June 11th – July 1st &
August 13th – September 21st:
Craig Francis Power
Angry Country Singer with Broken Bottle, Craig Francis Power
Whereas earlier generations of rug hookers depicted a quaint and somewhat idealized version of their lives—mainly decorative rural landscapes—Craig Francis Power‘s work seeks to present a grittier reality: drunks, overflowing garbage bags, ferocious seagulls, pop cultural references, drug paraphernalia, dead animals, and so on. The imagery for his hooked rugs are drawn primarily from his daily life and have a comedic, menacing and satirical edge that undermines the apparent sincerity and naïveté of the rug’s formal qualities.
June 11th – August 3rd:
Teresa Connors
Video Still from ‘Cathedral’, Teresa Connors, 2017.
Teresa Connors will develop an audiovisual relief sculpture that layers field recording material captured off the East Coast of Newfoundland. Included in this sculpture, will be a live audio feed streaming from the St. John’s SmartBay Buoy. This live stream is in conjunction with the project I initiated with Parks Canada and the Marine Institute of Newfoundland called Sonics from our Ocean’s Edge, which will be launched this summer. It includes the attachment of an icListen hydrophone onto the St. John’s buoy, with the aim to develop a phone app for the public to listen to the sonic ecology of this environment. From the Edge will expand the use of the live stream by embedded it into an audiovisual relief sculpture.
June 11th – August 3rd:
Ryan Josey
Over the course of a two-month residency at Eastern Edge, Ryan will develop Monad a new two-part project consisting of a sculptural installation and a text to be performed live alongside the object. Responding to letter-box church signs and their recent tendency to share twitter-length messages IRL, Ryan’s work at Eastern Edge will be to develop a text that walks viewers through a complex and critical response he had to a particular sign in his hometown of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Informed by literary analysis, postcolonial theory, diaristic poetry and queer ontology, Ryan’s text will deconstruct one particular message from this sign and turn inside out its tangle of assumption, belonging and identity.
RYAN JOSEY is a Nova Scotian artist practicing writing and visual art. Through image, text and text-based performance, video, sculpture and installation his work has explored translation, dislocation and the field of identity through the lens of queerness. He has been supported by grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Arts Nova Scotia, and has participated in residencies internationally including the New York Arts Practicum (New York); the Centre for Art Tapes (Halifax); the Arteles Creative Centre (Finland); the Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax); and Plug In ICA partnered with DIS.art (Winnipeg).
All of this is made possible thanks to our generous core operating sponsors, including Canada Council for the Arts, ArtsNL, The City of St. John’s, and The Cultural Economic Development Program.