North Island College’s new Artist-in-Residence program will bring local and Saskatchewan based artists Joanne Bristol, Barbara Meneley and Clive Powsey to NIC’s School of Fine Art & Design this summer.
The project is a component of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) project, Where is Here: Small Cities, Deep Mapping and Sustainable Futures, created in collaboration with Vancouver Island University, North Island College, Thompson Rivers University, UBC Okanagan and the Comox Valley Art Gallery.
The residency provides artists with access to NIC studios, MAC labs and production equipment while the Comox Valley Art Gallery features their work in a MAP: Make/Art/Place,exhibit. Meleney and Bristol will stay at the McLoughlin Gardens, which provides visiting artists accommodation in a charming waterfront cabin near Merville.
“NIC’s School of Fine Art & Design recognizes and promotes art-based research as a mode of creative inquiry,” said Vipond. “This residency offers a creative space and platform for professional practicing artists to conduct active research in NIC’s fine art studios.”
In developing work for this project, artists explore various mediums and modes of research to investigate how artistic practices can influence, expand and subvert our understandings of mapping, cartography and sense of space and place.
Meneley is a professional intermedia artist, focussed on cartographic representation and embodied relationships to land. For her, the art of map making is more subjective than scientific. “Cartography was my profession for 20 years, and every map I drew was fiction,” she says.
Bristol’s art locates ways in which human and more-than-human agencies are articulated by emphasizing the performativities of writing, drawing and photography in response to physical and conceptual sites of natural and built environments.
As a landscape painter and alpinist, Powsey is fascinated by views and representations of views that might obliterate or swallow a person whole — in short, views to die for. These are sublime scenarios where the observed might destroy the observer.
On Saturday, July 23, he will host Talk, Walk and Make, A Journey to the Horizon Line, an artist talk and 2.5 km hike to the Mount Washington summit from 10 a.m to 3:30 p.m. Participants will meet at NIC’s Shadbolt Studios and view the NIC student and faculty exhibition, Walking as Mapping: A Creative Laboratory before travelling to the mountain, where they will be encouraged to write, draw and photograph their journey. The event is open to the public and costs $10. Preregistration is required. Contact sharonkarsten@live.com for more information.
