HOLD FAST 2026: Featured Artist Announcement
Chelsea Dab Hilke & Fred Schmidt-Arenales
Chelsea Dab Hilke is a theatre director, dramaturg, and producer from Montreal, now based in St. John’s. She is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada’s Directing program, and co-Artistic Director of Scaredy Cat Theatre, a performing arts collective dedicated to presenting new work that leans into the terror and play of taking theatrical risks. In St. John’s, Chelsea has directed DOG (SJS 2022), Plays 4 the End of the World (SJS 2023), and There’s Nothing You Can Do (RCAT 2025).
Fred Schmidt-Arenales is an artist and filmmaker working across participatory non-fiction film, experimental narrative film, and video installation. His projects attempt to bring awareness to unconscious processes on the individual and group level. He has presented solo exhibitions at Storefront for Art and Architecture (New York), Visual Arts Center (Austin), Galveston Artist Residency (Galveston), The Power Station (Dallas), and ACRE Projects (Chicago). His film Committee of Six was awarded a Jury Prize for Best of the Festival at the 2023 Onion City Experimental Film Festival.
Art Crawl Project: SOMETHING’S HAPPENING IN THE BATTERY (and there’s nothing you can do about it)
After a long fight, the neighbourhood formerly known as The Battery is lost. Please join us for a final celebration of what it was and what it meant to us all. This will be a chance to remember, mourn, celebrate, and share space with others who also loved this beautiful, unique, historic neighborhood. Funeral and/or celebratory attire is encouraged.
Shanelle Nicole-Marie St. Hilaire
Shanelle St. Hilaire (she/they) is a Red River Métis multi-disciplinary artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Specializing in installation, beadwork, sound, recently exploring performance and video. St. Hilaire’s practice is rooted in research and process, with a focus on materiality and technique. She earned her honours BFA from The School of Art at the University of Manitoba in 2023. St. Hilaire is an active board member of CARFAC Manitoba, a member of the Nocturne Collective, and Fevered Impulse. Their work explores diverse themes, including plant science, gender identity, and the human-nature connection, framed through Métis, queer, nonbinary, feminist, and disabled perspectives.
Art Crawl Project: Wallerfall
Waterfall is an installation made out of innumerable strands of glass beads of various sizes and shades. It was created as a substitute for moving bodies of water in the winter months, when we lose access to swimming in natural moving water. Waterfall encapsulates the cool feeling of gentle water trickling on the body. This is a multi-sensory piece: visual, audio, and tactile, allowing the interactor to walk through the work, feeling the strands tickle their skin and hearing the glass beads tinkling against one another. This reminds us to appreciate water and the land we are on.
Nora de Mariaffi
Nora de Mariaffi is an artist, seamstress, and arts worker based in St. John’s, NL. She holds a degree in Community Arts Education from Concordia University and a certificate in Graphic Design from OCAD. Currently, she works as Marketing & Graphic Design Director at Lawnya Vawnya, a music festival in St. John’s. She also owns and operates a small, slow-made apparel brand out of her studio in Downtown St. John’s. She is also co-admin at I Don’t Do Comics, a Canadian comic publication open to everyone. In 2025, she completed residencies at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and Union House Arts. She has been supported by ArtsNL, and the City of St. John’s for her most recent work. De Mariaffi was born in Ontario, studied in Quebec, and has now returned to the province she calls home, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Art Crawl Project: Close to You
Building on personal and familial histories of sewing and textile labour, Close To You examines the evolving role of clothing-making beyond necessity, positioning garment creation as a means of storytelling and connection. By pairing surrealism and humour with reflections on touch, care, and post-pandemic social behaviour, Close To You invites audiences to reconsider the emotional and physical possibilities embedded within everyday clothing. In the post-pandemic, pro-virtual world, physical intimacy is increasingly met by caution, distance, and self-awareness, transforming even the most ordinary gestures of affection into conscious acts. Close To You explores this ongoing cultural shift through a series of three fibre art clothing pieces designed to be worn by two at once. These garments—a two-headed sweater, a shirt for hugging, and a three-legged pair of shorts — investigate how clothing can not only reflect intimacy, but actively require it.
Melissa Tremblett
Melissa Tremblett is a visual artist of Innu and English heritage from the community of Sheshatshiu, Labrador, currently based in Elmastukwek, Ktaqmkuk territory (Bay of Islands, Newfoundland). Tremblett is known for her interdisciplinary approach, playing across new and traditional making methods to build her own voice in an Innu visual language. Through the lens of her contemporary Indigenous reality, Tremblett marries her Indigenous and Settler roots uniting histories and legacies.
In 2025, Tremblett was awarded the ArtsNL Artist of the Year award, a cross-disciplinary honour recognizing her substantial contribution to the broader arts sector in Newfoundland and Labrador and, in 2026, she was longlisted in the circumpolar region for the prestigious Sobey Art Award.
Art Crawl: 300 Years
For the 2026 Art Crawl, I will be combining installation and spoken word as a response to the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador changing their stance on the accepted timeline of Innu presence in Labrador. Using updated archaeological evidence, the province insists the Innu have only been present for 300 years, while also claiming Europeans have been here for 500 years.
