News

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.

Artengine welcomes Najeeba Ahmed and Mercedes Ventura to our team as part of a new internship program.

Najeeba (they/them) is an artist and designer with a bachelor’s degree in biology and visual arts at the University of Ottawa. They are currently doing their Masters research on nakshi kantha in Bangladesh.

Mercedes (she/her/they) is an artist working across photo, textile, web and media projects, Instagram (as medium), performative self-portraits and, of course, memes. Their work functions as autobiographical fiction investigating new spaces of the digital era.

Najeeba and Mercedes will be helping develop the new artengine.ca space, expanding its capacity and developing new content for our growing Ideas section.

This initiative is supported by the DIGITAL SKILLS FOR YOUTH (DS4Y) administered by Independent Media Arts alliance and funded by the Government of Canada.

We are excited to share an early version of our new Artengine site. This new space will be an ongoing and transforming space as we develop new features and refine our web presence out in public.

The most exciting change is our new Ideas section. Here we are rethinking what it means to lead dialogue about art and culture in our time. It’s a bit public television. It’s a bit YouTube studio. It’s bit art panel. Check out the content we currently have rolled out here with plenty more to come.

We have many plans for the new site, but also want to hear from you! Let us know what you think.

Thunderbird Sisters Collective was recently awarded an exciting grant from the Trillium Foundation to develop its mentorship program for youth. Artengine is excited to be working in mentorship and exchange over the three year arc of their project development. Their program is targeted at youth’s from 12-19 and they recently kicked off with an in depth workshop on creativity and writing with Ottawa’sEnglish poet Laureate, Albert Dumont.

Thunderbird Sisters Collective was founded by Patsea Griffin and you can find more about them at their site. You can also reach out to our Managing Director, Remco Volmer, if you interested in learning more about the program.

As with so many things, Artengine has undertaken a significant transformation over the last few years. Poised to open a new space in the Arts Court facility in early 2020, but plans changed. We are fortunate enough in this part of the world to be emerging from some of the challenges the pandemic brought. We are back at the Arts Court, in some ways, but are still changing in many others. We are implementing new approaches to programming and changing our physical and online space to support this new direction.

We may not be open to the street, but we are open to hearing from you!