Category: Oxygen Art Centre

OXYGEN WELCOMES ANGELA GLANZMANN AND STEPHANIE YEE AS ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE

Oxygen Art Centre is excited to welcome artists Angela Glanzmann and Stephanie Yee as Artists-in-Residence from April 10^th to the 23^rd to create an installation for their forthcoming exhibition entitled EAT IT UP.

Expanding on their own histories, ethnicities, and social positions, Glanzmann and Yee invite viewers behind the scenes into the weird and obscure world of competitive cooking reality TV.

Their installation takes place on the set of a fictional show EAT IT UP, complete with a presentation table, competitor’s kitchen stations, and pantry/food storage. Constructed out of common household supplies, food sculptures speak to the culinary resourcefulness and resilience of their ancestors as they had to adapt to new cultures and customs.

During their residency the artists invite the public to “Open Kitchen” to take part in the artistic process and create a favourite dish of their choice in papier mâché or clay on Saturday, April 16 and Saturday April 23 from 1:00 – 3:00 PM. Contributed food sculptures will be included in the exhibition, on view from 27 April to 28 May 2022.

Join us on Saturday, April 30 at 1:00 PM (PST) for an online artist talk to learn more about the residency, exhibition, and artists. Admission is free or by donation, everyone welcome to attend. To register, visit EventBrite: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artist-talk-angela-glanzmann-stephanie-yee-tickets-301494878297 or Oxygen’s website for more information.

Oxygen Art Centre is an artist-run centre located at #3-320 Vernon Street, Nelson, BC via alleyway entrance. The exhibition will be open to the public Wednesdays to Saturdays from 1:00 – 5:00 PM. Prior to your visit please review Oxygen’s COVID-19 prevention protocols on our website, https://oxygenartcentre.org/about-us-2/covid-19-prevention/.

Artists Angela Glanzmann and Stephanie Yee are Oxygen Art Centre Artist-in-Residence from 10 – 23 April 2022. The public are welcome to take part in the “Open Kitchen” on Saturday, April 16 and Saturday April 23 from 1:00 – 3:00 PM. The exhibition, EAT IT UP, will be on view from 27 April to 28 May 2022 on Wednesdays to Saturdays from 1:00 – 5:00 PM.

This exhibition is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

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Image Credit: (L) Angela Glanzmann; (R) Stephanie Yee, Courtesy the artists

Artist Bios:

Angela Glanzmann is an artist, cultural worker and professional beekeeper currently based in her birth place of Tkaronto (Toronto). Her institutional education includes a BFA from NSCAD University and an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Her artistic and writing projects address settler relationships to land, queer possibilities, jokes about critical theory and the connection between violence and cuteness. Glanzmann’s work has appeared in galleries, publications and artist-run centres both nationally and internationally. She is currently reading lots about pollinators in preparation for spring. 

Stephanie Yee is a second-generation Chinese Canadian artist and cultural worker based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), the unceded territory of the Mi’kma’ki. Her education includes a BFA in Intermedia from NSCAD University where she began her exploration into community and identity. With a practice rooted in storytelling, her work manifests as gatherings, performance, writing, installation, video and playing with food. Often beginning with familiar imagery, processes, and materials, Yee playfully interjects as a means of exploring and questioning preconceived notions. She has participated as an artist, facilitator and curator in artist-run centers, festivals, residencies and galleries both locally and internationally.

JOIN US FOR AN ONLINE TALK WITH WRITER AND POET BILLY-RAY BELCOURT ON QUEERER TIMES

Guest Speaker 3: Billy-Ray Belcourt

April 14, 2022, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM PST

Register via EventBrite

Admission is free. Everyone welcome to attend.

Oxygen Art Centre launches the second phase of an online youth arts education program entitled freezer cheese. Generously supported by the BC Arts Council Pivot Program and Osprey Community Foundation, the second phase offers an online youth workshop series and public speaker series throughout March and April 2022. Part one of freezer cheese, here.

Led by researcher and curator Hanss Lujan Torres, the freezer cheese: queerer times series presents weekly workshops and visiting speakers to explore alternative ways of thinking about time and the ever-changing present moment. Rooted in 2SQTBIPOC experiences, these events will engage with broader timescapes like pandemic time and colonial time and try to make sense of the “queerer” times we are all experiencing.

