Featured Artists
Artists bring downtown Oshawa's CONVERGENCE Music + Art Festival alive with their creativity and inventiveness. Check out our 2023 artist line-up below. More are being added weekly.
Jenn E Norton
Oshawa born Jenn E Norton is an artist using time-based media to create immersive, experiential installations using stereoscopic, interactive video, animation, augmented reality, geolocative sound, and kinetic sculpture. Often using video as a starting point within her process, her imaginative compositions use a combination of pre-cinema and contemporary display technologies while exploring the blurring boundaries of virtual and physical realms. Norton has shown her work nationally and internationally and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Visual Arts at York University and is an Assistant Professor in Film + Media at Queen’s University.
Her projection work on 70 KING (formerly the Genosha Hotel) is not to be missed!
Lynne McIlvride
Lynne McIlvride is a mixed media contemporary visionary artist. She has worked in the Durham Region for over 30 years, with solo shows in Canada and group shows in Canada and the US. Past Toronto gallery representation includes Prime and David Kaye galleries. She recently had a solo show at Station Gallery Whitby dedicated to her late husband, the actor Kenneth Welsh and pieces from that exhibition will be on display. Lynne will also be showing a Chevrolet Pick-up truck she painted for Ken to help deliver Shakespeare. This is part of the ON the ROAD exhibit and will literally be on the road where anything can happen.
VITAL! Contemporary Circus
Vital! Contemporary Circus is the creation of Oshawa resident, Jackie Houghton. By its very nature, circus arts have always been a bit punk and aim to push the boundaries of the mainstream. Vital! Is excited to share some of that quality with Oshawa through ambient aerial work at Oshawa's inaugural Convergence festival. What's ambient aerial? Improvised aerial movement to music. You never know what you'll see, so stop by for the show!
Durham Shoestring Performers
Oshawa’s downtown community theatre was founded in 1974 by Jeannine Butler, whose objectives are followed by her successors today – to present challenging and entertaining plays with an emphasis on innovative acting, writing, directing and design and to produce these plays keeping costs low so that live theatre can be accessible to all members of the community.
Willy Zenga
Willy Zenga is a creative fool. His artistic journey includes creating comic books and skate zines, BMX, skateboarding, building skateboard ramps, starting an eccentric youth arts collective, painting art cars and tall bikes, sewing custom clothing, flags, banners and bags, writing poetry, prose and propaganda.
He is a part of the Zenga Bros: a group of brothers who are multidisciplinary artists, designers, fabricators and filmmakers who create works that add beauty and joy to public places.
During Convergence Willy will be displaying some of his fabric works, riding tall bikes as well as showing highlights from some of Zenga Bros. most popular films.
Viktor Tinkl
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, Viktor came to Canada in 1948. Graduating from the Ontario College of Art in 1959, he continued his studies in Munich in 1959/60.
His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions since 1970: the AGO, the RMG, the Bronfman Centre of Montreal, as well as the Isaacs Gallery of Toronto. He was a faculty member at the OCA from 1970 to 2000 and continues to work in and on his Sunderland property that one art-critic described as “a fantastical array of whimsical sculptures.”
Viktor's Pushers and Pullers (2020-2022) promises to be the must-see art installation at 70 KING's ON the ROAD.