Fall Institute Events
Citing the World: Points of Interreference
Raymond Boisjoly Artist Talk | September 17 | 6 PM
Open Studio | September 24 | 6PM
Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art | 1, 460 Portage Ave | Winnipeg MB | Canada
Join us on September 17, at 6PM where faculty Raymond Boisjoly will give an artist talk referencing his work in photography which engages diverse forms of production including writing and craft-based approaches, as part of the theme of this year’s Fall Institute.
An open studio event highlighting the participants activities over the course of the Fall Institute will take place on September 24 at 6PM.
Plug In ICA’s Fall Institute is part of its educational programs open to artists, writers, thinkers and various cultural workers from all backgrounds. It is a critical pedagogical context for communal learning, collaboration, and exchange.
This year’s iteration of the Fall Institute is being led by Raymond Boisjoly. It runs from September 14 to September 26, 2026.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
- Philip K. Dick
The 2026 Fall Institute will concern the idea of interreference in considering art not as a practice of representation, but as a practice of citation.
To cite is to establish a relation between varied phenomena. Forms of knowledge do not emerge in isolation from one another. They develop through encounters with things which already exist. This program explores interreference by staging encounters between distinct bodies of knowledge that generate new forms of understanding. When a distinct practice frames an encounter with the material world, what is being cited is both the world itself and the work which provides access to it. Moving beyond questions of representation, it considers how art establishes correspondences between disparate histories, materials, concepts, disciplines, and traditions. Rather than asking what an artwork stands for, the program asks how it connects, translates, transforms, and reconfigures existing forms of knowledge.
Through research, discussion, experimentation, and sustained engagement with specialized fields of practice, participants will consider art as a method of citing the world. Particular attention will be given to the ways knowledge travels between contexts, how methods developed in one realm may be made useful in another, and how new conceptual possibilities emerge through unforeseen encounters. The program approaches the artwork not a representation of something beyond itself, but as a singular point through which diverse forms of knowledge converge and acquire new significance.
Rather than treating worlds as pre-existing objects awaiting depiction, the program approaches them as relational constructions assembled through acts of citation, collection, and invention.
FACULTY:
Raymond Boisjoly is an artist and Haida citizen. His work is derived from his training in photography and engages diverse forms of production including writing and craft-based approaches. He uses various machines and equipment related to output and construction to capture technological processes interwoven with subject matter centered on cultural propriety, humour, and poetic-prophetic texts of mysterious origins.
Boisjoly has been included in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally. In 2026, he was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Boisjoly is an Associate Professor at the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU. He is represented by Catriona Jeffries.
PARTICIPANTS:
David Peters (he/him) was raised and grew up on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. He studied Literature at Mount Allison in New Brunswick before moving to Vancouver where he cleaned houses and worked concrete construction before completing a BFA at Emily Carr, he continued to study in Victoria before leaving the West Coast and moving to Winnipeg about 8 years ago. He’s not very good at using maps, but this might a self-fulfilling self-critique.
Ela Wasney (she/her) is a Winnipeg-based multidisciplinary artist. She uses photography, typography, textiles, and sculpture to explore rural culture, religion, social class, and masculinity. She is inspired by text found in DIY roadside signage and is interested in their connection to communication and place-making. Wasney graduated from the University of Manitoba’s School of Art in 2024 with a BFA (Hons.).
Harley Morman (he/him) works as a contemporary artist and a sessional lecturer in sociology and gender studies. He grew up along the Minnesota River in traditional Dakota territory, and spent 15 years in Saskatoon before settling again in Sikoohkotoki (Lethbridge) between a bowling alley and a potato chip factory. Morman is trans and lives with multiple sclerosis; humour, colour, and play lubricate the bearings of his transdisciplinary critical practice.
Heather Rule (she/her) is a multi-media artist based in Toronto, Ontario, whose practice includes ceramics, stop-motion animation, zines, and most recently ephemeral sculpture. Working from the idea of taking/making space, Rule creates ephemeral sculptures that respond to the needs of both their environment and the people using it, reflecting an interest in sculpture as something that can coexist with its surroundings rather than dominate them. Rule has exhibited and participated in residencies internationally.
Joshua Arthur Stasik Prince (he/him) (b. 1999, “Vancouver,” BC) works across painting, lively art, installation, performance, and writing to get at questions of mistranslation, storytelling, and social cohesion. He has grown an archive generated through hosting dinner parties—stories, jokes, images, relationships, recipes, and ideas—which culminate in installation mediating that specific social setting. Alongside this, he explores speech through rhetorical video performance assisted by projection, props, and teleprompter to examine the instability of embodied language.
