Residencies

Current Residencies

Sylvan Hamburger

July 19 – August 31, 2024

Cranky features the monoprints of a decaying punt found along Newfoundland’s east coast. Drawing its name from the nautical slang for an erratic vessel liable to capsize, the residency project presents the once-ubiquitous wooden punt as a strange and irregular spectacle. Working with the boat’s colourful impressions printed onto textiles, I look to create an ephemeral installation that interacts with the surrounding architecture, weather and passersby of St. John’s.

Upcoming Residencies

Joshua Schwebel

September 13 – October 26, 2024

During the residency I intend to visit the location of the Valentine mine and to research the processes and consequences of extracting gold from the landscape. I will speak with environmental groups and local community to discover the community reaction to this mining project, the environmental costs of resource extraction and the colonial legacy that these disruptive processes continue to enact. I will gather rubble and other materials produced by this extraction process.

Georgia Dawkin

November 8 – December 14, 2024

During this residency I will be furthering my research into Power Dressing, and the systems of misogyny within professional expectations and environments. I plan to use these resources and space to develop new performances as PROFESSIONAL WOMAN, explore developing bodies of work regarding Power Dressing and professional fashion, as well as use the time to connect and work directly with the community.

Tough Guy Mountain

January 31 – March 15, 2025

Blandscape is an interactive narrative experience presented in virtual reality (VR) and comic format. In the 15-minute virtual reality experience, a solitary intern wanders through an immense wasteland, following familiar stone statues. A bored executive watches from their office, passively observing the intern from a disembodied perspective. Eventually the intern, played by a performer in virtual reality, succumbs to the stone themselves, and the executive clicks to release a new intern into the wasteland. The interns look remarkably similar to the executive, as if they are sending endless iterations of themselves to a screen-mediated doom.

The project Blandscape is a continuation of a decade-long narrative role-play from the Tough Guy Mountain collective. Working together since 2012, the collective has developed a critical approach to creation with emerging technology. Their projects bring audiences into a fantasy world of unpaid interns and ebullient exploitative executives. The proposed project, Blandscape, is designed uniquely for the Eastern Edge studio space and audience. Through the residency at Eastern Edge we will develop a single-player, 15 minute VR experience and performance of Blandscape. We will also complete our 35 page comic of the same name, which will be made available as a zine for studio visitors during the residency. The collective will present their work through a live on-site performance of Blandscape at the end of the residency period. During this event, the audience will also be invited to put on the VR headset and experience Blandscape for themselves.

Shay Hucklebridge

March 28 – May 10, 2025

Our understanding of the world is inherently tied to the landscapes we inhabit. These landscapes shape our perceptions, our cultural identities, and the narratives we construct about ourselves and the world around us. The project of this residency will explore the interplay between local environment, mythology, and the nuanced experiences of individuals, with a specific focus on the natural history of Newfoundland. Art serves as a translator between external stimuli and inner experiences, an interpretive tool that helps fold reality into narrative. At the heart of this project is the creation of a symbolic narrative that brings the audience into my own internal life and perspective. The bridging of internal and external experiences is universal, since human perception is limited and unreliable. However, for those who are ‘othered,’ it can become a way of negotiating a reality that may not always be accommodating and a means of building internal protective structures out of dreams, beliefs, and fantasies. I am interested in how this phenomenon holds not only for individuals but also on a broader social scale. Materially, this project will take the form of watercolour paintings that document, fuse, and reshuffle elements of the tundra and taiga of Newfoundland while incorporating symbolism drawn from both mythology and modern culture. The goal is to encourage viewers to reconsider their own perceptions of place, identity, and narrative, particularly within the context of the North American landscape, which has no place in the mythological canon of western culture that forms the basis of mainstream understandings of fantasy and storytelling.

Sun Forest

February 6 – March 21, 2026

The project focuses on the creation of speculative IBPOC bio-armour for radical resistance and healing through multi-species connections and embodied practices of care. Incorporating biomaterials and living microorganic cultures within speculative body armour, the work transfigures forces and human-centric timelines of violence into conditions that can propagate equity and regeneration, and push for modes of collective and radical future imaginings. Developing a transdisciplinary installation using sculpture, performance, video, and new media, this project will continue to undergo change throughout the course of its installation, proposing symbiotic, evolving modes of being that can liberate and resist systems of racialized violence and techno-ecological harm.

Rae Swan

April 10 – May 23, 2026

Inspired by Susan Sontag’s essays on photography, I am interested in actively engaging with the camera in a way that blurs the boundaries between the natural world and the voyeur’s world. Today’s voyeur sees the world through a screen, through a glass box, a mirror world. Yet the physical world beyond it exists in a separate space, free of bounds. The project I will be creating is a series of videos and photographs that explore and challenge the relationship we have to these realities. During this residency I will be exploring a new and unfamiliar landscape through the idea of equal relationship and play. Beginning the project without the camera is crucial to attempting decolonial lens based work. After spending time with the land, I will venture out again and bring the camera with me, only taking photos and videos when there feels like consent from the land. This creates a trusting relationship with the land and works with the belief that the natural world has its own autonomy in relationships.

The videos each come in two parts. One where the video camera sits on a tripod, taking in the landscape, still, like a finished painting – The voyeur’s perspective. The second video becomes unstill and instead; a performance. With the camera affixed to my body, I’ll explore the landscape so the camera experiences the landscape in an intimate and full-bodied way. I want to know How does the world change when we change the way we look at it? By exploring the unfamiliar landscapes of Newfoudland and Labrador and connecting with local communities about land stewardship I hope to create a project that inspires discourse about connected and conscious art making with and about the land.

Jem Woolidge

June 12 – July 25, 2026

Jem Woolidge will spend his residency developing a collection of garments for musicians, inspired by the camp aesthetics of performance spectacles and stagewear, and in collaboration with local performers. Inspired by designers like Bob Mackie describing Elton John as a ‘Male Showgirl’, his costume methodology is inherently queer, colorful, silly, and imagery-based. He is interested in the ways in which garments can disarm both the wearer and the viewer, and create a more permissive environment to perform and be an audience in.

“I was fascinated by the social permissiveness of stage performance. You can ‘get away with’ wearing anything under the prerequisite of performance, including draggy, campy, tacky garments. In contexts where dressing in a gender nonconforming manner in a casual setting would potentially cause a stir, stage performance is an outlet where things can go unquestioned. Historically, costume designers would dress their subjects in high camp, effeminate garments, and from Liberace to Twisted Sister – their oftentimes conservative fan bases would watch and applaud.”