CALL FOR ENTRY! – Oxygen Art Centre Online Mentorship Youth Scholarships
Oxygen Art Centre (OAC) announces a new online Mentorship Program. There are currently two scholarships available for youth, 16 – 24 years old. The mentorship consists of two 1-hour mentorship sessions with one of OAC’s Artist Faculty.
The online mentorship will be individually designed to meet the needs and interests of the individual youth artist, potentially involving technical demonstrations, advice, professional development, and/or critique regarding a specific project or technical area of development.
Organized in a two-session format, each mentorship will allow mentees to begin an area of inquiry in the first session and then have the opportunity to put some of their learning into practice before sharing and discussing their new work or development in the second session.
Scholarship applications are now open and will remain open until the scholarships have been allocated.
Oxygen Art Centre is pleased to announce local musician and theatre artist, Bessie Wapp, to their Artist in Residence program for the month of December. The residency will be followed by a series of participatory performance events and an online artist talk throughout the month of January.
The title of the project, Pandora’s Jukebox is derived from Wapp’s interest in the Greek myth of Pandora, and her desire to transform the fate of this heroine by empowering her as a healer through this project.
As the ancient myth goes, Pandora is given a gift from Zeus, in the form of a small jar or box. She is instructed by Zeus to deliver this gift to her husband, Epimetheus, and warned not to open the box. Curious as to the contents of the gift, she defies Zeus’s orders and opens the box. The open box immediately unleashes physical and emotional troubles for humankind. In the end, only one emotion remains in the box, that of Hope. It is this kernel of human nature that Wapp seeks to embody in the work of the project, and to offer her community solace in these difficult times.
Wapp will daringly open the gifted box, or jukebox in this case, and set to work transforming the tragedy of the myth into one of good fortune through the healing power of music and summoning of hope.
Inspiration for Pandora’s Jukebox came to Wapp in comparing the similarities of the myth to the challenging circumstances of today’s world with the realities of the climate crisis and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Wapp says that this shaped her decision to use her residency time to offer some kind of consolation and hope for her community.
Wapp will use her December residency to experiment with an audio looper. A new instrument to Wapp, a looper station is an electronic device used by musicians to record musical performances, and then play these recordings back in real time. The musician can create loops of sound that layer the output adding texture and complexity to the music.
The recording and looping of pieces will allow Wapp to facilitate participatory sing-a-longs and conversational moments during the exhibition. Wapp is excited and grateful for the opportunity this residency affords to learn this new skill, as well as, to have a designated studio space to make music. She will also be working on an installation to alter the gallery into a soft, theatrical environment in which to set this new work.
Following the residency, Wapp will stage and host a series of public events at Oxygen Art Centre throughout the month of January. These events will centre on the musical expression of what is most forefront in the hearts and minds of those present. Wapp will lead audiences in a participatory process of conversation and engagement aimed to elicit and gather raw material in the form of words, poems, and drawings, which she will then incorporate into improvised, participatory musical compositions created live, in the moment.
In each public event, Wapp will challenge herself to work intuitively and spontaneously with her audience in the creation of new live music. For Wapp, this project brings a culmination of her experience and skill in improvisation, choir direction, theatrical design and community engaged art practice together.
Those interested in participating in the hosted events, held on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays will need to book an appointment via Oxygen’s website 24-hours prior to the event.
The residency will run from December 1st to December 30th, 2021. The exhibition will open on January 7th and run until January 30th, 2021.
The public is invited to register online through Oxygen Art Centre’s website for all the events. An online artist talk will be held on Wednesday, January 19, 2022 at 4:00 PM PST (Zoom). The participatory performance events will be offered on Friday and Saturday evenings from 5:00 – 6:30 PM with a matinee on Sundays from 2:00 – 3:30 PM.
These events will adhere to COVID-19 public health protocols which will include the wearing of masks while in the Oxygen Art Centre, proof of full vaccination upon registration, and limited numbers of participants in the space at one event.
