Spotlight North Collective is an interdisciplinary collaborative that is focused on working creatively with diverse communities in
Northern Ontario. Its members bring expertise from a variety of fields, including art, design, film, music, and the social sciences.
Spotlight North was formed in response to the overwhelming public reaction to an exhibition that Carol Kauppi and Jessica Hein organized called Living on the Outside, in May 2011 in Sudbury, Ontario. In this exhibition homeless and near homeless persons in Sudbury revealed the nature of their living circumstances through photography. Each photograph told its own story about how “sleeping rough” and substandard housing affect mental health.
The collective continues to work with marginalized communities in Northern Ontario on issues surrounding housing and homelessness.
"The main goal of this exhibit is to take action on the wishes of participant photographers, who want their photos and narratives to be seen by local residents and to provide
the impetus for taking steps toward real change."
- Carol Kauppi, Administrative Lead
Collective Members
Artist Lead
Jessica Hein is an artist who works within a drawing-based practice that is informed by experiential, interdisciplinary, and process based methods. Her work explores the interconnections between her body, the natural world, industrial sites, and urban areas. Whether she is working with a laser cutter, digital mapping software, or the choreography of her own body movements, the translation of an idea, memory, or experience is central to her work. Jessica studied visual art at NSCAD University and received her Master of Visual Studies (Studio) at the University of Toronto. She was raised in Sudbury and now resides in Toronto where she teaches in the Studio program at the University of Toronto Scarborough. In addition to her studio practice, Jessica has worked on numerous community engaged art projects including Living on the Outside, girlSpoken, a multifaceted art-based project for young women, and various programs by Musagetes, an international organization that makes arts more meaningful in our communities.
Administrative Lead
Suzanne Lemieux is a musician who specializes in the sociology of culture (popular culture, French, and minority culture with a focus primarily on Franco-Ontarian and Aboriginal-Ojibway culture). She completed her Ph.D. entitled Caractéristiques et logiques des musiques populaires, on pluralism in the symbolic structure of French songs that were popular among francophones in Canada and France. Suzanne has explored and written about the social processes used by artists in Sudbury in creating their work. She was the President of La Nuit sur L’Étang in 2010. She has performed at Northern Lights Festival Boréal, La Nuit sur L’Étang, and the Sudbury Jazz Festival.
Amanda McLeod employs video, photography, and drawing to explore site, culture, and experience of place in her work as an architect. She holds a B.A. from the University of Guelph and a Masters of Architecture at Dalhousie University. Her thesis design work focused on the housing shortage in Moosonee and the ways that architecture can reaffirm cultural identity in Northern Ontario. Drawing on research, material studies, and design workshops with Cree people from Northern Ontario, Amanda has developed an architecture that is responsive to existing patterns in material culture, intellectual culture, social structure, and ways of experiencing the land in the north.
Wayne Neegan, an Aboriginal artist, grew up in the northern Cree community of Constance Lake First Nation, a seven-hour drive north of Sudbury. Wayne is a video artist and actor who draws on his skills and knowledge in photography, video, and acting to explore social issues from a First Nations perspective. Since obtaining his BFA from Laurentian University, he has produced the award-winning documentary Will to Live, a 30-minute film about the life of a formerly homeless Cree man living in Sudbury, as part of his work with the Poverty, Homelessness and Migration project.
Sudbury resident Carol Kauppi is the Director of the Centre for Research in Social Justice and Policy at Laurentian University where she is also a professor in the School of Social Work. Over the years, Carol has been engaged in numerous community arts activities. Carol assisted with fundraising and facilitated exhibitions of artwork for the GirlSpoken project based on the book, GirlSpoken: From Pen, Brush and Tongue. She also coordinated the 2011 exhibition Living on the Outside held at Artists on Elgin in May, 2011, as well as other smaller exhibits from Living on the Outside held at Moose Factory Island in 2012, Mayworks Sudbury 2012 and the University of Sudbury, 2013. She is the Sudbury lead on Project Revision, a project that uses digital storytelling methods to enable marginalized people to tell their stories. Project Revision is creating a touring play (Toronto, Guelph, Sudbury and Peterborough) in which professional actors will re-create narratives from digital stories created in 2012.