This event is part of the New Circadia (Adventures in Mental Spelunking) exhibition at the Daniels Faculty.

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Beau Rhee, a visual-artist choreographer and instructor at the Parsons School of Design, will be visiting Toronto from New York to lead a workshop with Daniels Faculty students. Participants will use dance and drawing, as well as other forms of art and performance, in an attempt to reconceptualize time and architectural space. Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, an artist also visiting from New York, will create sound for this event. Both artists are interested in relational ecologies, spatial diagramming and embodied meaning.

The workshop will culminate in this group performance, inside New Circadia. The piece will be informed by cosmic time, agricultural calendars, landscape, weather, and rituals of time passing.

"Paysage. le sable parfaitement distinct de l’eau du lac sous laquelle il se prolonge sans mélange… l’eau seul et le reflet d’une barque d’écorce: l’air. La separation parfait de des substances m’enchante."

-Poésie perdue / Lost Poems, by Paul Valéry (philosopher, poet, writer of Eupalinos or the Architect and Dance and the Soul).

Beau Bree Rhee is an artist, choreographer and part-time professor at Parsons School of Design. She exhibits and performs her work internationally at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art/Berlin Biennale; The Kitchen, New York; Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York; Kaaitheater, Bruxelles; Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York; and MoMA/PS1, New York; among others. In Fall 2019, she gave a three-day masterclass at the Haute école d'art et de design Genève on dance, drawing and ecology. Her work is held in several private collections as well as in the MoMA Library and Research Collection. She has guest lectured as a visiting artist at the Strand Bookstore (Fulbright Scholars/Think Olio series), the ICP/Bard MFA program, the Swiss MFA Symposium for the Arts, and many other galleries and venues.

Rhee's artistic work is focused on the dialogue of dance, drawing, and ecology. Her practice creates relationships between body-space, the senses, and the environment. The body is a cosmic being and a relational site; it is the space where we exist in radical dependency to the world. She approaches drawing as a medium which exists “à travers” or “in between” the body and space, the dance and the choreographer, the space and the architect. Drawing is a space of potentiality and translation, spontaneity and directness, and instruction. As a dancer with over 17 years of training, she uses choreography (choreo: body – graphy: writing) as a tool for form-finding visual and haptic vocabularies of movement, the patterns of life. Drawings and performances are the main focus of Rhee's work, but she has also created installations, scents, sculptures, textile works, and texts/poems as part of her oeuvre.

Her studio, Atelier de Geste, is based in New York City.

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste is a New York–based artist, composer, and performer who considers notions of errant relations that thrive across subjectivities. Toussaint-Baptiste was a 2017 artist in residence at Issue Project Room. He received a Bessie Award in 2018 for Outstanding Music Composition and Sound Design. He has presented visual and performance work at MoMA PS1; Performance Space New York; The Brooklyn Museum; The Kitchen; Issue Project Room; The Studio Museum in Harlem; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; FringeArts, Philadelphia; Tanz Im August at Hau3, Berlin; Stoa Cultural Center, Helsinki; among others. Toussaint-Baptiste is a founding member of the performance collective Wildcat!, and frequently collaborates with performers and visual artists including Will Rawls, Yanira Castro/a canary torsi, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and André M. Zachery. Toussaint-Baptiste lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and holds an MFA from Brooklyn College’s Performance and Interactive Media Arts program.

Exhibition support is provided through the Lorne M. Gertner Fund.

Top photograph by Julieta Cervantes. Portrait by Barbara Anastacio.