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Welcome Junior Fellows!

01/06/2022

We welcome our first Junior Fellows to Artengine – Annika Walsh and Kayla Eli!

 

The Junior Fellowship program helps recent graduates transition out of the school context and into their professional practice. Annika and Kayla will be grounded at Artengine until the end of the year, making and exploring the beginning of their artistic practices in our home here.

 

Annika Walsh is a transdisciplinary artist who was born in Chuzhou, China and adopted at 11 months of age by my family in Canada. She works with a variety of ingredients, materials, and collaborators to form my conceptual pieces and her practice covers notions from personal exploration of cultural identity, to participatory food performances, and everything in between. Her passion for all things culinary are frequently implicated in my continuous investigation of the power of food and shared meals as a tool for community engagement, conversation and congregating.

Kayla Eli is a Kenyan-Canadian video, new media, and textile artist. She explores the feeling of nostalgia by creating work that focuses on childhood and memories. When creating sculptural and textile work, she takes her materials into consideration as she focuses on found objects from thrift stores. For her media-based work, she creates non-linear narratives that challenge viewer expectations and make them question the realities in her work. While Eli’s sculptural and textile work both invites and repels the viewer, her media-based work comments on real life stories and situations in popular culture.

Annika Walsh shooting Chinese Croquembouche for upcoming Food Conference.

30/05/2023

In the studio this week with Annika Walsh. In her words, “Chinese Croquembouche is a savoury twist on a classic French dessert presented as a durational interactive sculpture. A traditional croquembouche consists of choux pastry puffs piled into a cone and bound together with threads of caramel. Chinese Croquembouche has a savoury filling and is bonded with a sticky, salty maple syrup caramel. Visually, the tower resembles the traditional sweet dessert, it is only upon further inspection with the smell and taste senses, that you are faced with flavours you were not expecting. This edible sculptural piece allows viewers to become participants and contributors as each choux pastry puffs gets removed from the tower for consumption. Chinese Croquembouche demonstrates my approach to food and my experiences as a Chinese Adoptee. My authenticity is continuously challenged, and I am not always what people expect me to look, sound or act like.”

 

Chinese Croquembouche will be presented at the 2023 Canadian Association of Food Studies conference themed Reckonings, Reimaginings and Reconciliations Within and Through Food Systems.
https://foodstudies.info/news-conferences/upcoming-conference/

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Resident Sarah Conn presenting Remix in Victoria

05/05/2023

Sarah Conn’s experience Remixed premiered in Western Canada from May 5th-6th at SKAM studios Victoria.

The creator of the Project Trophy, which explored life’s turning points, introduced Remixed: a 45 minute personalized polyphonic playlist of true stories and prompts on transformation set in a colour changing garden inspired space.The playlist includes personal accounts of change, ordered algorithmically based on user responses in the Remixed web app to questions such as “Do you believe that change comes from inside or outside of us?” Conn combines true accounts of transformative life events with a multisensory garden space to intimately examine the movement of change through life, presence, and collective reassembling to find potential in the self.

For more on Remixed visit the Intrepid Theatre website.

 

Sarah Conn is a theater director based in Ottawa who has been developing the Remix project with a dynamic team in residence at Artengine throughout the start of 2023.

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Walk on the Wild Side: Interspecies Collaboration in Art

20/03/2023

SciArt Conference Poster

We are delighted to be a partner in the SciArt Symposium organized by SAW. Through a series of wonderful conversations with SAW we have helped assemble the panel:

Walk on the Wild Side: Interspecies Collaboration in Art

 

Moderator by our Managing Director, Remco Volmer and including:

Aleksandra Bajde, a Slovenian composer-performer, cultural manager, and Phd candidate in political science, creates semi-improvisational multidisciplinary and multigenre performance art exploring expressive possibility and multidisciplinary interaction.

https://aleksandrabajde.com/

 

Cheryl L’Hirondelle is an interdisciplinary artist, singer/songwriter, Governor General Award recipient, and CEO of Miyoh Music Inc. L’Hirondelle approaches audio, video, and multi-sensory experience from a contemporary Cree worldview encouraging dynamism, inclusion, and the presence of nehiyawewin and other Indigenous languages.

http://www.cheryllhirondelle.com/bio.html

 

Tina Tarpgaard is a dancer, choreographer, and founder of the cross aesthetic dance company Recoil Performance Group, and 2 time winner of the National Danish Performing art Award. Tarpgaard examines object functionality and  the links between performers and space,often integrating both human and nonhuman software and bio-art performers.

 

https://recoil-performance.org/about/

 

Dr Jenniffer Willet is the director of the Bioart lab INCUBATOR and Canada Research Chair in Art, Science and Ecology at the University of Windsor, and founder of BioARTCAMP. Willet examines interspecies interaction, biotech, the body, and representation, to challenge the divisions between art, biological science, and technology.

https://gallery.iotainstitute.com/collections/jennifer-willet

 

For more information on the symposium check it out at SAW’s website here.

You can watch more on Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s work on interspecies communication in the Ideas section here on our website.

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Art and Science Fiction Residency

12/02/2023

Join Artengine for a residency exploring the potential of science fiction as an artistic framework for imagining alternative futures.

 

This paid residency supports one artist / curator / cultural producer between 15 and 30 years of age to develop artistic research and/or a project that engages science fiction as a form of practice and politics. The residency is supported by the Digital Skills for Youth program, administered by IMAA and funded by the Government of Canada.

 

Application Details

 

Application deadline: February 12th, 11.59 PM EST

Residency dates : February 15th to March 31st

Complete applications to be sent to programming@artengine.ca

 

The residency takes the idea of science fiction as a form of practice, a set of sensibilities, and a methodology, increasingly adopted by artists as a theoretical and aesthetic framework for imagining emancipatory, decolonial concepts of futurity.

 

Potential approaches would include a critical perspective or experimental use of (digital) technology and may include: design fiction, immersive audio, game worlds, bio art, digital fashion, AI interventions, and any other critical and experimental approach to digital technologies.

 

During the residency, you will have access to Artengine’s production facilities and equipment, as well as internal and external mentorship.

 

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

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