.k.a. Alvis Parsley is a Toronto-based artist, performer, facilitator and researcher born and raised in Hong Kong. Alvis is named in the 2014 list of BLOUIN ARTINFO Canada’s 30 Under 30 and is a finalist of Toronto Arts Foundation’s inaugural TELUS Newcomer Artist Award. Alvis was an Artist in Residence at lemonTree creations and Videofag. They have presented at the SummerWorks Performance Festival, Mayworks Festival, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics – Encuentro, Performance Studies international (PSi), National Queer Arts Festival (Bay Area), the Art Gallery of Ontario and, most recently, the Mountain Standard Time Performance Arts Festival. Alvis obtained their Masters in Environmental Studies from York University in Toronto (2016) and is a collective member of Marvellous Grounds, a SSHRC-funded project that researches and documents queer of colour spaces within Toronto/Three Fires Territories and beyond. They work closely with Butterfly (Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network) as an artist, facilitator, and coordinator. In 2015, Alvis was appointed as the Chairperson of the Chinese Canadian National Council Toronto Chapter.

Elisha Lim is a queer and transgender story-teller, comic illustrator, claymation filmmaker and graphic novelist – and has produced award winning short films, book tours, solo and group exhibits, curatorial projects and the launch of an annual Montreal art festival called "Qouleur." The thread between all of these is Elisha's driving passion to build pride, space and solidarity for queers who are Black, Indigenous and people of colour. Elisha is completing a Masters of Fine Arts in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University and holds a previous Masters in English Literature from the University of Toronto.