🔗 EXHIBITION ESSAY 🔗
Artist Biography:
Kiera Boult is a Hamilton-based artist working in performance and video installation. She uses tropes of stand-up comedy, camp, and reality TV to skeptically address issues that surround the role and/or identity of the artist and the institution. Her work often features the performance persona Kiki, who offers audiences critiques and “hot takes” from her skewed position as a celebrated Black bi-racial (light skin) icon and self-described “guilt-free” celebrity. Presentations of Boult’s work explore the intersections of identity, popular culture, urban planning, and the social constructions of cities.
Her most recent performance, Hamilton’s My Lady (2022), was a part of the 2022 7A*11D performance art festival and Supercrawl – Hamilton’s Music + Arts Festival. In 2019, Boult received the City of Hamilton Arts Award for Emerging Visual Artist. Her work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and Artcite Inc. Windsor. She holds a BFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University and is currently Vtape’s Manager, Outreach & Public Programming.
Find more of her work online @kieraboult.
Writer Biographies:
Delilah Rosier is an artist and writer born, raised, and based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work concerns performance, popular and visual culture through a lens of queer theory, race politics and intersectional feminism. She holds a BA from OCAD U’s Criticism and Curatorial Practice program, an MA from York University’s Theatre and Performance Studies program, and an MA from OCAD U’s Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Histories.
Dr. Delores Derosier aka Dr. DD Rosé is the leading expert on Kiki & Kikiology. She is the Dean, Associate Dean, Chair, Head Administrator, Administrative Assistant, Lecturer, Sessional Lecturer, Professor, Adjunct Professor, Head Researcher, Exploited Intern, and Custodian of the underfunded and understaffed Faculty of Urban Criticism and Kikiology (F.U.C.K). Her dissertation The Icon Wore Spanx: From James Street North to the Stages of the Institution is suspiciously untraceable. Rosé has been banned from Hamilton, Ontario since 2020.