Kira Meyer (she/her) is an artist based in Vancouver, BC. Through processes of image transfer, layering, fragmentation, and reconstruction, she investigates how images accumulate meaning across memory, documentation, material space, and digital circulation. She has a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Mack Martens (they/them) is a queer settler writer and arts critic based on Treaty One Territory. They have been writing since they learned to put pen to paper, expressing themselves primarily through experimental lyric essays. In their work, Martens explores themes such as internet culture and parasocial relationships, place, gender, nostalgia, art, literature, and music. They hold an
undergraduate degree in Creative Writing and Honours Art History from the University of Winnipeg.
Maegan Harbridge (she/her) is a Canadian painter and writer exploring the political dimensions of aesthetic experience through abstraction, posthuman theory, and material-based practices. Her layered paintings bring abstraction and representation, nature and culture, and figure and ground into unstable relation. She recently completed a SSHRC-funded PhD in Visual Arts at York University, where her research developed “expanded formalism” and “care/full looking” through studio practice and writing. Her writing appears in publications spanning environmental humanities and posthumanist thought.
Meagan Williams (she/her) is a self-taught experimental photographer.
Her lens-based photography practice focuses on destructive analog
techniques, exploring the possibilities of using tools in ways they don’t want
to be used. Meagan is a member at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary
Photography, and her work has been exhibited at Gallery 44, Charles
Street Video, and Gagné Contemporary. She lives and works in Toronto
on lands covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit.
Meaganelizabeth Diamond (she/her, they/them) is an artist, organizer and curator working across photography, sculpture, new media and installation. Diamond is the Executive & Artistic Director at PLATFORM centre for photographic & digital arts in Winnipeg, MB. They are the current Chair of the Board of Directors for Buffalo Berry Press / BlackFlash Magazine. Currently, her solo exhibition GLIMPSE is on view at the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery in Saskatchewan until 19 September.
Mercedes E-Maduka (she/her) Born in Kano, Nigeria, Maduka’s life changed at eleven when she left home for boarding school. After her studies, her family moved to Abuja due to unrest, and shortly after, she began college in Cairo. However, the 2011 Egyptian Revolution led her to relocate to Canada, where she completed her BFA at the University of Manitoba in 2016. Her migration experiences deeply influence her artistic work, particularly in exploring themes of contemporary migration through the repurposing of the 1983 ‘Ghana Must Go’ bags, a symbol of immigrant struggle. Various arts councils support her works.
Natalie Baird (she/her) and Toby Gilles (he/him) are a visual artist duo based in Winnipeg. Their practice spans many mediums, approaching art as a process of discovery and a record of collective meaning-making. Over the last ten years, their projects have included animation, documentary filmmaking, drawing, and public art. Developing multigenerational relationships through shared art experiences is a focus of their practice; whether that be inside locked healthcare units, in city parks, or on the sea ice.
Sabba Rezaï (she/her) Architectural designer + artist Sabba Rezaï interrogates the mundane to dismantle hegemonic norms, letting the potential of “not knowing” guide her toward new ways of doing + being.
Soledad Fátima Muñoz (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher, born in Canada and raised in Rancagua, Chile. Her work highlights the historical materiality of textiles and their influence on collective memory. Through large-scale weavings, sound installations, and audiovisual projects, she hopes to create instances that contribute to the construction of a more equitable society and the development of new archives of resistance.
Sylvia Matas (she/her) is an artist working with images and language resulting primarily in drawings, artist’s books, videos, and poetry. She received her MFA from Chelsea College in London, England. Recent projects were inspired by the ways new technologies and new forms of knowledge change the ways we perceive, think, act, and relate to each other and our world. Recent exhibition venues include Gallery TPW, Art Windsor-Essex, and the Art Gallery of Regina. She has published five artists’ books.
Vince Rozario (they/them) is a Bangladeshi-Canadian independent curator, critic, writer, arts administrator, and community organizer based in Tkaronto/ Toronto. Their curatorial work engages performance, immersive new media, installation and site-specific activations that circumvent traditional modes of exhibition and dissemination. They are interested in collaborative modes of cultural production which transgress traditional institutional hierarchies. They are part of Artists Against Artwashing and the “No Arms in the Arts” coalition in Canada, which advocates for cultural boycott and divestment from entities tied to the genocide in Palestine.
They have presented exhibitions at Trinity Square Video, the Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery, Concordia University, the Art Gallery of Guelph, the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, and Xpace Cultural Centre. They have contributed writings to Momus, C Magazine, ArtsEverywhere and InterAccess. They are part of Whippersnapper Gallery’s board of directors, and were one of the winners of the 2021 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators and the 2018 C Magazine New Critics Award.