Mainframe Residents Oz & Brenda Reid

Join us in welcoming our next round of Mainframe resident artists, Oz (B. G-Osborne) and Brenda Reid! Both artists will be in EE Studios from May 5th to June 17th!

B.G-Osborne is a gender variant, autistic, white settler of Scottish and British descent. They were born and raised on Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg Territory and are a currently uninvited guest in Ktaqmkuk. Osborne’s ongoing projects seek to address the complexities and revisionary potential of gender-variant embodiment/representation and to unpack and share their experiences with mental illness, neurodivergence and familial bonds. They emphasize showcasing their work in artist-run centres and non-commercial galleries across Turtle Island.

Oz says, “As an autistic person who deals with auditory processing issues and increasing mental distress due to pandemic-related isolation, I want to immerse myself in an audio/visual project that is highly personal and embodied. I will explore how my perception of and relationship with sounds can help me connect with other autistic people and how distressing auditory stimuli can be positively transformed and subsequently interpreted into abstract visual information.

Oz would like to thank the City of St. John’s for their support. 

To learn more about Oz, visit www.bgosborne.weebly.com

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Brenda Mabel Reid is an emerging artist, designer and educator based in Kitchener, Canada. They received their master’s of architecture in 2021 from the University of Waterloo, researching care theory and ethics in architecture. Through this work, they developed a large-scale community art project, From Behind the Mask, collecting and displaying regional, individual stories of pandemic experiences to make a travelling installation of physical space for grieving and empathy. Since then, they have pursued political, care-based and community-engaged work. Brenda’s practice is based out of a shared co-op artist studio where they believe in the power of art to have critical public discussions in ways that the architecture profession does not.

Brenda will explore 2D animation while working on how architecture defines what people can do in space – often in restrictive ways – and how we could re-envision it in a context of spatial freedom, access, ethics, and community. I will survey and select 2-3 locations downtown that has greater potential for collective space and an increased variety of spatial uses. 

To learn more about Brenda, visit www.brendamabelreid.com