FEATURED ARTISTS 2018
ALANA BARTOL
Born in Halifax, Canada, Alana Bartol comes from a long line of water witches. Through performative, research-based, and community embedded practices, her site-responsive works propose walking and divination as ways of understanding across places, species, and bodies.
Bartol’s work has been screened and presented across Canada at Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff); InterAccess (Toronto); PlugIn Institute for Contemporary Art (Winnipeg); Access Gallery (Vancouver); TRUCK Contemporary Art (Calgary); Art Gallery of Windsor; and Group Intervention Vidéo (Montréal), as well as in Romania, Germany, Mexico and the United States. She has been an artist-in-residence with the City of Calgary’s Public Art program. Santa Fe Art Institute, and Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity. She is one of six artists selected for the Canadian Forces Artist Residency program (2018-19). She currently lives in Calgary where she teaches at Alberta College of Art and Design.
This year for HOLD FAST, Alana is hosting a water-witching workshop where she will lead an exploration of the use and tools of dowsing! Click here to find out more, and to register.
For the Art Crawl, Alana will be performing a pendulum dowsing while exploring the future of oil and gas in Newfoundland. Click here for more information.
Learn more about Alana’s residency here!
CARRIE ALLISON
Carrie Allison is an Indigenous mixed-race visual artist born and raised in unceded and unsurrendered Coast Salish Territory (Vancouver, BC).
Situated in K’jipuktuk since 2010, Allison’s practice responds to her maternal Cree and Metis ancestry, thinking through intergenerational cultural loss and acts of resilience, resistance, and activism, while also thinking through notions of allyship, kinship and visiting. Allison’s practice is rooted in research and pedagogical discourses. Her work seeks to reclaim, remember, recreate and celebrate her ancestry through visual discourses. Allison looks to Indigenous, mixed-race, antiracist, feminist and environmental theorists to critically examine the world around her.
Allison holds a Masters in Fine Art, a Bachelor in Fine Art and a Bachelor in Art History from NSCAD University.
This year for HOLD FAST, Carrie is hosting a community collaborative beading workshop, where participants bead the individual words of the Peace and Friendship Treaty of 1725. Click here to find out more, and to register.
For the Art Crawl, Carrie will be beading as a mnemonic device for language learning; repeating Cree words and phrases through bluetooth speakers while she beads. Click here for more information.
LENKA NOVAKOVA
Born in the Czech Republic, Lenka Novakova is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Montreal.
Currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Maine, ME, USA and the ZYUD University in Maastricht, Netherlands, she is positioning her subject focused on the Conversation with Landscapes within a larger question exploring how performative environments reposition our understanding of performance as a dynamic expression of space and as a dialogue between theatre and visual arts.
Lenka has been an active member of Hexagram and Matralab at Concordia, in Montreal, QC a recipient of numerous fellowships, awards and presents her work in Canada and abroad. She received fellowships from The Corning Museum of Glass, Urban Glass, Vermont Studio Center or La Chambre Blanche in Quebec and Santa Fe Art Institute. She presented her work at Project Integral Sao Paulo-Quebec, SASC Sao Paulo, Brazil, DMZ festival in Korea, Gallery Puls, Alvik, Norway and USF Verftet, Bergen, Norway and at the Historical Hospital Kuks in the Czech Republic
This year for HOLD FAST, Lenka will guide the community through the production and preparation of her immersive Art Crawl Performance. Click here to find out more, and to register.
For the Art Crawl, Lenka will have trained and audience performers participate in a dynamic multimedia environment. Click here for more information.
SAMAGIIK
It’s a complete gift when you get to choose who you work with. Asinnajaq and Camille Georgeson-Usher work collectively through acts of care where process comes above all else. To us, process sits at the core of building relationships and deep meaningful acts of convergences. We are two Indigenous women who have woven huge parts of our lives around Tiohtià:ke and all that it represents through community, artistic expression and the city itself.
Asinnajaq is an award-winning Inuk filmmaker from Inukjuak, QC and currently based in Montreal, whose most recent film Three Thousand has been exhibited around the world. Camille Georgeson-Usher is a Skwxwú7mesh / Hul’q’umi’num / Sahtu Dene/Scottish scholar, artist, and writer from Galiano Island, BC of the Pune’laxutth’ (Penelakut) Nation and is also a PhD candidate at Queen’s University. Samagiik translates to those who call each other friend, together this is what we call ourselves. Samagiik.
This year for HOLD FAST, Samagiik will be hosting an Open Studio as they put together their project, ‘this world; here’ . Click here to find out more, and to register.
For the Art Crawl, Samagiik will be leading a walk through alleys and streets, where participants will be drawing on walls and sidewalks with chalk. Click here for more information.
Camille Usher: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Pintrest | Twitter