Artist Bio:
Bessie Wapp was born in New York City and raised in the Kootenays. She is a musician, theatre-maker and educator. Wapp’s music practice involves voice, accordion, hand percussion and piano. She has performed in Europe and throughout North America. Touring highlights include Festival D’ete (Montreal), Lincoln Centre (NYC) and Zagreb Dance Week (Croatia). She has studied the arts at Emily Carr College of Art And Design, Vancouver Community College and Selkirk College’s Contemporary Music Program. While living in Vancouver, she worked with innovative and multi-disciplinary groups such as Mortal Coil, Zeellia, Public Dreams, Electric Company, Radix, Ruby Slippers, Touchstones, Vancouver Moving Centre and Gamelan Madu Sari. In 2006, she relocated to Nelson where she co-founded Twin Fish Theatre. Through this company she developed an autobiographical body of work sourcing material and stories from her ancestry and family life. Hello, I must be going, Loco Phantasmo and Letters from Lithuania are part of this series. She has cultivated music projects including Klezmeridian, Bessie and the Black Eddies, and Oxygen Orkestar. Her interest in expressive arts programs, arts education and community-engaged projects has brought her in to creative and often collaborative contact with people of all ages. Wapp teaches for the Oxygen Art Centre and heads up the Blue House Choir. In 2015 Wapp was named Nelson’s Cultural Ambassador.
Image credit: Bessie Wapp, photographed by Allan Hughes
Oxygen Art Centre’s Author Reading Series begins its Winter 2021/2022 season on Tuesday November 23rd at 7:00 PM PST, with readings by Tanya Lukin Linklater, Alasdair Rees and student writer Kathleen Cauley.
The evening will also feature a reading by student writer Kathleen Cauley from the Selkirk College Creative Writing Program. Cauley is a musician and librarian, and this reading will be her debut as a creative writer.
Slow Scrape is, in the words of Layli Long Soldier, “an expansive and undulating meditation on time, relations, origin and colonization.” Lukin Linklater draws upon documentary poetics, concrete-based installations, event scores, and other texts composed in relation to performances written between 2011 and 2018. The book cites memory, Cree and Alutiiq languages, and embodiment as modes of relational being and knowledge.
The book unfolds a poetics of relation and action to counter the settler colonial violences of erasure, extraction, and dispossession. Slow Scrape can be read alongside Lukin Linklater’s practice as a visual artist and choreographer. Slow Scrape includes an introduction by Layli Long Soldier, as well as a dialogue between Lukin Linklater and editor Michael Nardone.
In Rees’s collection of poems, Mon Ecologie, the ecology in question is at once that of the internal self and that of the external world. Through an intermingling of physics and philosophy, the poet unravels layers of meaning, examining the processes of nature and the mundane realm of objects, tracing their transformations and mapping their locations.
Copies of Slow Scrape and Mon Ecologie can be ordered online in advance of the reading. Those interested in attending can register via Eventbrite through the link on Oxygen’s website and social media accounts.
Join us on Tuesday, November 23 at 7:00 PM PST on Zoom to participate in the first instalment of the Author Reading Series featuring Tanya Lukin Linklater, Alasdair Rees, and Kathleen Cauley. Admission is free or by donation. Register via EventBrite to attend.
Oxygen’s Author Reading Series is generously supported by Columbia Kootenay Cultural Allian
About the Authors
Tanya Lukin Linklater’s performances, works for camera, installations, and writings centre histories of Indigenous peoples’ lives, lands, and structures of sustenance. Her performances in relation to objects in exhibition, scores, and ancestral belongings generate what she has come to call felt structures. She investigates insistence in both concept and application.
Her work has been shown at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019, EFA Project Space + Performa, Art Gallery of Ontario, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Remai Modern, Art Gallery of Alberta, Winnipeg Art Gallery, La Biennale de Montréal, and elsewhere. She will participate in Soft Water Hard Stone, the 2021 New Museum Triennial. Her presentation of current and new works for the BMW Tate Live Exhibition 2020, Our Bodies, Our Archives, in London was cancelled due to the worldwide pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus. As a member of Wood Land School, she participated in Under the Mango Tree – Sites of Learning, a gathering for documenta14 in Athens and Kassel. Tanya Lukin Linklater is represented by Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver.
Tanya has worked alongside dancers, Ceinwen Gobert, Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Emily Law, and Danah Rosales, among others. In recent years she has worked in relation to composer and amplified violinist, Laura Ortman, curators, Eungie Joo, Candice Hopkins and Jovanna Venegas, artist, Duane Linklater, and artist/curator/architect, Tiffany Shaw-Collinge.
Her first collection of poetry, Slow Scrape, was published in the Documents series by The Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism, Montréal in 2020 with a second printing in 2021. Slow Scrape is, in the words of Layli Long Soldier, “an expansive and undulating meditation on time, relations, origin and colonization.” Slow Scrape can be read alongside Lukin Linklater’s practice as a visual artist and choreographer. She has also published in periodicals and publications by galleries.
