What does it take to build and sustain a publishing project, and do so with communities? This panel brings together artists and organizers working across comics, graphic design and photography-driven independent publications to share how their projects are initiated, structured, and sustained over time and the communities that are fostered alongside it. Panelists will also reflect on what it means when the goal of an initiative has been met. When is it necessary to pause, transform, or let a collective publishing project go? 

Panelists



Pulping Anthology
Pulping is an anthology project conceived and edited by Jenn Woodall, Jon Iñaki, Jonathan Rotsztain, Mitch Lohmeier and Paterson Hodgson. Volume #1 features comics on the theme of comics by 35 Toronto artists. Volume #2 features comics on reality and 50 Ontario artists. 

Jonathan Rotsztain is an artist, writer and dreamer based in Toronto. His work deals with class, identity and self-esteem while using the power of drawing to conjure the fantastic. He is the creator of Self-Loving Jew, a series of visual essays exploring a secular, cultural Jewish identity. 

Jon Iñaki is a cartoonist, designer and publisher from Saskatoon. Their expanded cartooning toys with form and structure, enamoured by the image as artifact and obsessed with delusions both personal and societal.



photoED Magazine
With origins in classrooms well before the dawn of virtual learning, photoED magazine started as a grassroots resource publication to feature local content, by and for Canadian educators. An inspiration for the past 23+ years to professionals, students, educators, and enthusiasts alike, photoED is now the leading creative content publisher in the editorial photography space in Canada spanning print, digital, and social media.

photoED Magazine’s editor /publisher Rita Godlevskis has more than twenty years of experience in photography based, creative media work, in Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. She has worked across multiple platforms with a diverse range of projects in her portfolio in editorial, and creative production contexts. A passion for promoting diverse voices in Canadian photography, and great coffee keep her fuelled.





Ottawa Design Club
The Ottawa Design Club is a creative community that brings people together through speaker events and independent publications. Its speaker events feature candid, behind-the-scenes talks from creatives, focused on process, turning points, and the realities behind the work. Its zines are large-scale, theme-driven editorial projects built through open calls, curation, and collaboration, creating space for designers, artists, and writers to connect through print and in person.

Izzy Poirier is an independent brand designer and strategist based in Ottawa. She is the founder of the Ottawa Design Club and works across identity, editorial, and event design, with a focus on building community through thoughtful visual systems and storytelling.

Ariane Bédard is a graphic designer based in Ottawa. She works on national event and publication design at Canada Post and is the co‑founder of the Ottawa Design Club. With a soft spot for print and editorial design, she helps shape the club’s zines and design‑driven gatherings.

Moderator


Benjamin Woo is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University, where he studies comic conventions and comic art festivals. His next book, Making Worlds: For an Ecology of Cultural Production, is co-written with Miranda Campbell and will be published by Concordia University Press.

Ottawa artist Maura Doyle will discuss the evolution of her three-decade career with a focus on artist publishing. From early 90s DIY zines and posters to larger offset print projects, her publications function as both independent artworks and as extensions of exhibitions, public works, and performance. Her multidisciplinary work is grounded in personal experience and shaped through her relationships to place, material processes, and systems of exchange. The talk will conclude with the launch of her new artist book, Beaver Baffler: Architecture of a Universe (2025), a nature-guide–style booklet that traces the history of beaver architecture in North America, weaving a story of interspecies influence and interdependence through factual, poetic, and imagined narratives. 



Maura Doyle is a visual artist with 30+ years of publishing experience. Her work includes formats such as zines, artist books, mail art, maps, envelopes, posters, giant letters; and projects such as her self-published annual zine “The Mail Order Catalogue” (1994-2004) in collaboration with Annie Dunning or recent artist book Beaver Baffler: Architecture of a Universe published by Gibson Museum (2025). 

To mark Asian Heritage Month in Canada, this panel brings together artists and independent publishers of Asian descent in Canada and in Asia who explore how embodied knowledge - memory, language, migration, ritual - is documented, translated, and shared through publishing. From zines and exhibitions to participatory archives and hybrid forms, panelists will reflect on the possibilities of publishing as a site of care, connection and resistance and the challenges of representing ephemeral and intergenerational knowledge.

