upcoming
Zine harvest approaches on November 15, 2025, Saturday November 15 from 11-5!
Sun Wah Centre
268 Keefer St, floor LG at sun wah centre
Coming soon: mail club!
- graphics: zine harvest
ddc press
ddc press publishes zines, books, and print ephemera with a focus on artist projects, queer narratives, and critical theory.
The Dirty Dishes Collective is a collaborative project co-founded by dani neira and Cassia Powell. Grounded in friendship as a mode of working and producing knowledge, our practice centers care, collaboration, and gathering.
If you are interested in purchasing, please contact us with your selection and we will arrange the rest!
- dirty dishes by the dirty dishes (zine, 2025)
- Dog Ears (zine, 2024)
- Eat in Take out (zine, 2024)
- RIPPLES (zine 2023)
about the ddc
The Dirty Dishes Collective is a curatorial, artistic, and publishing duo formed by dani neira and Cassia Powell. Inspired by the piles of dishes that remain after gathering, the DDC centers friendship, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing as queer methodologies. Emphasizing research-based practices together with community programming, their projects include exhibitions, residencies, workshops, publications, mobile zine libraries, and dinner parties.
ddc press publishes zines, books, and print ephemera with a focus on artist projects, queer narratives, and critical theory.
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DDC was founded in 2022 on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) peoples, now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. As of 2024, the DDC is now based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
- first photo by Halle Jean March
archive
comfort zone
July 4 - July 25, 2025
Group Exhibition featuring Kaila Bhullar, Marissa Sean Cruz, Brigita Gedgaugas, and Joan Valentine. Installation by Rihab Essayh, digital interface by Samantha Herle, sound design by Shae Powell. Exhibited at Whippersnapper Gallery. Curated by Cassia Powell and dani neira (Dirty Dishes Collective).
Comfort Zone’s digital interface was built by Sam Herle. Each artist was given creative control in customizing their individual portals as extensions of the hosted work. Thank you to Rihab Essayh for her hand-dyed textiles used in the installation. Thank you to Shae Powell for the default audio soundscape.
Comfort Zone is made possible by the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Documentation by Lamis Haggag
Curatorial Text
Comfort Zone is a group exhibition exploring queer digital folklore. Taking the form of a 3D game world projected into physical space, the exhibition holds digital works by Kaila Bhullar, Marissa Sean Cruz, Brigita Gedgaudas, and Joan Valentine.
In her cyberfeminist manifesto, Legacy Russell posits we can no longer distinguish between the digital and “real” world.1 Considering the ways in which contemporary queer identities and cultures have been shaped by online landscapes — including chat rooms, memes, and worldbuilding games — Comfort Zone queries how we relate to ourselves and each other in a hybridized reality. If the digital realm provides a space where users can construct and modify, how do notions of “reality” and “artificiality” play out through the identities, relationships, and worlds we build online and offline? Occupying the slippages between cultural value systems, auto/fictional narratives, performance, and simulation, the works in Comfort Zone explore how our digital and physical realities underwrite and alter one another.
Brigita Gedgaudas’ Be Vardų, Be Kojų: polka.fbx (2025) takes the form of a digital avatar for the artist’s ongoing investigation into queering Lithuanian folk dance. Blending cultural tradition and speculative narrative, Polka, the dance step, is imagined as a queer ancestor and glitching entity. Similarly embracing the technical error of the ‘glitch’ as a site of possibility, Kaila Bhullar’s mirrorloop.exe (2025) creates a “choose your own adventure” environment that explores the construction of queer identity by remixing pop culture, digital manipulations, and analogue footage. Marissa Sean Cruz’ narrative video RAT+CAMMIE=FOREVER (2025) also borrows from pop culture to create a satirical yet touching love story between a personified webcam and rodent girl who meet online. Joan Valentine’s experimental film the body is gone, the signal remains (2024-2025) draws parallels between virtual simulation and self-representation through surveillance footage of the artist’s studio.
