2018 RESIDENCY SCHEDULE
MAY 7 – MAY 23
MONDAY May 7
Arrival and Orientation in the Fireplace room
6:00 Communal Dinner - Icebreakers & Happy Hour
7:30 Anti Oppression workshop Arabi Rajeswaran
Arabi is a daughter of the Tamil diaspora who was born on Dish with One Spoon Treaty Territory aka Tkaronto and has ancestry rooted in Jaffna. They are a passionate youth culture worker who aims to create dialogues among and within young people from various backgrounds and experiences. Raised in Toronto’s West-end neighbourhood of Rexdale and with over 10 years of experience as a facilitator, mentor and youth leader to her peers and several communities, Arabi has collaborated with many organizations across Turtle Island. Passionate about photography, yogic medicine, traditional knowledge and yummy food. Arabi currently works as a housing advocate, community animator, and consultant. Recognizing the human spirit and its ability to persevere are constant motivations for Arabi. Her belief in solidarity and feelings of compassion continue to motivate her in her own journey.
9:00 Collage Party
TUESDAY May 8
8:00 - 8:30 Meditation in the Fireplace Room
10:00am - Trip to grocery and art supplies stores for out of towners
8:00 pm - Feminist Film Night And Still I Rise
WEDNESDAY May 9
8:00 - 8:30 Meditation in the Fireplace Room
6:00 Feminist Art Tour of the AGO with docent Maureen DaSilva.
Maureen Da Silva is a Toronto-based second-generation Portuguese settler and cis-gendered community-driven artist and art professional committed to an intersectional feminist practice. She is a printmaker specializing in silkscreen and lithography and dabbles in bookbinding as well. She has taken her love of print into the founding of the not-for-profit artist group The inPrint Collective, of which she is the Managing Director. Through the inPrint Collective, Maureen has been proud to showcase work in Scotiabank NuitBlanche (2012), Printopolis (2010), Culture Days (2010-present) and across the GTA as well as engage in a number of community-based projects with partners such as The Scarborough Museum, East End Arts, First Story Toronto and more. A 2008 graduate of York University’s B.F.A program, Maureen has also completed her Master’s of Arts at the University of Toronto (2009), as well as her Certificate in Museum Studies from the Ontario Museum Association (2013). Her research in her Women and Gender Studies Master’s program focused on the politics of inclusion within feminist art collectives, an interest which brought Maureen into the Feminist Art Conference committee. Her own practice in feminism and printmaking, as well as the artistic wealth of her print community has inspired Maureen to (hopefully) a lifetime of creativity and non-stop learning.
THURSDAY May 10
8:00 - 8:30 Meditation in the Fireplace Room
10:00am - Meet Jen in the kitchen for a Nature Walk and tour of the island
4:00pm Decolonization of the Island Workshop with First Story member Trina Moyan
FRIDAY May 11
8:00 Meditation in the Fireplace Room
4:00 Talk with Maria Belén Ordóñez
6:00 Communal Dinner with Maria
7:30 Community Art Share
Meet in the kitchen to go off in self organized groups for mini-meetups and feedback on your art project from your fellow residency artists
Maria Belén Ordóñez is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences/Humanities in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences and School of Interdisciplinary Studies at OCAD University. Her research broadly explores unofficial channels of public pleasure, desire, affect and corporeal politics in explorations of alternative sexual citizenships, the destabilization of heteronormativity and the formation of media publics. Her ethnographic research has been based in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver where she has engaged with the affective impacts of events in disparate locations such as media headlines, queer identified spaces of pleasure and activism and contested zones of censorship and regulation. Her research has included the investigation and tracking of affect in Canadian legislative challenges dealing with sex, sexuality, censorship, and morality. She uses feminist/queer methodologies and multi-sited ethnography to think and write about the emergence and undoing of public events.
She has been a collaborator in developing and teaching curriculum for FemTechNet (femtechnet.org), an internationally distributed network of feminist artists, scholars, and activists, teaching and doing research in feminist science, media, art, and technology. Recent publications include, Doing/Writing Queer Research at the Margins. In eds. Richard J. Gilmour and Robin Ganev. We Were Here: Queers Write about their Mentors. Biblioasis 2016 and Circuits of Power, Labour and Desire: The Case of Dominique Strauss-Khan eds. Pavan Kuman Malreddy and Birte Heidemann In Reworking Post Colonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights. Palgrave, 2015. M. Belén Ordóñez teaches feminist theory, multi-sited and experimental ethnography, popular culture, and body politics.
SATURDAY May 12
8:00 Meditation in the Fireplace Room
10:00 Toronto gallery tour with Jordana Franklin, highlighting Contact Photography Festival
Jordana Franklin is a curator and writer whose love of art, feminism, and collaboration brought her to FAC. She has an MA in Art History, where her research focus was on the individual, institutional, and collective memory. Jordana has worked for art galleries on land and sea and sat on the board of a public art gallery and non-profit arts organization. She was recently a jury member for the Ontario Society of Artists and is a member of an international curatorial collective known as 7×8. She also co-founded a blog that examines critical curatorial practices. Jordana has curated exhibitions in Canada, Hungary, and Italy.
