Introducing the 2023 Festival Creative Artist

Ben Luu is a graphic designer and artist based out of Tkaronto/Toronto. He is interested in image-making, type design, editorial design, and the intersection of design and dance. His practice encompasses illustration, design, writing, and dance, touching upon topics of wellness, queer identity, technology, and the environment.

I use flowers in my personal work to symbolize beauty, life, queerness, and celebration. Here, the stylized flowers are a take on the flower motif found in traditional ceramics. In ceramics, stylistic influences, motifs, and natural resources travel between cultures and people, amalgamating human histories—not unlike filmmaking.

There is a lot of uncertainty in a world that is ever automating, attempting to fade artists into obscurity for profit, and I feel that now it is most important to celebrate these practices, like ceramics or filmmaking, where the craft intrinsically captures the human spirit.

aaronraays aka RAAYS is a producer, multi-instrumentalist, and sound architect, always approaching music through a lens of curiosity. It’s from this intuitive sense of wonder he synthesizes earthly fragments with cosmic soundscapes, reflecting it all back as shimmering ambient, experimental jazz and radiant left-field electronic beat music.