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.
Oxygen Art Centre presents an artist talk and book launch with artists Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis. Oxygen hosted Daedalus and Davis for a remote residency throughout the month of August, during which the artists produced photographic works exploring the Sitka swamplands of the Grays River.
Daedalus and Davis are a multi-disciplinary, collaborative artist team and cofounders of the former Roll-Up Gallery, an artist-run, contemporary exhibition space in Portland, Oregon. Having relocated in 2019 from Portland, Oregon to a rural hamlet on the Grays River, the artists live and work next to 55 acres of Sitka spruce swamp protected by the Columbia Land Trust. Over the past year Daedalus and Davis have been working with local organic materials and photographic processes to initiate a new body of work about this relatively obscure corner of the natural world.
Conceived under the title, “Palūs,” the Latin word for marsh, the residency is a continuation of their work with the Columbia River through alternative photographic and print processes such as the fugitive plant-based process of anthotypes that document flora and fauna, photograms documenting the swamp tides, and Japanese Gyotaku print methods. These material explorations, alongside the artists embodied reflections on the process, are included in an artist monograph published by Oxygen Art Centre.
The monograph chronicles Daedalus and Davis’s remote residency alongside an introduction by curator Rachel Lafo, an ecological perspective of the Sitka spruce swamp by environmentalist Andrew Emlen, and a poem by Robert Pyle. The book will be available to the public in print and online formats mid-October 2021.
Join us on Saturday October, 23, 2021 at 1:00 PM PST (Zoom) to celebrate the launch of the artist monograph, Palūs (2021), and learn more about Daedalus and Davis’s artist practice. This event will feature the artists Deadalus and Kerry discussing their artistic practice, as well as the remote residency more specifically. A question and answer period will follow the discussion. Admission is free or by donation. Everyone is welcome to attend. Registration required via EventBrite.
Artist Bio: Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis are a married artist team whose multidisciplinary individual and collective work spans photography, installation, assemblage and book arts. Their four major projects have focused on themes of interdependence, environmental crisis and resilience, the Anthropocene epoch, and geologic time. Their work often employs alternative photographic techniques to foreground physical, tactile experience and the ideas of presence and immediacy. Davis studied photography and filmmaking at Portland State University and Oregon College of Art and Craft. Daedalus earned her BA from Reed College. Their collaborative projects have been supported by grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and shown regionally, including Portland State University’s Littman Gallery and Southern Oregon University’s Schneider Museum of Art. Their individual work has been featured in numerous publications and exhibited throughout the Pacific Northwest. Cofounders of Roll-Up Gallery, an erstwhile contemporary exhibition space in Portland, the team lives and works in Southwest Washington State near the mouth of the Columbia River.
Image Credit: Palus, anthotype using elderberry and skunk cabbage, 2021; Courtesy the Artists
OXYGEN HOSTSONLINE ARTIST PANEL DISCUSSION FEATURING OCICIWAN CONTEMPORARY ART COLLECTIVE
Oxygen Art Centre presents an online artist panel discussion alongside the current exhibition, “Body and Water” on view from 3 September to 2 October 2021. Join us on Saturday, September 11 at 1:00 PM (PST) for an online artist panel discussion to learn more about the exhibition, artists, curators, and artworks. Admission is free or by donation, everyone welcome to attend. To register, visit EventBrite https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/body-and-water-artist-panel-discussion-tickets-167484690217 or Oxygen’s website for more information.
“Body and Water” is a group exhibition curated by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective featuring artists Paxsi, Jaime Black, Hannah Claus, and Lindsay Dobbin. Opening on Friday, September 3, 2021 and running until Saturday, October 2, 2021 the exhibition considers connection with waterways through video, performance, photography, and textile installations. The online panel discussion will be moderated by curators Becca Taylor and Halie Finney from Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective and featuring the four participating artists.
Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective are based in in the region of amiskwacîwâskahikan [Edmonton], Alberta. The core collective support and present Indigenous artists through collaborative contemporary art projects, as well as at their artist-run Indigenous contemporary arts centre. Previous projects include “A Parallel Excavation: Duane Linklater & Tanya Lukin Linklater” at Art Gallery of Alberta (2016) and “Current Terrain: Bruno Canadien, Brenda Draney, Jessie Ray Short, Adrian Stimson, and Alberta Rose W.” at A Space Gallery (2018). Ociciwan are currently developing an Indigenous pollinator and medicine garden research project in collaboration with Finding Flowers Project entitled, kamâmak nihtâwikihcikan (2021).
