Amery Sandford & David Carriere

January 7- February 4 2020

Gentle Barriers

Amery Sandford’s MFA Thesis exhibition SMILING PILE, exhibited at SNAP Gallery in Edmonton, Alberta. 2019Gentle Barriers is a collaborative interdisciplinary project by Montreal artists Amery Sandford and David Carriere that combines drawing, 3D modelling, and sound. With these artists coming from their respective backgrounds of visual arts and music, the project will be an exploration and intersection of dialogue between contemporary art, video, and pop music. Using Blender, a 3D modelling software, the artists plan create four to seven short animations that will be accompanied by music scored by Carriere. These animations will be a moment for experimentation for creating characters that populate the mysterious constructed worlds in Sandford’s drawn and printed works that investigate cultural spectacle in public space.

Realizing parallel issues that arise in tourist spaces across Canada, Amery Sandford’s work focuses on regional identity and public understanding of Canadian history. She recently completed an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University and continues to make prints, illustrations, and textiles in Montreal, Quebec.

David Carriere is a musician based in Montreal, Quebec. He is a guitarist, songwriter, and producer for TOPS, a Montreal born pop group that gained international attention after their debut release Tender Opposites in 2012. He is releasing a new record with TOPS in the spring of 2020 and has taken the post of producer on a number of projects, most recently Deborah by Sorry Girls that was released by Arbutus Records in October 2019.

Together David and Amery make music under the name Born At Midnite and are releasing an EP with Arbutus Records in 2020.

Melanie Colosimo

January 20^th to February 2^nd

Following a January Residency and Solo Exhibition, “What keeps things together, when things fall apart” at Grenfell Gallery, Melanie Colosimo will be participating in Eastern Edge’s studio residency from January 20^th to February 2^{nd  ‘}During this residency  I will be creating soft sculpture works representing power and connection.  These works will be limp, warning of the challenges inherent in any form of progress, communication and connection. This is a continuation of my soft sculpture works which underlines the precariousness of the Atlantic region’s situation. By robbing these structures of their potency, I mock their function by reproducing them from materials that are malleable and flimsy.’

Based out of Halifax, NS, Melanie Colosimo uses found material, graphite and paper to create large-scale sculptural drawings. Her work focuses on strong, structural materials to explore identity, liminality and progress. She received a BFA from Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB (2006) and an MFA from the University of Windsor, in Windsor, ON (2011). Her work has been screened and exhibited in festivals and galleries internationally and across Canada such as AKA Gallery (SK) the Art Gallery of Windsor (ON), the Atlantic Film Festival (NS), Eastern Edge Gallery (NL), and Mount Saint Vincent University Gallery (NS). Her work is currently travelling southern China as part of the exhibition Maud Lewis and the Nova Scotia Terrior. She has participated in a variety of residencies such as the CFAT local Artist in Residence, University of Windsor Research Residency and the Banff Centre’s Thematic Residencies and at the Vermont Studio Centre in Johnson, Vermont. Colosimo is currently the Director of the Anna Leonowens Gallery at NSCAD University in Halifax where she facilitates over 120 exhibitions a year by NSCAD visiting artists and graduating students.

Artist Statement:
Much of my work addresses nostalgia, community, dislocation and longing but has recently moved towards a preoccupation with traditionally masculine utilitarian imagery and themes of progress and construction. I commit to simple materials – cut paper, graphite and fabric – to create large-scale drawings and paper sculptures of fences, structures and architecture to explore memory, transitory states and trace imagery. My subjects are temporary utilitarian objects that connote construction, a ‘work in progress’ or the formative states. They are symbols of liminality, thresholds between a previous state of being and the next phase. I explore this liminal state; not only through the completion of a work but also during the phases of creation and process. My most recent body of work uses lattice towers to warn of technology’s fallibility as well as the challenges inherent to communication.

Kate Lahey

January 7th – February 22nd, 2020

 Exploring practices of care and criticism through dialogue, this residency will take up conversation with Newfoundland artists about Newfoundland art. In this way, this residency is solely focused on engaging culturally specific, land based dialogues situated within the current context of Newfoundland identities to ask critical questions about land, time, place, memory, trauma, and care.

Based on the kitchen table methodologies of my Nan, research will be conducted through three conversations. The goal of this residency is to create space and time to generate alternative practices of inquiry, criticism, writing, engagement, thought, and interpretation for creative gestures, land based activations, and textural relationships. Indeed, kinning, or kin making, is the central mode, method and line of inquiry for this experimental exploration of how we do art criticism, why we do criticism, and how we might imagine Newfoundland ways of making dialogue that are grounded in cultural legacies, memories, embodied knowledge and place based practices. These conversations will be recorded and presented as critical audio essays.

 Kate Lahey is a PhD student at the Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto researching intergenerational trauma, material culture and land based practice in Newfoundland. Kate is frontwoman of the band Weary, an arts writer, and a board member of Girls Rock NL. Kate is a Newfoundlander.

You can read Kate’s published work here:
www.peripheralreview.com/2019/04/10/with-a-soft-gaze-hazel-may-eckerts-over-time
www. visualartsnews.ca/2019/06/all-these-in-betweens

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.