Second Spring

Second Spring is an artist imprint that produces vinyl records and apparel. We are devoted to supporting expanded and experimental practices.

Julian 伊 中 Hou

Julian 伊 中 Hou is an artist based in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples. His multidisciplinary practice includes the fostering and organizing of productions through a fluid collaborative art, audio, publishing and apparel entity (Second Spring), as well as an ongoing artistic practice that involves the accumulation of new skills and application of personal symbolic invocations, collective meaning, and original methods of divination that probe the darker recesses of psychic awareness. His stalwart mediums are drawing, sculpture, songwriting, album production, and clothing as art.

Aisha Sasha John

Aisha Sasha John is interested in choreographing performances that occasion real love. She’s passionate about the creative potential of surrender, and builds structures through her choreographic work that allow for experiences of entrancement. The expressive possibilities exclusive to Black being-together is her ongoing research interest. John is the inaugural Toronto Dance Theatre Affiliate Artist. Her duet DIANA ROSS DREAM (Danse-cité) premiered in fall 2022 and was developed during a 2019-2022 Dancemakers choreographic residency. Her first full-length solo work debuted as the aisha of oz at the Whitney Museum in 2017, and in 2018, iterations of the aisha of oz is were presented at MAI and Toronto’s SummerWorks Festival.

Tiziana La Melia

Tiziana La Melia is a painter, poet, and collaborator based on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and sel̓íl̓witulh territories (Vancouver, Canada). In her writing and art practice, La Melia gleans the detritus of the everyday and transmutes it into material textures, fantasy, iterative shapes, and symbols that move through layers of diasporic time. She is the author of lettuce lettuce please go bad (2024), The Eyelash and the Monochrome (2018), and Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect (2015/2018).

Yan Wen Chang

Yan Wen Chang (b. 1993) immigrated to Toronto, alone from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2011 at the age of 17. Chang graduated with a BFA in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University in 2015 and has most recently earned her MFA from the University of Guelph, 2022. She was Robert Fones’ studio and painting assistant for three years. Chang has exhibited work at A.D. NYC, New York and in Toronto at the plumb, Pushmi Pullyu, Susan Hobbs Gallery and General Hardware. Her paintings are included in the collections of the Toronto Dominion Bank, the Royal Bank of Canada and several noteworthy private collections. Yan Wen Chang investigates and critiques the utopian idea of the American Dream. She refers to the American Dream as a concept that is not defined geographically by the U.S.A., but to one that describes the passion, obsession, desire and sacrifice to translocate to the West as a means of survival and/or a ‘better life’. Chang firmly believes that there is always a possibility in the face of nothing. This maxim informs her very existence and is the foundation of her artistic practice.

FASTWÜRMS

FASTWÜRMS (formed 1979) is the cultural project, trademark, and joint authorship of Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse. FASTWÜRMS artwork is characterized by a poly-disciplinary DIY sensibility, Queer and Witch positivity identity politics, and a keen allegiance towards feminist, working class, and artist collaborations. Guided by the ethos of ecology and the praxis of Witchcraft, FASTWÜRMS has extensive experience making public art, installation art, social making and performance art, landscape and earth art, vernacular and artist architecture, ceramics, ecology, geology, and enminded living systems. FASTWÜRMS is a recipient of the 2023 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Mel Paget

Mel Paget (Mass Marriage) was born in Victoria, BC. Her practice involves several mediums including drawing, sound, textile, writing and collage. She has shown and performed numerous group/solo exhibitions and performances in Canada and abroad. She currently resides in Vancouver, Canada.

Addelle McCauley

Addelle McCauley is an illustrator, traditional printmaker and apparel printer based in Toronto. Their work explores themes of subversion and transcendence to facilitate exchanges between the motives of domination and extraction with those of embodiment and the fluidity of identity.

Chaucer Gilson

Chaucer Gilson is an electroacoustic music composer and sound artist based in Vancouver, BC — the unceded, traditional territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. His experimental sound practice coalesces generative music, minimalism, and media archeology into rhythmic soundscapes highlighted by eclectic live performances. Chaucer’s recent sonic endeavors investigate the physicality of bygone analog technologies in unconventional and performative gestures. Community engagement is also at the forefront of Chaucer’s artistic practice having released compilations of underrepresented student sound artists, publishing S.C.A.M. Magazine, and screenprinting for Vancouver based record label + artist imprint, Second Spring.

New Chance

Producer and vocalist Victoria Cheong has been steadily refining her vision as New Chance. Her core sound palette, and potent-yet-diaphanous singing are likely to evoke the golden age of dance music however, where others indulge in benign nostalgia, Cheong’s deft, individual productions build upon the unmistakable psychedelic malaise that lurked in that era’s periphery. Numerous notable early 90s club hits teemed with spooky energy—stubbornly spiraling glossolalia, pulsing electronic atmospherics, and cryptic lyrics delivered in soulful deadpan. New Chance charts fresh routes through these haunted corners of dance music history toward a conception of the present moment that’s as personal as it is propulsive.

Fortunato Durutti Marinetti

Born in Turin and based in Toronto, Daniel Colussi has been playing in underground bands within various subterranean communities for the last twenty years. Adopting the nom de guerre Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, he self-released the Desire cassette in 2020, which was quickly followed with Memory’s Fool (Soft Abuse/Bobo Integral) in 2022 and the Desire LP (Second Spring), also 2022. The third Fortunato Durutti Marinetti album is titled Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean and it arrives November 2023 via Quindi Records and Soft Abuse.

Prince Nifty

Prince Nifty is the alternate personality of Matt Smith, a producer and musician based in Toronto. His practice involves building immersive spatialized sound design for live theatre and dance, and composing work of various textures and approaches.

Fan Wu

Fan Wu is an performer, writer, translator, and organizer based in Toronto, Canada. His practice involves studying knowledge traditions and engaging with wisdom traditions, namely Daoism, and is guided by a fascination with the expansiveness of such archetypes as “the wounded healer” and “the indulgent monk.” In his work and life, he asks: how can mythic ur-narratives help us to integrate our own suffering into transformation? And, how can we rearrange the forms of social life so it’s conducive to open channels of change? He is a Pisces/Pisces Rising, born into yin fire, and—of all the major arcana—most drawn to Temperance.

Strawberry

Strawberry is a Vancouver-based band comprising Barry Doupé (various instruments) and Dennis Ha (vocals, various instruments). Formed in 2012, the band has also featured special guests Arvo Leo (harp) and Marie-France Berard (vocals).

Barry Doupé is a Vancouver-based artist primarily working with computer animation, digital painting and sculpture. His work uses imagery and language derived from the subconscious developed through writing exercises and automatic drawing. His films have been screened throughout Canada and internationally.

Dennis Ha is a musician and artist working in photography. Born in Hong Kong SAR, he currently lives and works in Vancouver.