We Are Still Processing 2020 is a series of conversations co-animated between Geneviève Wallen, exhibition coordinator at FOFA, Maya Rae Oppenheimer and Joni Cheung from Conversations in Contemporary Art. On this discursive platform, USE 2021 artists delve more deeply into themes that resonate with their works and musings of the moment that inform their day-to-day experiences through the pandemic. Although we are collectively exhausted by 2020, in 2021, we will still be processing the year that just passed and how it impacted our creative practices.

These conversations will exclusively circulate via a weekly newsletter throughout the month of March until late Spring. Don't miss out and subscribe today!

About CICA (Conversations in Contemporary Art) 

Conversations in Contemporary Art is a free event series sponsored by Concordia University's Studio Arts MFA Program. The series provides a unique opportunity to hear artists, designers, critics, writers, educators, and curators share their practice(s) and perspectives.  

Follow their programming here.

CICA Team

Maya Rae Oppenheimer

Maya Rae Oppenheimer is a daughter, sister, aunt, plant-parent, friend and colleague who receives financial remuneration as a writer/researcher/artist/educator, mainly as assistant professor in the Department of Studio Arts at Concordia University. maya preoccupies herself with writing as social practice and the tangles of historical narratives that inform our contemporary worldviews. Structures of institutional knowledge formation and validation are often the focus of maya’s inquiries, from museum narratives to histories of social psychology and laboratory experiments. Experimental writing, performance, radical pedagogy, wandering, diy tactics and rogue archival tendencies number among the methods may brings to reconsidering and recalibrating histories and ways of knowing and being in the world. @mayarae on IG, for now. Website always pending.

Joni Cheung

Snack Witch aka Joni Cheung is a grateful, uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Stó:lō, Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh, and Kanien’kehá:ka peoples. She is currently working towards her Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Ceramics at Concordia University and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction in Visual Art (2018) from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. She has exhibited and curated shows at the CRES Media Arts Committee, Vancouver (2021); the FOFA Gallery, Montréal, Centre A: the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Vancouver; the Audain Gallery, Vancouver; and has been featured in CBC Arts; and the Canada Line Transit BC Public Art Program, among other spaces and platforms.

They have been a recipient of numerous awards, including the British Columbia Arts Council Scholarship and the Dale and Nick Tedeschi Studio Arts Fellowship. She was waitlisted for the SSHRC - Joseph-Armand Bombardier: Canada Graduate Master’s Scholarship (2020).

Aside from researching and writing, Joni also wants you to know that she likes doing snack and beverage reviews, medium length walks at the beach, being wrapped into a burrito/cinnamon bun, 🥐 and her perfect first date is a grocery run at Costco or getting bubble tea 🌈.