Ashley Hemmings
June 2nd – June 24th, 2020
Ashley Hemmings is a visual artist and gallery worker from Newfoundland and Labrador. She is currently based in Windsor, Ontario where she is working towards her MFA at the University of Windsor. Ashley completed her BFA in Visual Art from Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her research-based art practise has led her to partner with environmental scientists, cognitive psychologists, and horticulturalists, to consider the intersection of many different ways of looking at and interacting with the natural world. Most recently, Ashley has shown her solo project Souvenir Documents at the rOGUE Gallery in St. John’s. Ashley has worked at a number of art galleries across Newfoundland including Eastern Edge Gallery, The Grenfell Art Gallery, and The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery. Currently she works as a Research Assistant to Dr. Jennifer Willet and Incubator Art Lab at the University of Windsor.
During this residency, Ashley Hemmings intends to continue work on her current text-based rug hooking project. The rugs that she is making represent an analysis of municipal and colloquial language used to describe and dictate interactions between humans and their environments. They are also a decontextualization of these forms of language, considering how the meaning of a directive or phrase changes when presented through a domestic craft medium, as opposed to an authoritative government sign. Her goals are to continue to work on rugs that are already planned, as well as begin an interactive research project with the community. She would like to speak with the public to see if they/ their families have any of their own strange place-specific sayings relating to how they as people interact with the land they inhabit. Hemmings wants to take these phrases into consideration, potentially creating smaller rugs to add to the series that can be given back to her collaborators and photographed in locations that have \ importance to people other than just herself and her family.
Sheila ReStack
June 2nd – June 24th, 2020
Sheilah ReStack was born and raised in Caribou River, Nova Scotia. ReStack is currently Associate Professor Studio Art at Denison University. She has her BFA from NSCAD University, Halifax and MFA from Goldmiths College, London. Recent solo shows include Build Your Altar, at Enjoy Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand, If Becoming This, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, Stack for Carrington’s Hyena, Iceberg Projects, Chicago (with Dani ReStack) and Stack at the Columbus Museum of Art (with Dani ReStack). Sheilah was co-director of Strangely Ordinary This Devotion, a video that premiered at the Whitney Biennial, 2017. Residencies include Headlands Center for the Arts, Struts and Faucet Media Centre, Banff Center for the Arts and upcoming McDowell fellowship. ReStack is the recipient of the Howard Foundation Fellowship for Photography, and has received several Canada Council Project Grants. “Conflating the miraculous with notions of chance and arbitrariness, Sheilah’s work alludes to religious motifs from a perspective of a sincere and heartbroken skeptic. It often centers around the empty center, an impossibility that she bravely faces while connecting history, land and personal experience into fluid and surprising actions within her artistic practice.” Leeza Meksin for Temporary Contemporary, December 2012.
“The photograph has long been considered the mark of a specific moment, a decisive moment.” – Sheila ReStack
In ReStack’s practice, they attempt to unbind this momentary assumption, creating a cumulative photograph that acknowledges the primacy of the body and the gestural potential of photography. Hold, which ReStack will create and exhibit during this residency, is for a body of photographic and sculptural work that allows this conversation to occur, taking into account the specificity of place. ReStack will generate the walking prints in Newfoundland, and take photogram photos of holding those who identify as LGBTQ in St. John’s and environs.
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.