TJ Dedeaux-Norris fka Tameka Jenean Norris was born in Guam and received her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles before graduating with an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2012.

Norris has recently participated in numerous exhibitions and festivals including at Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Yerba Buena Museum, San Francisco, CA; Prospect.3 Biennial, New Orleans, LA; The Walker Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; and The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY, Rotterdam Film Festival, Rotterdam,Netherlands, Sundance Film Festival, New York, NY, Mission Creek Festival, Iowa City, IA among many others.

Norris has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Fountainhead Residency, Grant Wood Colony Fellowship, and The MacDowell Colony. She is the 2017 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a tenure track Assistant Professor at University of Iowa.

Jess Portfleet is a Vancouver-based artist utilizing her sculptural practice to investigate and rewire the structures people build with and for, things. By casting, displacing, repurposing and collecting, she creates arrangements that question social concepts of control, investment, value and identity as they move through perceived connections with (and between) things. Portfleet reinterprets objects through exhibition strategies centered around staging and play.  Using space and place as scaffolding, and props that provide alternative modes of support; these objects explore and articulate complex human moments.

Portfleet received her MFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2018.  She is a sessional instructor in sculpture and ceramics at Michigan Technological University, Kwantlen Polytechnic University and Emily Carr University.  She currently lives and works in the DTES of Vancouver, BC where she enjoys shopping for lost objects, found furniture and industrial salvage.