“Body and Water” is the culmination of a year-long curatorial research project exploring connections with waterways regarding colonial, physical, and embodied borders. Anishinaabe-Finish artist Jaime Black slips and shifts between elemental water waves in three photographs included in the exhibition, as well as a poem that connects waterways with the cosmos. Similarly immersed in water, Black’s photographic explorations are echoed in Kanien’kehá:ka-Acadian-Irish artist Lindsay Dawn Dobbin’s video “Transitory Fish” (2021), which features a performance in the Bay of Fundy, Wabanaki Territory that honours “our aquatic origins by following the continuity of body and water.”
In parallel, Kanienkehá:ka-English artist Hannah Claus presents a looped video entitled “all this was once covered in water” (2017) that is transfixed by the movements and transformations of water, suggesting a slippage between interior and exterior worlds. Also included in the exhibition is an installation by queer, disabled Aymara and Welsh-Irish multidisciplinary artist Paxsi that shares memories of skipping rocks through fragments of story, denim, and chain. In their narrative artist statement, Paxsi offers, “I want you to know that I miss skipping rocks together, and I miss you, too.”
“Body and Water” is curated by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective and will be on view from 3 September 2021 to 2 October 2021 at Oxygen Art Centre. The exhibition includes artworks by Paxsi, Jaime Black, Hannah Claus, and Lindsay Dobbin, who will engage in a panel discussion on 11 September 2021 at 1:00 PM (PST) via Zoom. An exhibition catalogue will be published in print and online formats.
This exhibition is generously supported by Canada Council for the Arts and Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance.
Curator Bio:
Based in the region of amiskwacîwâskahikan [Edmonton], Alberta, Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective supports the work of Indigenous contemporary artists and designers and engages in contemporary critical dialogue, valuing artistic collaboration and fostering awareness of Indigenous contemporary art practices.
Paxsi (they/jupa) is a queer, disabled Aymara and Welsh-Irish multidisciplinary artist based in amiskwaciywâskahikan. Drawing inspiration from folk icons such as Buffy Sainte-Marie, Joni Mitchell, and Violeta Parra, Paxsi’s songwriting echoes folk revival with an alternative twist. Alongside their career as an emerging singer-songwriter, they create energy-informed beadwork which embodies Indigiqueer celebration and resistance. Paxsi uses their art, music, and writing as a means of connection and self-discovery, holding space for both healing and celebration. They hope to share this tenderness and joy with others in all that they do. You can find their work and more on their Instagram, @paxsi__.
Jaime Black is a multidisciplinary artist of mixed Anishinaabe and Finnish descent who lives and works in Winnipeg. Black’s practice engages in themes of memory, identity, place and resistance and is grounded in an understanding of the body and the land as sources of cultural and spiritual knowledge. Through her art practice, Black creates space and time to connect with and enter into a relationship with the land in which she works, creating images and impressions from a space of connection.
Hannah Claus is a Kanienkehá:ka and English visual artist who explores Onkwehonwe epistemologies as living transversal relationships in her transdisciplinary practice. A 2019 Eiteljorg fellow and 2020 Prix Giverny recipient, her installations have been included in exhibitions across Canada, including Àbadakone: ContinuousFire at the National Gallery of Canada in 2018, Des horizons d’attentes at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2021, and Written on the Earth at the McIntosh Gallery in 2021. She is a board member of the Conseil des arts de Montréal and is a co-founder of daphne, a new Indigenous artist-run centre in Montreal. Claus is a member of Kenhtè:ke, next to the Bay of Quinte in Ontario. Having grown up away from her grandfather’s community, she is privileged to live and work in Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtià:ke [Montréal].
Lindsay Dawn Dobbin is a Kanien’kehá:ka – Acadian – Irish water protector, artist, musician, storyteller, curator and educator who lives and works in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of Lnu’k (Mi’kmaq). Dobbin’s relational and place-responsive practice is a living process—following curiosity rather than form, the way of water, with the intent of understanding and kinship. As a human being with intersecting identities as well as personal and ancestral displacement and trauma, their practice honours direct experience as a way of coming to (un)know while listening for the shared beingness, health and resilience in meeting waters. Their transdisciplinary work in sound art, music, performance, sculpture, installation, social practices and writing places wonder, listening, collaboration, play and improvisation at the centre of creativity, and explores the connection between the environment and the body, engaging in a sensorial intimacy with the land and water. Dobbin aims to bring attention to the natural world as witness, teacher and collaborator in learning—making visible and audible our interdependence with the larger web of living beings and systems in which human life is embedded.
Image Credit: Paxsi, Courtesy the artist, 2021 (left); Lindsay Dobbin, Courtesy the artist, 2021
Oxygen Art Centre acknowledges with gratitude that we are located on the tum xula7xw/ traditional territory of the sn̓ʕay̓ckstx/the Sinixt People. As uninvited guests we honour their ongoing presence on this land. We recognize that the Sinixt Arrow Lakes, Sylix, Ktuxana, and Yaqan Nukij Lower Kootenay Band peoples are also connected with this land, as are Métis and many diverse Indigenous persons.