Tanya studied at University of Alberta (M.Ed.) and Stanford University (A.B. Honours). In 2018 Tanya was chosen as the inaugural recipient of the Wanda Koop Research Fund administered by Canadian Art. In 2019 she received the Art Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. In 2021 Tanya received the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Visual Art and was long listed for the Sobey Art Award. She is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University with supervision by Dylan Robinson. Her Alutiiq homelands are in southwestern Alaska where much of her family continues to live. She is a member of the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in the Kodiak archipelago.
Alasdair Rees is a Fransaskois writer living on Treaty 6 territory in Saskatoon where he teaches French at the University of Saskatchewan. In 2019 he was chosen to become Saskatchewan’s first Youth Poet Laureate. A former Poetry Editor of Grain Magazine, Alasdair has been published by Ancrages, GUTS magazine, Moebius, and Metatron Press. Recent work was longlisted for Prism Magazine’s Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. His first book, Mon écologie, appeared last June with Les éditions du blé. Alasdair is currently developing a new suite of performance work to be presented in the spring of 2022 at Saskatoon’s Remai Modern in the context of the gallery’s Sustained Artist Project.
Kathleen Cauley is a librarian and musician. Before moving to BC she was an active member playing violin in the Ottawa based band Loon Choir touring the country, playing festivals and receiving rotation on the CBC. Kathleen hosts the radio program “Big Shiny Turns” on the Kootenay Co-Op Radio. She is currently studying creative writing at Selkirk College. This is her first foray into creative writing.
Image Credit: Tanya Lukin Linklater, photo by Liz Lott / Alasdair Rees, photo by Carey Shaw
Oxygen Art Centre is pleased to announce Sacrificial Cabbage, an online contemporary art workshop series.
Artist S F Ho will facilitate an online workshop on Saturday, November 27, 2021 drawing on their research, which will explore the idea of medicine and how we come to define what we put in our bodies as healing or toxic.
Ho states, “Considering plant medicine and harm reduction models, I am asking aloud if we can get to a more complex understanding of how our bodies are affected both specifically and holistically by various agents and elements. I wonder how medicine can manifest within different relationships, objects and materials.”
Based in the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples for the past eleven years Ho is cultivating a practice of wary sociality, never finishing books, and being sort of boring. They’ve recently published a novella about love and aliens called “George the Parasite” (2021, SPEC/FIC).
Interested participants are invited to register for a workshop by visiting the following EventBrite links. A maximum of twelve (12) participants will be invited to attend each workshop. No previous experience necessary. Learn more information about Sacrificial Cabbage by visiting their website, www.oxygenartcentre.org.
Taking its name from a garden plant ravaged by slugs, Sacrificial Cabbage is a workshop series that invites three contemporary artists to share their practice with participants who live and work in the Nelson region and surrounding communities. The workshops will explore topics such as ecology, seed saving, and medicinal plants. Each workshop will be two-hours in length consisting of both lecture and participatory workshop.
Sacrificial Cabbage is free to attend. Each workshop seeks sliding scale donations that will be given to non-profit organizations chosen by each artist. Workshops will not be recorded; however, a print and digital publication will be available summarizing the topics, resources, and discussions explored.
Sacrificial Cabbage is an online contemporary art workshop series hosted throughout the month of November 2021 and the beginning of December 2021 featuring Christina Battle, S F Ho, and Tania Willard.
This program is generously supported by Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance.
Artist Biography:
S F Ho
S F Ho is an artist, writer, and facilitator. Their parents immigrated to Turtle Island from Hong Kong in the 1970s and they have been living as an uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples for the past eleven years. They’re cultivating a practice of wary sociality, never finishing books, and being sort of boring. They’ve published a novella about love and aliens called George the Parasite.
Image Credit: Photo by Tegan Moore; Courtesy the Artist
Christina Battle: Saturday November 20, 2021; 2:00 – 4:00 PM PST (EventBrite) S F Ho: Saturday November 27, 2021; 2:00 – 4:00 PM PST (EventBrite) Tania Willard: Saturday December 4, 2021; 12:00 – 2:00 PM PST (EventBrite) All workshops will take place on Zoom; Register via EventBrite
Oxygen Art Centre is pleased to announce Sacrificial Cabbage, an online contemporary art workshop series taking place on Saturday November 20th, 27th, and December 4th, 2021.