Panelists



林樂 Le Lin is a trans Teochew-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, activist, and researcher based in Tiohtià:ke, Montréal and 東京 / Tokyo.  Most of his recent works have been silk-screen or risograph-printed artist books, always pushing the boundaries of traditional books. Le received his BFA at Concordia University in 2021, specializing in Design and Printmaking. He worked at Hand Saw Press, a DIY risograph printing shop in Tokyo, Japan. He currently resides in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal and is the Risograph Coordinator at Atelier Circulaire, where he helps artists create prints and zines, and teaches risograph and bookbinding classes.



Jasmine Gui, Abby Ho and Justine Wong (Teh Studio) are multidisciplinary artists who work in forms such as mixed media and sculptural drawings, paper cutting, ceramics, painting and collage-work. As long-term collaborators, they have worked in various combinations on book projects and installations, most notably, the resurgent artefacts project. The resurgent artefacts artist book is published through tehzi, a micro imprint of Teh Studio, an interdisciplinary production space with a particular love for craft and form, collaboration and dialogue. Teh Studio moves in the spirit of slowness and stillness, exploring bodied processes of art-making through iterative and durational creation.




51 Personae, founded by Chen Yun, is a self-sustaining independent art publishing project that treats publishing as an urgent artistic practice. It focuses on life experiences in Asia and the Third World, amplifying marginalized voices and exploring contemporary forms and possibilities of realism as a mode of expression.

Moderator



Shani Khoo Parsons is an independent curator, writer, designer, mother, and founding director of Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC). With degrees in architecture and graphic design she has pursued a transdisciplinary, process-driven creative practice within independent and institutional contexts, producing an eclectic body of work ranging from intimate artist’s books to museum exhibitions. With Critical Distance she has collaboratively produced over 70 exhibitions and curatorial projects since 2013 while pursuing an independent curatorial practice. In 2022 she received her Master’s in Visual/Curatorial Studies for The aleatory object, an experimental collections-based exhibition-as research at the Art Museum of the University of Toronto.

Against the backdrop of a municipal election taking place in Ottawa in 2026, Laura Blanchette talks about the origins of Good Golly Zines and her ongoing project, Mid City, where she combines zine-making with journalism as a tool for civic engagement. Playing with the DIY, cut-and-paste zine aesthetic and embracing the whimsy, she uses printed zines to bring people into the news cycle.



Laura Blanchette is an independent journalist, artist, and founder of Good Golly Zines. She loves exploring how zines can be used in community and in conversation other art forms, like filmmaking and music. Through her ongoing zine series Mid City, Laura reports on Ottawa’s city hall using printed zines as a platform for sharing news to further engage and empower residents. Good Golly Zines is based on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe Nation in Ottawa, ON.

3:15 - 4:00 PM
Parallel Situations in Publishing: Brief Encounters between Final Form and Reflex Editions

Scott Wiese (Final Form) and Eric Francisco (Reflex Editions)

Artist-publishers Scott Wiese (Final Form) and Eric Francisco (Reflex Editions), who met at the inaugural 2025 Object//Project Art Book Fair  by sheer “coincidence”, will discuss how 20th century avant-garde tendencies, particularly the Situationist International and Surrealism, inform their individual artistic and experimental publishing practices. Ideas such as derive (drifting), psychogeography, recontextualization, and chance encounters will be explored. A dialogue between the two artists will follow, examining the similar and different ways of how their approaches to Situationist and Surrealist frameworks influence the formal decisions, materiality, and production of their respective works.



Eric Francisco is an artist-publisher, graphic designer, and educator. His research-driven artistic practice synthesizes artist’s books, photography, printmaking, and text to engage with the poetics of the everyday. He co-runs Reflex Editions, a Toronto-based DIY publishing collective that explores the collaborative and experimental potential of small-edition, handmade publications and ephemera.

Scott Wiese is a photographer and operates the publishing project Final Form (Forme Finale) based in Montréal, Final Form produces handmade, small-edition photography books with a focus on design, materials, and detail.

What new narratives might emerge from a stack of used scrap paper? Use remnants of handmade paper from Atelier Retailles studio as pieces of a story and assemble them to create your own booklet. Flipping through pages reveals connections between textures, colors and text that will surprise you. Associations are now made as your unlikely narrative experience takes shape.