The third and final online public event features Billy-Ray Belcourt, writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of three books: This Wound is a World, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, and A History of My Brief Body. His fourth book, A Minor Chorus, will be published in the fall of 2022 by Hamish Hamilton (CAN) and W.W. Norton (US).

“freezer cheese” is derived from the fated piece of cheese—dairy or otherwise—that sits safely in the freezer, awaiting the moment it is needed for nutrition, for comfort, for enjoyment. These workshops and speaker series consider what lessons can be pulled from the theories of queer temporality and ask how we can use these to navigate moments of unease, pause, and disorientation brought on by the pandemic while also evoking a sense of play and curiosity.

Those interested in attending the speaker series are invited to register via EventBrite links above. All events are free and open to the public.

This project is generously supported by British Columbia Arts Council, Osprey Community Foundation, and Cowan’s Office Supplies Ltd.

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Image Credit: Billy-Ray Belcourt

Bios:

About the Facilitator

Hanss Lujan Torres is an artist, curator and researcher from Cusco, Peru, working between the unceded territories of the Syilx/Okanagan Nation and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Minor in Art History and Visual Culture from the University of British Columbia Okanagan and is an MA candidate in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. His research and curatorial practice consider subjugated archives, queer temporalities, and alternative futures in contemporary art. Hanss is the research coordinator for the Indigenous Futures Research Centre. In addition, he has worked with several arts organizations in British Columbia, including past president of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art and a curatorial assistant at the Kelowna Art Gallery.

Instagram

About the Guest Speakers

Kama La Mackerel is a Montreal-based Mauritian-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, educator, writer, community-arts facilitator and literary translator who works within and across performance, photography, installations, textiles, digital art and literature.

Kama’s work is grounded in the exploration of justice, love, healing, decoloniality, hybridity, cosmopolitanism and self- and collective-empowerment. They believe that aesthetic practices have the power to build resilience and act as resistance to the status quo, thereby enacting an anticolonial praxis through cultural production.

Kama has exhibited and performed their work internationally and their writing in English, French and Kreol has appeared in publications both online and in print. ZOM-FAM, their debut poetry collection published by Metonymy Press was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, a Globe and Mail Best Debut, and was a finalist for the QWF Concordia University First Book Award and the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQ2S+ Writers.

Website + Instagram

Léuli Eshrāghi is a Sāmoan/Persian/Cantonese interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator and researcher working between Australia and Canada. They intervene in display territories to centre global Indigenous and Asian diasporic visuality, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices. Through performance, moving image, writing and installation, they engage with Indigenous futurities as haunted by ongoing militourist and missionary violences that once erased faʻafafine-faʻatane people from kinship and knowledge structures. As a curator, speaker and educator, Eshrāghi contributes to growing international critical practice across the Great Ocean and North America through residencies, exhibitions, publications, courses and rights advocacy. They are Curator of the 9th TarraWarra Biennial of Australian Art in 2023 at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Curatorial Researcher in Residence (Blue Assembly) at the University of Queensland Art Museum, and Scientific Advisor (Reclaim the Earth) at the Palais de Tokyo.

Website + Instagram

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia. A 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, he earned his PhD in English at the University of Alberta. He was also a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and holds an M.St. in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford and Wadham College. In the First Nations Youth category, Belcourt was awarded a 2019 Indspire Award, which is the highest honor the Indigenous community bestows on its own leaders. He is the author of three books: This Wound is a World, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, and A History of My Brief Body. His fourth book, A Minor Chorus, will be published in the fall of 2022 by Hamish Hamilton (CAN) and W.W. Norton (US).

Website + Instagram
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 JOIN US FOR AN ONLINE TALK WITH Léuli Eshrāghi ON QUEERER TIMES

Guest Speaker 2: Léuli Eshrāghi

March 31, 2022, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM PST

Register via EventBrite

Admission is free. Everyone welcome to attend.

Oxygen Art Centre launches the second phase of an online youth arts education program entitled freezer cheese. Generously supported by the BC Arts Council Pivot Program and Osprey Community Foundation, the second phase offers an online youth workshop series and public speaker series throughout March and April 2022. Part one of freezer cheese, here.

