artist, Crash!Boom!Bau! Festival

Emma Waltraud Howes, born 1976 Toronto, ON, Canada, received the foundations of her training in Modern Dance and Ballet from the Canadian Children’s Dance Theatre and Toronto Dance Theater before obtaining her BFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver, BC. She is currently obtaining her MFA in Open Media from
Concordia University, Montreal, where she was awarded an international scholarship to study at the Bauhaus University of Weimar ‘Public Art and new artistic Strategies’ program in 2008.
Her work has been exhibited locally and internationally within performance arts festivals: Electra, Paris, France; 404 Festival, Trieste, Italy, Performance Mix, New York City, U.S.A.; Vernissage-Danse, Studio 303, Montreal; through Site Specific Performance Residencies: Visualeyez 2007, Alberta, 3e imperial, Quebec, and within gallery contexts: Fofa, MAI, Montreal. Her video work is widely distributed in Canada, Belgium, France, Germany, and the U.S.A., by Video Out, Vancouver, and Groupe Intervention Video, Montreal, Quebec.

Emma Waltraud Howes:
I am an interdisciplinary performance artist interested in structures that are employed to define space and bring clarity to chaos. My current practice is informed by a stubborn curiosity to engage with the boundaries that contain, to press up against borders, and to consider seemingly concrete forms as malleable. I maintain a movement research practice in addition to a material process aimed towards the development of new artistic strategies and subtle shifts in spatial design. Through performance, drawing, altered photographs and mixed media installation, I am pursuing methods for translating this spatial research into material form. I am searching to translate these ideologies into poetic structures, to construct participatory installations that engage the audience in both a physical and intellectual manner. The intent is to convey the value of agility in the face of obstructions, an optimistic proposition to consider agency and inspire invention.