Taking its name from a garden plant ravaged by slugs, Sacrificial Cabbage is a workshop series that invites three contemporary artists to share their practice with participants who live and work in the Nelson region and surrounding communities.
Artists Christina Battle, S F Ho, and Tania Willard will facilitate individual online workshops on topics including ecology, seed saving, connectivity, medicinal plants, and land-based practices. Each workshop will be two-hours in length consisting of both lecture and participatory workshop.
Through diverse mediums, the Sacrificial Cabbage workshops will engage broader dialogues about climate change, disaster capitalism, land and food sovereignty, and harm reduction through creative and artistic interventions. Christina Battle’s workshop, “Doing Things with Others (across distance): Considering Participatory Practice” draws upon pandemic instigated infrastructural shifts in participatory art regarding their artistic practice with seeds and community gardening. S F Ho’sworkshop will explore the idea of medicine and how we come to define what we put in our bodies as healing or toxic. The series will conclude with Tania Willard’sworkshop on land-based artistic practice concerning Indigenous knowledges as it relates to the ongoing collaborative project BUSH Gallery.
Interested participants are invited to register for a workshop by visiting the following EventBrite links. A maximum of twelve (12) participants will be invited to attend each workshop. No previous experience necessary. Learn more information about Sacrificial Cabbage by visiting Oxygen’s website.
Sacrificial Cabbage is free to attend. Each workshop seeks sliding scale donations that will be given to non-profit organizations chosen by each artist. Workshops will not be recorded; however, a print and digital publication will be available summarizing the topics, resources, and discussions explored.
Sacrificial Cabbage is an online contemporary art workshop series hosted throughout November and December 2021 featuring Christina Battle, S F Ho, and Tania Willard.
This program is generously supported by Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance.
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Artist Biographies: Christina Battle Christina Battle is an artist based in amiskwacîwâskahikan, (also known as Edmonton, Alberta), within the Aspen Parkland: the transition zone where prairie and forest meet. Battle’s work focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster: the complexity of disaster and the intricacies that are entwined within it. She looks to disaster as a series of intersecting processes including social, environmental, cultural, political, and economic, which are implicated not only in how disaster is caused but also in how it manifests, is responded to and overcome. Through this research, Battle looks closer to both the internet (especially social media) and plant systems for strategies to learn from, and for ways we might consider disaster anew. [www.cbattle.com]
S F Ho S F Ho is an artist, writer, and facilitator. Their parents immigrated to Turtle Island from Hong Kong in the 1970s and they have been living as an uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples for the past eleven years. They’re cultivating a practice of wary sociality, never finishing books, and being sort of boring. They’ve published a novella about love and aliens called George the Parasite.
Tania Willard Tania Willard, Secwepemc Nation, works within the shifting ideas of contemporary and traditional as it relates to cultural arts and production. Often working with bodies of knowledge and skills that are conceptually linked to her interest in intersections between Aboriginal and other cultures. Willard has worked as a curator in residence with grunt gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery. Willard’s curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, a national touring exhibition first presented at Vancouver Art Gallery in 2011. As assistant professor in Creative Studies at UBCO (Kelowna BC) currently her research focuses on Secwepemc aesthetics/language/land and interrelated Indigenous art practices. Willard’s projects include BUSH gallery, a conceptual space for land based art and action led by Indigenous artists. [www.taniawillard.ca]
Image Credit: Christina Battle, workshop collage materials [cropped], 2021
Oxygen Art Centre (OAC) is excited to announce the launch of their new Online Mentorship Program. Beginning in January 2022 OAC will be offering affordable one-on-one online mentorship opportunities for individual artists to receive two 1-hour mentorship sessions with one of OAC’s Faculty.
Each online mentorship will be individually designed to meet the needs and interests of the individual artist, potentially involving technical demonstrations, advice, professional development, and/or critique regarding a specific project or technical area of development. Organized in a two-session format, each mentorship will allow mentees to begin an area of inquiry in the first session and then have the opportunity to put some of their learning into practice before sharing and discussing their new work or development in the second session.
OAC Education Coordinator, Natasha Smith shares that “This is a new Oxygen educational experience which is very affordable thanks to funding from the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance. We encourage artists of all levels to apply and learn from one of our talented and experienced OAC faculty members.”
The program will offer 10 mentorships, as well as 2 youth scholarships. Applications are now open and will remain open until the deadline of November 15, 2021 at 5:00 PM PST. Approved mentees will be matched with an Oxygen Artist Instructor depending on their practice, medium, and stated goals.
