CEREMONY brings together publicly established artists and the everyday artist: those friends who scribble poems in their notes app that the world needs to see and celebrate.
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Stephen Attong
“I like to think of all of the moving parts of production. In my world, there's a photographer, an assistant, a lighting assistant, a stylist, all this stuff. When someone is career-driven, they probably like to view themselves as the glue to everyone. I'm trying to rewire this thinking.
Usually, I think I am the glue, and this is the team around me that is making something. At the same time, in the stylist's mind, they might think they are the glue, and everyone is helping create their vision. Each person probably feels a percentage of that feeling. When the actual image comes out, the audience is like, okay, the person that is photographed is the glue. No one actually has that title at the end of the day...It's good to never forget that you're basically in service to whatever craft it is instead of being like, this is ‘my team.’”
Stephen Attong is a Trinidad-born, Toronto-based photographer (b.1994). His work explores the sentimentality in public spaces. From amusement parks to quiet moments with friends, hidden beneath playful colours and structures is deep contemplation of shared experiences. He intends to enable viewers to relate to, recall or imagine their own memories in his work. Often inspired by screenplays and cinema, Attong explores how these experiences, perspectives, and ideas can co-exist through the common anchor of a still image.
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Joseph Manzoli
“Since my relationship with music is really strange, and I’m into so many different things, it's hard to know what the most honest thing I could do is. You know, what is that? What is honesty? How do you even know what that is? So a lot of what I do is experiment with what feels the most natural. What, at any given moment, can I do organically?
It's taken me a lot of years to get to where I'm at with my development. I’m learning how not to fight music, the path of least resistance, and I’m having a more Zen approach and easy relationship with music as opposed to how I started. I mean, this is part of the reason why I play jazz; it's so difficult. My upbringing was very like, you work. I started working at an extremely young age and grew up in a factory. It was instilled in me that you basically fight your way through any challenge, and that doesn't necessarily work with music. It just doesn't.”
Born in Toronto, Joseph Manzoli began playing guitar professionally at the age of 15. He attended Berklee College of Music in 2009 on scholarship as a guitar player, and since has toured extensively as an artist and sideman with acts such as Adrianne Lenker (Big Thief), Nick Hakim, Danilo Perez, John Patitucci, and most notably his own project, ginla. Manzoli started the label/collective, No Content in 2019 with long-time collaborator Jonathan Nellen. Joseph records under several monikers, some of which include DJ Planet Express, VTX, Robert Mooney, and Rebica.
