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Welcoming our new AiRs, Cat Bluemke and John Janigan-Mills!

We’re so excited to welcome our first artists in residence of 2025 to the studio! Artists Cat Bluemke and John Janigan-Mills will be joining us from February 4th – March 15th. Keep an eye out for updates on what they’re working on over the next month and a half!

During their shared residency at Eastern Edge, Cat and John will develop an interactive experience combining virtual worldbuilding, illustration, and non-linear narrative. Building on techniques developed through the 2021 augmented reality graphic novel Escape From Intern Purgatory published by Eyelevel Gallery (Halifax, NS), the artists will create a “choose your own adventure” digital comic book. The project 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. Artists Cat and John will create a finalized prototype of the project that will be available for the Eastern Edge audience to play onsite at the studio.

Meet the Artists!

Cat Bluemke is an artist creating games, performances, and immersive experiences that explore technology’s ability to obscure the line between work and play. Her work has been exhibited internationally with prominent institutions including Rhizome and the New Museum (2020) and the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018) as part of the American Pavillion’s corollary exhibits. Recent exhibitions include the Fotomuseum Winterthur (2024), the Milan Machinima Festival (2024), the Singapore Art Museum (2023), Art Gallery of Regina (2023), and the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie (2022). She lives and works in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, in Mi’kma’ki.

 

 

 

John Janigan-Mills is a multifaceted human residing in K’jipuktuk (Halifax, NS) engaging in music, sound, art, technology, engineering, and the innumerable permutations thereof. He is an inventor and participant of artistic apparatuses that explore questions about the nature of self and our roles in the uncountable multiverses along the analog/digital continuum. He double majored in Jazz Composition and Electronic Music Production at Berklee College of Music (Boston, MA), followed by a stint of Computer & Electronics Engineering at Dalhousie University (Halifax, NS) and has since striven to merge the two worlds into one cohesive collage.