Born 1975 in Leduc, AB, Canada • Lives and works in Lethbridge, AB, Canada

Cindy Baker’s Lipsticks and Bullets take the visual similarity of lipsticks and bullets as the starting point for the work and explores masculine and feminine histories and the relationship of commercial cosmetic production to the military industrial complex.

Cindy Baker is an interdisciplinary and performance artist whose work is informed by a fierce commitment to ethical community engagement and critical social inquiry. Drawing from queer theory, gender culture, fat activism and art theory, Baker’s research-based practice moves fluently between the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Baker considers context her primary medium, and works with diverse materials and techniques from the low-craft (such as latch-hooking) to digital fabrication and performance, emphasizing the theoretical, conceptual and ephemeral aspects of her work.

Cindy Baker completed her MFA at the University of Lethbridge in 2014, and lives and works in Lethbridge, AB, Canada. Her work is featured in the book Queer Threads, co-edited by John Chaich and Todd Oldham, and she recently performed her work Fashion Plate at the symposium Queer Threads: Making and Talking, Fiber and Fashion at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA.

Born 1978 in Guelph, ON, Canada • Lives and works in Montréal, QC, Canada

Dana Dal Bo’s …Still in the Running Towards Becoming… is a ten-minute video where Dal Bo re-enacts scenes from the popular American reality television shows America’s Next Top Model and Toddlers & Tiaras. Inhabiting these scenes, Dal Bo intermeshes quote from teen models, pageant children, as well as their parents, all blending together into the same character consumed by the desire to use beauty to win approval and beat the other contestants.

Dana Dal Bo’s is an emerging contemporary Canadian artist whose work moves in and between photo, video, textiles, performance, and the net. She draws inspiration from reality TV, surveillance practices, the history of medicine and psychology, infomercials and pop culture, and porn. Themes of contemporary anxiety, voyeurism, exhibitionism, narcissism and feminism dominate her work. Dal Bo recently completed her MFA in Fibres and Material Practices at Concordia University, and her installation self-Less will be exhibited at VOLTA Basel in June 2017.

Born 1985 in Hackney, East London, UK • Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Zoë Buckman’s use of vintage lingerie in her installation Every Curve traces female idealization across decades, while exploring the contradictory and complimentary influences of Feminism and Hip-Hop in her upbringing. The antique undergarments – relics from our past and windows into cultural ideas of female objectification – are hand-embroidered with lyrics from rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. that refer to women, in this case, particularly their bodies.

Buckman is a multi-disciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, and photography, exploring themes of Feminism, mortality, and equality. Buckman’s recent solo exhibition Imprison Her Soft Hand was exhibited at Project for Empty Space, Newark, NJ and her project Every Curve was shown in it’s entirety at PAPILLION ART, Los Angeles, CA in 2016. Her public mural work, We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident, in collaboration with Natalie Frank is currently installed at the Ford Foundation Live Gallery of New York Live Arts in Chelsea, New York.

Born 1989 in London, UK • Lives and works in London, UK

Juno Calypso stages herself as a fictional character named Joyce and reenacts the private underlife of a woman consumed by the laboured construct of femininity, carried out to the point of ritualised absurdity. Sourcing anachronistic beauty contraptions online, Calypso takes photos of herself in honeymoon hotels or rented rooms online, where Joyce appears alone, absorbed and exhausted. Here, a ‘rejuvenating’ electronic anti-wrinkle device becomes part of a performance the rituals of beauty, shown alongside footage from the original infomercial overlaid with music that heightens the sinister tone.

Calypso graduated from the London College of Communication in 2012 and was the cover of the FOAM Magazine 2017 Talent issue. Her work is currently on view as part of FOAM Talent at Beaconsfield Contemporary Art in London as well as the exhibition From Selfie to Self-Expression at Saatchi Gallery in London.

Courtesy of Flowers Gallery, New York, NY, USA

Born 1981 in Orange, MA, USA • Lives and Works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Genevieve Gaignard’s work exists in a space of in-between. Gaignard, who is mixed-race, uses a range of character performance, self-portraiture and sculpture to explore blackness, whiteness, femininity, class and norms of beauty standards. Staring in the mirror, Gaignard’s Self speaks to the pressures of the beauty industry and ideals of body placed on individuals.

