Flowers While We Are Living is a film and a portraiture project centering and celebrating 2S/ trans people from across Northern Turtle Island, focusing on joy and survival. Each drawing/painting in the series features a mixed media approach to depicting trans people alongside their favourite flowers. The short film Flowers While We’re Living focuses on the creation of the project during the residency at Fogo Island Arts in Newfoundland and Labrador in 2024.
With Love, From Dragon City grew out of a desire to peek behind the velvet curtain and find out what Burlesque means to the dancers themselves.
Mishann Lau is an interactive artist and filmmaker who has been making short films and working in the film industry here in Toronto. Together with Dainty Smith, a storyteller, performer, and organizer of “Les Femmes Fatales”, a femme burlesque troupe for Black and People of Colour performers, they created a space for showgirls to be their full selves.
With Love, From Dragon City opens up the mic and gives performers Dainty Smith, Kimora Koi, and Suki Tsunami a chance to tell their stories and talk about what the art form of burlesque means to them, personally, politically, and artistically.
For the 2022 Toronto Biennial, Syrus Marcus Ware presents MBL: Freedom (2022). This work is the next chapter of the saga, wherein the three Black, Indigenous, and POC Antarcticans flee the Company’s territories and abandon their mission to colonize Antarctica, swimming in icy waters toward the only part of the continent not claimed by a country, “Mary Bird Land,” or MBL.
MBL: Freedom (2022) is commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art and made possible with the generous support of the Age of Union Alliance.
commissioned by the 10th annual That’s So Gay, signature Gladstone exhibition.
2019 That’s So Gay: Love is a Battlefield is a group show celebrating new works by LGBTTI2SQQ artists and allies curated by Syrus Marcus Ware.
LBD: An Installation
What if the rooms we stay in held onto the memories that were made there? LBD is the story of 2 women who met in this one room, 3 times over 3 decades.
created by Mishann and Tijiki
audio by Mishann Lau, shadow projections by Tijiki Morris
special thanks to Kimiko Inouye.