Led by researcher and curator Hanss Lujan Torres, the freezer cheese: queerer times series presents weekly workshops and visiting speakers to explore alternative ways of thinking about time and the ever-changing present moment. Rooted in 2SQTBIPOC experiences, these events will engage with broader timescapes like pandemic time and colonial time and try to make sense of the “queerer” times we are all experiencing.

The second online public event features Léuli Eshrāghi, Sāmoan/Persian/Cantonese interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator and researcher working between Australia and Canada. They intervene in display territories to centre global Indigenous and Asian diasporic visuality, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices. Through performance, moving image, writing and installation, they engage with Indigenous futurities as haunted by ongoing militourist and missionary violences that once erased faʻafafine-faʻatane people from kinship and knowledge structures.

The final speaker series event will feature writer Billy Ray Belcourt, who will offer readings of his work and discuss their relation to time and queerness. In conversation with the facilitator Hanss Lujan Torres, these events will emphasize anticolonial approaches and Indigenous understandings of time. 

“freezer cheese” is derived from the fated piece of cheese—dairy or otherwise—that sits safely in the freezer, awaiting the moment it is needed for nutrition, for comfort, for enjoyment. These workshops and speaker series consider what lessons can be pulled from the theories of queer temporality and ask how we can use these to navigate moments of unease, pause, and disorientation brought on by the pandemic while also evoking a sense of play and curiosity.

Those interested in attending the speaker series are invited to register via EventBrite links above. All events are free and open to the public.

This project is generously supported by British Columbia Arts Council, Osprey Community Foundation, and Cowan’s Office Supplies Ltd.

Image Credit: Léuli Eshrāghi, Portrait by Rhett Hammerton, 2019

Bios:

About the Facilitator

Hanss Lujan Torres is an artist, curator and researcher from Cusco, Peru, working between the unceded territories of the Syilx/Okanagan Nation and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Minor in Art History and Visual Culture from the University of British Columbia Okanagan and is an MA candidate in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. His research and curatorial practice consider subjugated archives, queer temporalities, and alternative futures in contemporary art. Hanss is the research coordinator for the Indigenous Futures Research Centre. In addition, he has worked with several arts organizations in British Columbia, including past president of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art and a curatorial assistant at the Kelowna Art Gallery.

Instagram

About the Guest Speakers

Kama La Mackerel is a Montreal-based Mauritian-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, educator, writer, community-arts facilitator and literary translator who works within and across performance, photography, installations, textiles, digital art and literature.

Kama’s work is grounded in the exploration of justice, love, healing, decoloniality, hybridity, cosmopolitanism and self- and collective-empowerment. They believe that aesthetic practices have the power to build resilience and act as resistance to the status quo, thereby enacting an anticolonial praxis through cultural production.

Kama has exhibited and performed their work internationally and their writing in English, French and Kreol has appeared in publications both online and in print. ZOM-FAM, their debut poetry collection published by Metonymy Press was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, a Globe and Mail Best Debut, and was a finalist for the QWF Concordia University First Book Award and the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQ2S+ Writ

Léuli Eshrāghi is a Sāmoan/Persian/Cantonese interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator and researcher working between Australia and Canada. They intervene in display territories to centre global Indigenous and Asian diasporic visuality, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices. Through performance, moving image, writing and installation, they engage with Indigenous futurities as haunted by ongoing militourist and missionary violences that once erased faʻafafine-faʻatane people from kinship and knowledge structures. As a curator, speaker and educator, Eshrāghi contributes to growing international critical practice across the Great Ocean and North America through residencies, exhibitions, publications, courses and rights advocacy. They are Curator of the 9th TarraWarra Biennial of Australian Art in 2023 at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Curatorial Researcher in Residence (Blue Assembly) at the University of Queensland Art Museum, and Scientific Advisor (Reclaim the Earth) at the Palais de Tokyo.