Genevieve Gaignard received her MFA in Photography at Yale University, and has exhibited throughout the United States, including shows at The Cabin LA in Los Angeles, FLAG Art Foundation in New York and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. Her work will be included in the upcoming Prospect.4 triennial of contemporary art in New Orleans, LA, USA curated by Trevor Schoonmaker.

Courtesy of Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA

Born 1975 in Zürich, Switzerland • Lives and works in London, UK

In the Designer Organ series, Andrea Hasler deconstructs high end designer accessories to create wax sculptures that are at once both attractive and repulsive. Using human organs in form of luxury fetish, Hasler plays with visions of the future, scenes of surgical fetishes, glamour and desire.

Andrea Hasler holds an MA Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art & Design. In 2014, Hasler won the Greenham Common Commission and participated in the 3-D Foundation Artist Residency in the mountain town of Verbier, Switzerland creating two site-specific sculptures for the exhibition MUTATIONS: Contemporary Sculpture in Context, curated by Paul Goodwin. Hasler’s solo exhibitions include New Greenham Arts, Newbury, UK; GUSFORD, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Next Level Projects, London, UK; and Artrepco Gallery, Zürich, Switzerland. Her work was featured in the 2014 publication The Language of Mixed-Media Sculpture by Jac Scott.

Born in Detroit, MI, USA • Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Cara Phillips’ series Singular Beauty explores America’s cultural fixation with beauty, and it’s pursuit as a complex and pervasive part of modern society. Photographing the interiors of plastic surgery offices, this body of work focuses on the advanced technologies and never-ending array of procedures that enable us to correct and enhance our bodies.

Cara Phillips was born and raised in suburban Detroit. Her history with the beauty industry began as a child model for Ford Models and continued into her years working as a make-up artist in luxury department stores. In her late-twenties she returned to school and studied photography at Sarah Lawrence College.

Since graduating in 2007 her work has been published and exhibited internationally and she has received numerous awards. Solo exhibitions include Robert Morat Gallery in Hamburg & Station Independent Projects in New York City. Her work is in several public & private collections and her first monograph, Singular Beauty, was released in 2012 by Fw:. and short-listed for the 2012 Paris Photo Aperture Foundation First Book Award and was selected for several best book lists.

Born 1984 in Warsaw, Poland • Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Ilona Szwarc’s series of photographs, I am a woman and I play the horror of my flesh, takes the form of a makeup tutorial employing a lookalike as the artist manipulates her own image to create a grotesque version of herself. Szwarc’s work explores ways in which female identity is constructed in current cultural context, as well as processes of socialization of girls and women. Notions of becoming, and concept of the ideal self are at the core of her investigation.

Szwarc holds an MFA in Photography from Yale University. Her photographs have been featured in numerous publications worldwide including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and TIME. Szwarc has been awarded Richard Benson Prize for Excellence in Photography (2015), Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture (2014), and was recently included in FOAM Magazine’s Talent issue.

Born 1959 in Winnipeg, MB, Canada • Lives and works in Montreal, QC, Canada

Using high fashion images as source material for her paintings, Janet Werner’s fictional portraits take beauty and the human figure into altered realms, bordering on the grotesque. Distorted with shifting scale, these female figures push codes of fashion and beauty into the unsettling and disturbing.

Janet Werner received her MFA from Yale University and has shown widely throughout Canada. Internationally, Werner’s work has been exhibited in the Prague Biennale and in the survey exhibition Oh, Canada at MASS MoCA. A survey exhibition of that artist’s works entitled Another Perfect Day was organized by the Kenderdine Art Gallery and toured to five locations in Canada including the Esker Foundation (Calgary), the McIntosh Gallery (London, Ontario), Galerie de l’UQAM (Montreal) and the Doris McCarthy Gallery (Toronto).

Courtesy of Parisian Laundry, Montreal, QC, Canada