While online personas, avatars, and gameworlds are often associated with artifice or fiction, their creation and subsequent performance creates a mixed-reality loop. By performing possibilities through digital means, we enact a “queer orientation to reality”. 2 As an interactive installation, Comfort Zone asks its players: What is the embodied experience of engaging with a virtual world? In the merged space of the digital-physical, queer folklore flourishes as we produce and disseminate knowledge that disrupts existing frameworks and imagines alternatives. Comfort Zone invites users to find glitches in the system where “we make new worlds and dare to modify our own.”[3]
- Legacy Russell, “Introduction.” Glitch Feminism, 3-14. Verso, 2020.
- Jack Halberstam, “Queer Gaming: Gaming, Hacking, and Going Turbo.” In Queer Game Studies, edited by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw, University of Minnesota Press, 2017:187
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Glitch Feminism, 15.
archive
measured by hand
August 15 - September 28, 2024
Duo exhibition featuring Vitória Monteiro and Lan “Florence” Yee at Artspeak Gallery. Curated by Cassia Powell and dani neira (Dirty Dishes Collective).
Documentation by Sophia English
Curatorial Text
measured by hand is a duo exhibition featuring the works of artists Vitória Monteiro and Lan “Florence” Yee. Exploring the architectures of memory, the exhibition considers how we hold and build space for personal and cultural histories.
measured by hand employs the concept of a vessel as a nonlinear and intangible tool for gathering, holding, and knowledge sharing. Monteiro conceptualizes notions of rest and cultural narratives, and Yee articulates the reverberations of grief; together, the installation recalls notions of domestic interiors and land anchored by material objects. Wooden support structures, fabric hangings, sculpture, and poetic fragments traverse subjects of cultural burial practices and queer abuse. Tender and tactile, the works reflect on what we do with memory that is difficult, or incomplete.
If memory is a vessel we give form to, what are the architectures we build out of necessity? In giving the exhibition porous walls, measured by hand builds a vessel that holds without containment. As a site of commemoration and possibility, it asks what might grow from sharing in feeling and knowledge.
archive
eat in take out
July 13 - 27, 2024
Exhibition, Dinner Party, and Zine. Exhibited at FLUX Media Centre. Curated by Cassia Powell and dani neira (Dirty Dishes Collective), in collaboration with Snack Witch/Joni Cheung.
Documentation by Cole Smith
In support from FLUX Media Gallery
Curatorial Text
Eat in Take out pairs Soba’s Corner, a video work and takeout menu by Snack Witch/Joni Cheung with a collaborative zine, and dinner party. The exhibition explores food, recipes, restaurant aesthetics, and dinner table gathering as sites of cultural knowledge and connection.
Through parallel spaces of care and disruption, Eat in Take out embraces the collective experience of food-sharing while examining how representations of cultural cuisines can reveal uncomfortable histories and value-systems. Soba’s Corner uses the familiar “how-to” format of a cooking show to play with notions of authenticity, while incorporating hidden narratives in the video captions and menu’s text.
The Eat in Take out zine consists of community-generated recipes, stories, and photographs from Paolino Caputo, Alanna Edwards, Mel Granley, Dani Neira, Josh Ngenda, and Rudra Manani. Prompted by personal and cultural experiences with food, we found this publication filled with recipes for doughy comfort food: bread, bannock, arepas, pancakes, and dhokla.
archive
ripples
July 4-11, 2022
Research residency. Exhibited in the Crummy Gallery, parked at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Co-curated by Cassia Powell and dani neira (Dirty Dishes Collective), in collaboration with Kitt Peacock.
With support from UNIT/PITT Wronger Wave Festival
In-kind support from the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Crummy Gallery, and SUPPLY Victoria
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Ripples was a collaborative research residency between artist Kitt Peacock and the Dirty Dishes Collective, taking place within the Crummy Gallery in front of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from
July 4-11, 2022 as a part of UNIT/PITT's Wrong Wave Festival.
With the intention of creating a collaborative zine, Ripples explores movement and trace as a way of queering and decolonizing settler relationships to land. Looking to the sea edge’s resistance of colonial mapping and the tidal zone as a space that’s constantly erasing, rewriting, and leaving traces through erosion, Ripples considers the queer possibilities of shapeshifting geographies which refuse finitude.
Functioning as an open studio/community workshop zone, the gallery had a queer zine library set-up so folks could read and visit with the residency artists + curators. Throughout the residency, we also hosted zine-making workshops and talks exploring the themes we are working with.