Website + Instagram

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia. A 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, he earned his PhD in English at the University of Alberta. He was also a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and holds an M.St. in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford and Wadham College. In the First Nations Youth category, Belcourt was awarded a 2019 Indspire Award, which is the highest honor the Indigenous community bestows on its own leaders. He is the author of three books: This Wound is a World, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, and A History of My Brief Body. His fourth book, A Minor Chorus, will be published in the fall of 2022 by Hamish Hamilton (CAN) and W.W. Norton (US).

JOIN US FOR A FILM SCREENING AND ONLINE TALK WITH KAMA LA MACKEREL

Guest Speaker 1: Kama La Mackerel

March 17, 2022, 5:30 – 7:00 PM PST

Register via EventBrite 

Admission is free. Everyone welcome to attend.

Oxygen Art Centre launches the second phase of an online youth arts education program entitled freezer cheese. Generously supported by the BC Arts Council Pivot Program and Osprey Community Foundation, the second phase offers an online youth workshop series and public speaker series throughout March and April 2022. Part one of freezer cheese, here.

Led by researcher and curator Hanss Lujan Torres, the freezer cheese: queerer times series presents weekly workshops and visiting speakers to explore alternative ways of thinking about time and the ever-changing present moment. Rooted in 2SQTBIPOC experiences, these events will engage with broader timescapes like pandemic time and colonial time and try to make sense of the “queerer” times we are all experiencing.

The first online public event features Kama La Mackerel, a Montreal-based Mauritian-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, educator, writer, community-arts facilitator and literary translator who works within and across performance, photography, installations, textiles, digital art and literature. To begin the event, La Mackerel will present a 30 minutes performance that documents a ritual performance that honours the history and memory of water bodies. The film was originally presented at MOMENTA Biennale de l’Image last Fall and is a multilingual performance. 

The following speaker series will feature artists and writers, Léuli Eshrāghi and Billy Ray Belcourt. They will offer readings of their work and discuss their relation to time and queerness. In conversation with the facilitator Hanss Lujan Torres, these events will emphasize anticolonial approaches and Indigenous understandings of time. 

“freezer cheese” is derived from the fated piece of cheese—dairy or otherwise—that sits safely in the freezer, awaiting the moment it is needed for nutrition, for comfort, for enjoyment. These workshops and speaker series consider what lessons can be pulled from the theories of queer temporality and ask how we can use these to navigate moments of unease, pause, and disorientation brought on by the pandemic while also evoking a sense of play and curiosity.

Those interested in attending the speaker series are invited to register via EventBrite links above. All events are free and open to the public.

This project is generously supported by British Columbia Arts Council, Osprey Community Foundation, and Cowan’s Office Supplies Ltd.

Image Credit: Kama La Mackerel, Image courtesy the artist

OXYGEN OFFERS YOUTH WORKSHOPS AND SPEAKER SERIES ON QUEERER TIMES

SCHEDULE

Workshop 1: Intro to Queer Time

March 10, 2022, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM PST

Guest Speaker 1: Kama La Mackerel

March 17, 2022, 5:30 – 7:00 PM PST

EventBrite 

Workshop 2: Queering Pasts

March 24, 2022, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM PST

Guest Speaker 2: Léuli Eshrāghi

March 31, 2022, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM PST

EventBrite

Workshop 3: Imagining Queer Futures

April 7, 2022, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM PST

Guest Speaker 3: Billy-Ray Belcourt

April 14, 2022, 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM PST

EventBrite

 To register to attend the workshops, click here.

 Max. 12 workshop participants, ages 15-30.

 Admission to both the workshops + events is free.

Oxygen Art Centre launches the second phase of an online youth arts education program entitled freezer cheese. Generously supported by the BC Arts Council Pivot Program and Osprey Community Foundation, the second phase offers an online youth workshop series and public speaker series throughout March and April 2022. Part one of freezer cheese, here.

Led by researcher and curator Hanss Lujan Torres, the freezer cheese: queerer times series presents weekly workshops and visiting speakers to explore alternative ways of thinking about time and the ever-changing present moment. Rooted in 2SQTBIPOC experiences, these events will engage with broader timescapes like pandemic time and colonial time and try to make sense of the “queerer” times we are all experiencing.