How might letter-writing provide opportunities for examining positionality, intersectionality, and community? Join artist yuki kéké tam to learn how epistolary episodes can become unconventional modes of writing as subjective and emotional practice. Participants will be given time to experiment with these unconventional modes by writing their own letter to a loved one, and explore letter-writing as part of their artistic or everyday life.



yuki kéké tam (she/they) examines everyday tasks and objects through a multi-disciplinary practice, proposing that even the most ordinary rituals can tell profound stories of resilience. Using printmaking, painting, ceramics, and books, they employ play, pastiche, and vulnerability to express care in spite of social precarity. They often depict domestic spaces, using charms, games, plants, and food to speak to their lived experience in the Cantonese diaspora.

Join Aysha White - journalist, artist, and zine-maker - for a workshop tracing the zine as both a site of artistic experimentation and archive shaped by personal and collective histories. Drawing from her experience as one of the inaugural Possible Worlds resident artists in 2025, she will also share an interdisciplinary framework rooted in her knowledge and experiences within journalism, research, writing, book arts, and collage developed since 2019. Participants will be invited to explore how lived experience, personal ephemera, and archival materials can be transformed into both image and record--and why that is important in this time period.

Aysha White is a journalist, editor, fact-checker, graphic designer, and artist, based in Montréal. She is the Associate Editor of Maisonneuve Magazine, a quarterly print magazine, and Contributing Arts Editor to Cult MTL. Her writing has appeared in Broadview Magazine, Reader’s Digest Canada, and Cult MTL. Her artwork has been featured editorially and in various exhibitions, including I Am From Here (2020), Roots (2024), and Owning Our Histories (2026). Aysha has received grants to produce independent journalism projects utilizing the magazine format to tell a single story: Montreal Smoked Meat: A Secret History (2023) and The Alt Muslim Scrapbook (2025). She is passionate about print; in her spare time, she makes zines, and operates a micropress plus creative studio, Pink Heart Press.   

Drop by the Zinemaking Station at any time for some casual zinemaking. Creative prompts will be provided. No experience necessary, all materials provided. In collaboration with Carleton University Art Gallery and Ottawa Trans Library.

resurgent artefacts
(Parlour)

Teh Studio

resurgent artefacts is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Jasmine Gui, Abby Ho and Justine Wong that began with a poem of the same name (winner of the Vallum Poetry Prize in 2022) and expanded over three years, into paper prints, a room installation and an artist book.  The project meditates on the concept of memory: how it is unstable and elusive, and how our own memory is something we negotiate with every day. 

seri.oko is a Gatineau-based flying laser eyed seal, sleepily drifting along. One can find him trapped in tangles of irresponsibly coiled wires, wiring up circuit boards of alien origin.

808909
3:00 PM

808909 (AKA World News 808909) is the live electronic hardware project of Toronto-based Bill Cutbill and Qu Mi. The duo melt elements of techno, house and alternative music for a unique sound with improvisation at its core.

CMD is Corina MacDonald, a Montreal-based music producer, DJ, and radio host. She is the host of Modular Systems, a biweekly radio show on the campus-community station CKUT 90.3 FM, and has been a member of several dj-producer collectives over the years. Currently she organizes events and releases with the moodswings crew. Versatile and discerning, her DJ sets and live performances reflect her love of Midwest techno, synth-laden electro, non-club music, and ambient vistas. She has performed at several iconic music events such as MUTEK, Piknic Electronik, Igloofest, as well as in many underground clubs and parties. Her productions for labels including PPRZ, Fixed Rhythms, Jacktone, and Low Noise Productions have gained her recognition across Canada and beyond.

Co-founder and music director at Possible Worlds, veteran DJ Jason Skilz spins a blend of house, disco, tech house, and other underground grooves. Co-founder of nights Spins and Needles, Techcetera, and Stay House! and two labels focused on house, techno, and experimental sounds. Featured internationally from the UK to Asia, with past releases on labels - Spins & Needles, Dustpan, Coyote Cuts, O.X.O., and Caliber Sounds. Jason also runs the Low Noise Productions label focused on experimental and electronic sounds. 

blakfyrebeats is an Ottawa-based DJ creating, curating and spinning music that showcases Africa and the diaspora.