Fondation

Jack Smith
Few artists can be said to have had a greater influence on the history of experimental cinema, queer cinema, and performance art than Jack Smith (1932–1989). Smith was an antic performer who played to the cheap seats, flamboyantly and tragicomically overwrought in the manner of Theda Bara, Maria Montez, Gloria Swanson, and Dorothy Lamour.

His style of camp blended Hollywood orientalism, burlesque, kitsch, polymorphous sexuality, and social satire. Caustically funny, politically trenchant, and defiantly intolerant of intolerance, he provoked police raids and censorial judges, and created a beautiful, haunting, poignant, outrageous, orgiastic body of work that transformed the artistic landscape of the New York underground—a culture also being shaped in profoundly radical ways by Andy Warhol, Tony Conrad, Ken Jacobs, Ron Rice, the Kuchars, Jonas Mekas, the Velvet Underground, Charles Ludlam, and Susan Sontag—as well as inspiring a subsequent generation of artists, including Richard Foreman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Christoph Schlingensief, Laurie Anderson, Derek Jarman, Nan Goldin, Robert Wilson Jack Goldstein, Mike Kelley, Pipilotti Rist, Vaginal Davis, Cindy Sherman, Guy Maddin, Ryan Trecartin, John Waters, Vivienne Dick, The Cockettes, John Bock, and countless others.

Jashim
Jashim is a non-binary Colombian multidisciplinary artist based in Montréal. They grew up in El Choko in Bogotá in the native and Afro-Colombian communities. They grew up visiting the Intermedia CyberArts Fine Arts world and their work pursues the development of interactive technology and the creation of environments embedding cybernetic culture. In 2018, Jashim began to DJ, immersing themselves in the underground Latinx music scene of Montréal. Jashim’s style blends genres in a playful way that is beginning to merge with their Immersive-Arts career too. Their focus is to develop a combination of audio-visual and sensory installations to create interactive environments for viewers to detach from reality and navigate sensational virtual spaces.