Carmela Laganse’s practice engages with intersections of embodied experience and perception as well as exploring the agency embedded in objects and environments. Her work explores the impact of colonialism, diasporic communities and considers how these things contribute to material culture and identity. Working in a variety of media, she often builds interactive work or portable, modular environments that playfully and critically integrate physical, emotional, ritualistic, and intellectual processes through an intersectional lens.

 Included in her multidisciplinary art practice is research and involvement in collaborative practice centred around the inclusive representation, accessibility and anti-oppression through artistic creation. She has partnered with Centre 3 for Artistic and Social Practice on various community centred collaborations including: the creation of video tutorials to improve digital literacy for older adults funded by New Horizons for Seniors, and Direct Message (now known as Seniors Art Link) and Digital Fuse: Enhancing Digital Literacy and Online Mobility for Under-Represented Older Adults: A Pilot Project with Arabic-Speaking Communities in Hamilton. Laganse is a co-founder of the NEW Committee at the Hamilton Artists Inc. and collaborator with Taien Ng Chan on several projects through their collective Centre for Margins. They worked with Centre 3 and other community partners to co-coordinate the Reception funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, which was a two- day forum that aimed to help decolonize arts institutions through community-building, advocacy, and socially engaged art events and workshops. They are continuing this research and artistic practice through the multi- year project: The Sari Sari Xchange: Building Asian Diasporic Community Through Emergent Media. Through collaborative practice between community organizations and universities, driven by a team of artists, cultural workers and researchers with intersecting identities, this project explores the possibilities and impact of emergent media and technology when practiced through a framework of inclusive representation and accessibility.

 Laganse received an MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg and is an Associate Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University. She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2005. Upcoming and recent activity includes Wonder: the real, the surreal, and the fantastic an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, New York CAA conference, presenter for X Marks the Spot: Filipinx Visual Futurities in Canadian Universities, moderator for Toward Future Bodies symposium at the Gardiner museum and Re[new]all an online Sensorium (York University) VR exhibition.

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