COMFORT ZONE
July 4 - July 25, 2025
Group Exhibition featuring Kaila Bhullar, Marissa Sean Cruz, Brigita Gedgaugas, and Joan Valentine
Installation by Rihab Essayh, Game design by Sam Herle
Whippersnapper Gallery
about the artists
Kaila Bhullar
Kaila Bhullar (She/They) is a queer Indo-Chilean experimental filmmaker + multimedia artist based in the traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ nations. Informed by digitally-based art forms, Bhullar explores various dispositions concerning identity and perception, including contemplations around the existential and political implications of images and technology. They use moving images and sound as a means to express the abstractions within these intersections, rendering their inquiries to often manifest as collages of varying forms, video or audiovisual works, and multimedia installations. Some of their recent exhibition and screening history includes Centre A, Gallery Gachet, What Lab, XINEMA, The Polygon Gallery, Massy Arts Gallery, UNIT/PITT, and The Small File Media Festival.
Marissa Sean Cruz
Marissa Sean Cruz is a digital multimedia and video performance artist from Kjipuktuk (so-called Halifax). Cruz’s topics of interest are related to labour, power and surveillance as seen through digital platforms and pop culture. Their experimental videos comprise found footage, 3D modelling, sound design and costumed performances to look at value systems with critical sensibility. These satirical works aim to capture a fast-paced contemporary present and envision possible, liberatory futures.
Marissa has been exhibited in venues like InterAccess, Gallery 1C03, Video Pool Media Arts Centre and Struts Gallery and Faucet Media Centre. Cruz’s various projects have been displayed throughout the United States and distributed digitally through spaces like the Centre for Art and Thought, Canadian Art, The Art Gallery of Ontario, PLATFORM Projects and more.
Brigita Gedgaudas is an emerging, interdisciplinary, trans*, and diasporic-Lithuanian artist working in so-called Toronto. Coalescing from a life-long practice of Lithuanian folk dance, a recent involvement in the Punking/Whacking/Waacking community, and training in new media art and vertical dance techniques — Brigita amalgamates these histories into one human shell. Finding home in a glitch’s persistent ability to reconfigure and reframe a person’s approach to digital systems, Brigita extends this into explorations of the queer body in heteronormative reality. Their work is in constant conversation with trans*mutation, translating the body between physical and digital, human and alien through interactive and immersive installations.
Existing between disciplines and artistic communities, Brigita has collaborated and worked with Hercinia Arts Collective, PriXm, Chimerik 似不像, and others in myriad capacities ranging from collaborator, designer, artistic associate, and performer. Their work has screened/exhibited/performed at The Bentway, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, and more.
Brigita Gedgaudas
Joan Valentine
Joan Valentine is a Victoria-based visual artist from Huntington Beach, California.
Her art concerns signal processing, image reproduction, and the impact of digital infrastructure on the human psyche.
She will never fully retire from show business despite her assurances.