Speculative::
Skaṝ-broügĥ
Scarborough Arts’ 39th Annual Juried Exhibition
✨CALLING ALL EARTHSEEDS::Depart from reality. Go beyond the everyday machinations, and reveal the mutations of
Area X/Scarborough✨
PRIZES
$1500 - 1st place (x1 per category)
$750 - 2nd place (x1 per category)
$750 - Scarborough Arts Student Achievement Award* (x1)
Swag bag - Staff Pick Winners (x1 per category)
*Scarborough Arts Student Achievement Award: This prize is for a student of any age currently enrolled or planning to attend secondary school (9-12) or post-secondary school (university/college, etc.) in the 2024-25 academic year. When you submit your application for this category, please identify yourself as a Student, indicate your area of study, and your current year of study below.
The Student Achievement Award is generously supported by community donations.
This year’s AJE calls for work steeped in elements of speculative fiction to comment on the socio-political, economic, and cultural conditions of Scarborough today. Speculative fiction is a genre of fiction that encompasses works in which the setting is other than the real world, involving supernatural, futuristic, or other imagined elements.
Tell us how you experience an imagined Scarborough. From the aunties in Tim Horton’s brewing their daily morning potions, to the monstrous 401, or the robot workers building the Eglinton line - show us the magic of our community, and let us bear witness to the dystopia and boundless possibilities of Speculative::Skaṝ-broügĥ (Speculative Scarborough) 🪄
This year, Scarborough Arts is accepting submissions for the following categories:
🛸 Visual Arts
🛸 Literary Arts
🛸 Auditory Arts
Featured works will be selected by a panel of jurors.
Visual Arts
Rajni Perera was born in Sri Lanka in 1985 and lives and works in Toronto. She explores issues of hybridity, futurity, ancestorship, migrant and marginalized identities/cultures, monsters and dream worlds. These themes come together to fuel explorations within a multimedia practice that includes drawing and painting, clay, wood, lanterns, new media sculpture, textile, and most recently, synthetic taxidermy. Perera seeks to open and reveal the dynamism of the icons, beings and objects she creates by means of a subversive aesthetic that counteracts antiquated, oppressive discourse, and acts as a restorative force. Perera’s work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Sobey Foundation, and the Musée De Beaux Arts De Montréal.
THE JURORS
Rajni Perera
Auditory Arts
Kevin Ramroop is an experimental musician, writer, and community arts facilitator from Scarborough. Shaped by the diverse migratorial history of his heritage and upbringing, his artistic pursuits are as multifaceted in medium as the cultures that inspire them - ultimately woven together through a lifelong focus on sound, storytelling, and community
Kevin Ramroop
Canisia Lubrin
Written Arts
Canisia Lubrin is a writer, editor and teacher, author of five books, including The Dyzgraph*st, The World After Rain, and Code Noir. Her honours include a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Griffin Poetry Prize. Lubrin has been twice a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. She has been a fellow at the Banff Centre, Civitella Ranieri, Literature Colloquium, among others.
A professor and coordinator of the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA in the School of English & Theatre Studies, she is poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart. Code Noir (Knopf, 2024) her fiction debut, contains 59 drawings by acclaimed visual artist, Torkwase Dyson and is a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers Trust Prize for Fiction.