SUNDAY May 13
8:00 Meditation in the Fireplace Room
9:30 Critiques with April Hickox for photography and video artists
April Hickox is a lens-based artist, teacher and independent curator who lives on the Toronto Islands. Over the course of over 35 years, April has mined the distinctions between personal and public sites through film, video, photography and installation. Her work with objects and still lives are rooted in narrative histories that individuals accumulate throughout their lives and the ability of inanimate objects to shape memory. Currently this direction in her work continues in both photographic and video works with Provenance Unknown, and Variations a series of video works exploring the studio still life.
April is also known as a landscape photographer explores notions of the wild and what we know wilderness to be. Over the years she continues to documented the overlapping layers of human and natural histories, as nature with our help reinvents itself. Here work can be found in numerous public and privet Canadian Collections has been supported by all levels of funding throughout her career and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Hickox is currently associate professor of photography at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto. An active community leader, the founding director of Gallery 44 Center for Contemporary Photography, and a founding member of Tenth Muse Studio, and Artscape Toronto. For the past five years she has been a member of the curatorial board of Art with Heart Casey House.
Notable exhibitions include the, Harbourfrount Centre, Winnipeg Art Gallery, The Maclaren Art Centre, The Oakville Galleries, Tom Thompson Memorial Art Gallery and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. Most recently her video work was shown at the Surrey Gallery in B.C.
6:00 Communal Dinner with Andrea Thompson
Andrea Thompson is a writer and educator who has performed her poetry across the country for over twenty years. In 1995 she was featured in the documentary Slamnation as a member of the country’s first national slam team and in 2005, her CD One was nominated for a Canadian Urban Music Award. She is the author of the novel Over Our Heads and co-editor of Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out. A graduate of the University of Guelph’s MFA Creative Writing program, Thompson currently teaches fiction through Brock University and spoken word through the Ontario College of Art and Design University and the University of Toronto’s Continuing Studies departments. She is currently working on a new CD and print collection about spoken word.
MONDAY May 14
8:00 Meditation in the Fireplace Room
10:00 Tarot Readings with Magda
1:00 Artist Talk with Tannis Nielsen, followed by crits
Tannis Nielsen, (a Métis Woman of Saulteaux/Anishnawbe and Danish descent) has twenty years of professional experience in the arts, cultural and community sectors, and ten years teaching practice at the post-secondary level. She holds a Masters in Visual Studies Degree (M.V.S.) from the University of Toronto. Tannis’s studio expertise includes: painting, new media, performance, drawing and sculpture. Her academic research and teaching practice engages with the areas of anti-colonial theory, natural law/Indigenous governance, Indigenous arts activism(s), and the relative investigations of Indigenous science and Western quantum physics.
In 2006, Tannis’s dissertation asserted the need for localized Indigenous contexts to be inserted accurately within the structures of the academy by visually illustrating the the negative consequence of colonial trauma on Indigenous culture/land/language, familial relationships, and memory. Her thesis titled “Not Forgotten,” emphasized this positioning by repudiating the need of utilizing an English/imperialist punctuation and capitalization in its text. Tannis’s community service includes sitting as advisory member to Native Women in the Arts (NWIA), The Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Program (CCWWP), and past President of The Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts (A.N.D.P.V.A.). She’s also volunteered with the Toronto Native Community History Project where she assisted in re-igniting “The Great Indian Bus Tour of Toronto” of which she acted as a ‘tour guide’ on three occasions. Currently, Tannis holds a Teaching Intensive Stream position at OCAD-University and is working on a large scale public art commission for The City of Toronto.
6:00 Communal Dinner with Tannis Nielsen and Magda
TUESDAY May 15
8:00 Meditation in the Fireplace Room
Open Studio Day
WEDNESDAY May 16
4:00 Talk with Min Sook Lee
6:00 Communal Dinner with Min Sook Lee
THURSDAY May 17
8:00 Meditation in the Fireplace Room
1:00 Artist Talk with Natalie Waldburger
Natalie Majaba Waldburger received her B.A. specializing in Women’s Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In 1996, she graduated with Honours from the Ontario College of Art and Design receiving the Drawing and Painting Department Medal. Currently she is the Ada Slaight Chair of Contemporary Painting and Print Media at the OCAD University where she is also assisting in building the Life Studies specialization. This new area of study is designed to explore the meaning of the human body as it relates to the notion of embodiment, feminism, issues of representation, and the interplay between science, technology and studio inquiries. She has also taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the Media Arts Department where she completed an MFA in 2004. Natalie has exhibited widely in Canada, the U.S. and Europe; in cities such as Berlin, Florence, Vancouver, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami.
4:00 Talk with Andrea Thompson
6:30 Ilene Meta Figure Class Tour around the studios and meet the artists
FRIDAY May 18
8:00 Meditation in the Fireplace Room
7:00 Community art share. Meet for mini-meetups and feedback on your art from your fellow residency artists
SATURDAY May 19
8:00 Meditation in the Fireplace Room
1:00 Meeting: planning space use for Open Studio
SUNDAY May 20
8:00 Meditation in the Fireplace Room
10:00 Prepare for Open Exhibition
6:00 Open Studio Exhibition
MONDAY May 21
8:00 Meditation in the Fireplace Room
All day group critique on final works
Final Communal Dinner and Optional Beach Party / Camp Fire