billie raphael

billie raphael is SAVAC’s Artist-in-Residence and Programming Assistant from October 2026 – April 2027. Over 24 weeks, billie will spend their time between working in the studio and working with our Artist Director as a Programming Assistant. This residency is supported through Young Canada Works at Building Careers in Heritage.

For this residency, billie will explore the idea of “the doll”, both as an object of play and in terms of its transfeminine vernacular. They are interested in its connections to the transhuman act of becoming, the internet occult, and potential for ritualization. Expanding on their previous explorations of divine metaphysics, magic, billie looks to post2000s internet culture to interrogate the relationship between dolls, trans-ness, and the limits of transgressing the body until it becomes no longer “human”. billie is drawing from online beauty subliminals popularized on YouTube and Tumblr as a method of ritual to develop a multimedia installation of a 1:1 scale ball-jointed doll of the artist’s body, mid-transformation in a magical-girl-esque fashion.

billie raphael is a queer Filipino artist working in sculpture, video, and performance. Their practice explores the spectacle of rituals and the act of queering, imbuing esotericism and weirdness into authoritarian ideological systems in order to pervert colonial social performances of gender and sexuality. Their work takes inspiration from the plush, the soft, the fuzzy, the erotic, the internet post2000s, magic, and divine metaphysics. 

@billieraphael
www.billieraphael.neocities.org