Episode 199: Live Recording: VoTS Podcast at Horizons

About Our Guests

Yvonne Mark

Her parents had moved the family there so Yvonne wouldn’t have to go to residential school. She came to Vancouver when she was 16. 

In addition to her volunteer work at Carnegie Community Centre, Yvonne is a Megaphone vendor and member of Megaphone’s Speakers Bureau, working to end stigma around substance use. She has taken part in Megaphone’s Community Journalism 101 writing workshop, held in partnership with SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement, and is an outspoken advocate for the Downtown Eastside.

Julia Aoki

She has served as General Manager and Programming Director of the Powell Street Festival, the General Manager of VIVO Media Arts Centre, and volunteered with advocacy groups and organizations, such as the DTES SRO Collaborative. Her writing on cultural expressions and community formations that are overlooked and underserved by commercial and political mechanisms and practices, can be found in TOPIA, Space and Culture and a collection by Lexington Books. She spends her spare time playing tennis with more enthusiasm than skill, and thinking about what to eat for dinner.

Paige Smith

Her work often explores questions about body and place while employing embodied art-making practices. She is interested in the synergy between materiality and bodily awareness, and of dissolving the divisions of mind and body, self and world. She uses reflexive techniques to investigate her viewers’ perceptions and interactions with art, and is interested in revealing the lack of an objective point-of-view within lens-based art. Her work plays with different framing and artistic choices that change how the audience sees what has been captured, to foreground the reciprocal power between viewer and artwork. Smith’s work is deeply personal, stemming from a desire to find connection and be understood. Her artwork reaches out to its audiences to move them — to find understanding not through language, but instead through a felt bodily experience.

Smith lives and works on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations, also known as Vancouver, Canada.

She received her BFA in Film from Simon Fraser University (SFU) in 2018, and is currently pursuing a Post Baccalaureate Diploma in Visual Arts from SFU. Recent presentations of her artwork include Massy Arts Society (2022), Audain Gallery (2022 & 2021), Dawson City International Short Film Festival (2020), and Vines Art Festival (2020).

Smith also has experience working in the world of podcasting; she currently produces SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement’s podcast Below the Radar and Sad Hill Media’s Film Formally.