Using concepts from queer and affect theory as guiding frameworks, the workshops will introduce participants to concepts of queer time, a post-modern model of temporality that positions the current understanding of time and progress as binding, normative constructs and imagines new and different ways of being. Participants will explore how creatives have depicted time and challenged its structures by looking at examples from contemporary art, poetry, and popular culture.

The accompanying speaker series will feature artists and writers, Kama La Mackerel, Léuli Eshrāghi, and Billy Ray Belcourt. They will offer readings of their work and discuss their relation to time and queerness. In conversation with the facilitator Hanss Lujan Torres, these events will emphasize anticolonial approaches and Indigenous understandings of time. 

“freezer cheese” is derived from the fated piece of cheese—dairy or otherwise—that sits safely in the freezer, awaiting the moment it is needed for nutrition, for comfort, for enjoyment. These workshops and speaker series consider what lessons can be pulled from the theories of queer temporality and ask how we can use these to navigate moments of unease, pause, and disorientation brought on by the pandemic while also evoking a sense of play and curiosity.

Interested participants are invited to register for the workshop via EventBrite. A maximum of twelve (12) participants will be invited to attend each workshop. Priority will be given to 2SQTBIPOC youth (ages 15-30). No previous experience is necessary.

Those interested in attending the speaker series are invited to register via EventBrite links above. All events are free and open to the public.

This project is generously supported by British Columbia Arts Council, Osprey Community Foundation, and Cowan’s Office Supplies Ltd.

Image Credit: (Left to Right)Kama La Mackerel, Léuli Eshrāghi, and Billy Ray Belcourt, Images courtesy the artists 

Bios:

About the Facilitator

Hanss Lujan Torres is an artist, curator and researcher from Cusco, Peru, working between the unceded territories of the Syilx/Okanagan Nation and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Minor in Art History and Visual Culture from the University of British Columbia Okanagan and is an MA candidate in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. His research and curatorial practice consider subjugated archives, queer temporalities, and alternative futures in contemporary art. Hanss is the research coordinator for the Indigenous Futures Research Centre. In addition, he has worked with several arts organizations in British Columbia, including past president of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art and a curatorial assistant at the Kelowna Art Gallery.

Instagram

About the Guest Speakers

Kama La Mackerel is a Montreal-based Mauritian-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, educator, writer, community-arts facilitator and literary translator who works within and across performance, photography, installations, textiles, digital art and literature.

Kama’s work is grounded in the exploration of justice, love, healing, decoloniality, hybridity, cosmopolitanism and self- and collective-empowerment. They believe that aesthetic practices have the power to build resilience and act as resistance to the status quo, thereby enacting an anticolonial praxis through cultural production.

Kama has exhibited and performed their work internationally and their writing in English, French and Kreol has appeared in publications both online and in print. ZOM-FAM, their debut poetry collection published by Metonymy Press was named a CBC Best Poetry Book, a Globe and Mail Best Debut, and was a finalist for the QWF Concordia University First Book Award and the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQ2S+ Writers.

Léuli Eshrāghi is a Sāmoan/Persian/Cantonese interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator and researcher working between Australia and Canada. They intervene in display territories to centre global Indigenous and Asian diasporic visuality, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices. Through performance, moving image, writing and installation, they engage with Indigenous futurities as haunted by ongoing militourist and missionary violences that once erased faʻafafine-faʻatane people from kinship and knowledge structures. As a curator, speaker and educator, Eshrāghi contributes to growing international critical practice across the Great Ocean and North America through residencies, exhibitions, publications, courses and rights advocacy. They are Curator of the 9th TarraWarra Biennial of Australian Art in 2023 at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Curatorial Researcher in Residence (Blue Assembly) at the University of Queensland Art Museum, and Scientific Advisor (Reclaim the Earth) at the Palais de Tokyo.

Website + Instagram

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia. A 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, he earned his PhD in English at the University of Alberta. He was also a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and holds an M.St. in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford and Wadham College. In the First Nations Youth category, Belcourt was awarded a 2019 Indspire Award, which is the highest honor the Indigenous community bestows on its own leaders. He is the author of three books: This Wound is a World, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, and A History of My Brief Body. His fourth book, A Minor Chorus, will be published in the fall of 2022 by Hamish Hamilton (CAN) and W.W. Norton (US).

Oxygen Art Centre’s Author Reading Series Presents Tiziana La Melia and Fan Wu

Tiziana La Melia and Fan Wu will read online for Oxygen Art Centre’s final Author Reading Series event of the season, 23 February (images provided by the authors)

Join Oxygen Art Centre on Wednesday the 23rd of February at 7:00 PM PST for an online reading featuring painter-poet, Tiziana La Melia, and poet-critic, Fan Wu. The evening will open with readings from students in the Selkirk College creative writing program. 
Tiziana La Melia’s The Eyelash and the Monochrome asks: what happens when material becomes thought and thought becomes object?

At once a book of poetry and an artist’s book, it gathers together poems, performance scripts, and parallel texts, illustrating the hybrid nature of these texts and trespassing upon the boundaries of genre. It is a book about enmeshment, about the potentiality of interplay. It is a conversation. It is not linear, but it interrogates and explores the line: lines of text, lines of dialogue, socio-economic lines drawn or crossed, lines that were the trails of snails… Everything is a signifier, meaning is elastic, and references are multi-faceted. La Melia’s multivalent and generative practice lives in process; it thinks through materials (paint, objects, non-human forms) with violent sentimentality, excessive desire, naiveté, narrative construction, and an awareness of the body and memory.

Fan Wu is a poet, editor, critic, and founding member of the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective. He is a frequent contributor to Canadian arts publications, a very good dancer, and has responded to contemporary exhibitions as an essayist and storyteller. Core to Wu’s writing practice are eclectic participatory performances that draw on collective experimentation, inspired by sensual, convivial energies. Wu collects the erotic qualities of language and offers them to us, placating a lack in our always desiring minds. 

Student writer, musician, and reader, Stevie Rose Polling will join us from the Selkirk College creative writing program. 
Anyone interested can register on Eventbrite through the following link. https://www.eventbrite.ca/x/author-reading-series-tiziana-la-melia-and-fan-wu-tickets-240546831047

Copies of The Eyelash and the Monochrome can be ordered online here. The edited collection Mourning Anthology, can be ordered online here. 

More information is available on Oxygen’s website, as well as recordings of previous events. Admission is free or by donation. The Author Reading Series is generously supported by Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance.
​

Author Biographies:
Tiziana La Melia is an artist and writer. Born in Palermo, Italy, and raised on an orchard, she currently resides on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She is the author of two books and is currently working on a dual language book titled I come from a long line of people who don’t use words (Archive Books 2022), Kletic Kink, a forthcoming poetry album and The Simple Life: A Drama Between Mice consisting of video, confessions, drawings, clothing mood boards, and a collaborative tabloid magazine. Recent solo and collaborative exhibitions include Fly Robin Fly, Mecedes du Sud, Montpellier (2021); Global Cows, Damien and the Love Guru, Brussels (2019/2020); St. Agatha’s Stink Script, galerie anne baurrault, Paris (2019); Garden Gossip, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff (2017-18); Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures, Vancouver Art Gallery,(2016-17); Down to Write You This Poem Sat, Oakville Galleries, Oakville (2016); Pigeon Looks for Death Between the Needle and the Haystack, Unit 17, Vancouver (2018). Her writing has appeared in Art21, Organism for Poetic Research, C Magazine, and The Interjection Calendar, among others.
Fan Wu is the squeezed remnant of a quest for vitality. He’s currently working on an obsessive project on the strange intersections between Georges Bataille and Daoist philosophy. Send him a love letter or a grievance at fanwu4u@gmail.com.
Student Writer Biographies:
Stevie Rose Poling is a first-year student in the University Arts and Sciences course. She was born in Trail but at age 7 she and her family moved to Melbourne, Australia, where she grew up. Stevie moved back to the Kootenays in March 2021 and has loved every minute of it. Alongside being a Creative Writing student, she is a musician and artist. Stevie loves incorporating poetry and literary references into all art forms she practises. She views art and writing as an emotional outlet and is recently beginning to share her work. Stevie is studying to become a secondary school art teacher and hopes to inspire the future generations to love art and literature as much as she does.

Image Credit: Photographs contributed by the authors.