GROUP EXHIBITION CONSIDERS CONNECTION WITH WATERWAYS AT OXYGEN ART CENTRE
Oxygen Art Centre is pleased to present “Body and Water,” a group exhibition curated by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective featuring artists Paxsi, Jaime Black, Hannah Claus, and Lindsay Dobbin. Opening on Friday, September 3, 2021 and running until Saturday, October 2, 2021 the exhibition considers connection with waterways through video, performance, photography, and textile installations.
Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective are based in in the region of amiskwacîwâskahikan [Edmonton], Alberta. The core collective support and present Indigenous artists through collaborative contemporary art projects, as well as at their artist-run Indigenous contemporary arts centre. Previous projects include “A Parallel Excavation: Duane Linklater & Tanya Lukin Linklater” at Art Gallery of Alberta (2016) and “Current Terrain: Bruno Canadien, Brenda Draney, Jessie Ray Short, Adrian Stimson, and Alberta Rose W.” at A Space Gallery (2018). Ociciwan are currently developing an Indigenous pollinator and medicine garden research project in collaboration with Finding Flowers Project entitled, kamâmak nihtâwikihcikan (2021).
“Body and Water” is the culmination of a year-long curatorial research project exploring connections with waterways regarding colonial, physical, and embodied borders. Anishinaabe-Finish artist Jaime Black slips and shifts between elemental water waves in three photographs included in the exhibition, as well as a poem that connects waterways with the cosmos. Similarly immersed in water, Black’s photographic explorations are echoed in Kanien’kehá:ka-Acadian-Irish artist Lindsay Dawn Dobbin’s video “Transitory Fish” (2021), which features a performance in the Bay of Fundy, Wabanaki Territory that honours “our aquatic origins by following the continuity of body and water.”
In parallel, Kanienkehá:ka-English artist Hannah Claus presents a looped video entitled “all this was once covered in water” (2017) that is transfixed by the movements and transformations of water, suggesting a slippage between interior and exterior worlds. Also included in the exhibition is an installation by queer, disabled Aymara and Welsh-Irish multidisciplinary artist Paxsi that shares memories of skipping rocks through fragments of story, denim, and chain. In their narrative artist statement, Paxsi offers, “I want you to know that I miss skipping rocks together, and I miss you, too.”
Join us on Saturday, September 11 at 1:00 PM (PST) for an online artist talk to learn more about the exhibition, artists, curators, and artworks. Admission is free or by donation, everyone welcome to attend. To register, visit EventBrite https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/body-and-water-artist-panel-discussion-tickets-167484690217 or Oxygen’s website for more information.
“Body and Water” is curated by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective and will be on view from 3 September 2021 to 2 October 2021 at Oxygen Art Centre. The exhibition includes artworks by Paxsi, Jaime Black, Hannah Claus, and Lindsay Dobbin, who will engage in a panel discussion on 11 September 2021 at 1:00 PM (PST) via Zoom. An exhibition catalogue will be published in print and online formats.
This exhibition is generously supported by Canada Council for the Arts and Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance.
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Curator Bio:
Based in the region of amiskwacîwâskahikan [Edmonton], Alberta, Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective supports the work of Indigenous contemporary artists and designers and engages in contemporary critical dialogue, valuing artistic collaboration and fostering awareness of Indigenous contemporary art practices.
Paxsi (they/jupa) is a queer, disabled Aymara and Welsh-Irish multidisciplinary artist based in amiskwaciywâskahikan. Drawing inspiration from folk icons such as Buffy Sainte-Marie, Joni Mitchell, and Violeta Parra, Paxsi’s songwriting echoes folk revival with an alternative twist. Alongside their career as an emerging singer-songwriter, they create energy-informed beadwork which embodies Indigiqueer celebration and resistance. Paxsi uses their art, music, and writing as a means of connection and self-discovery, holding space for both healing and celebration. They hope to share this tenderness and joy with others in all that they do. You can find their work and more on their Instagram, @paxsi__.
Jaime Black is a multidisciplinary artist of mixed Anishinaabe and Finnish descent who lives and works in Winnipeg. Black’s practice engages in themes of memory, identity, place and resistance and is grounded in an understanding of the body and the land as sources of cultural and spiritual knowledge. Through her art practice, Black creates space and time to connect with and enter into a relationship with the land in which she works, creating images and impressions from a space of connection.
Hannah Claus is a Kanienkehá:ka and English visual artist who explores Onkwehonwe epistemologies as living transversal relationships in her transdisciplinary practice. A 2019 Eiteljorg fellow and 2020 Prix Giverny recipient, her installations have been included in exhibitions across Canada, including Àbadakone: ContinuousFire at the National Gallery of Canada in 2018, Des horizons d’attentes at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2021, and Written on the Earth at the McIntosh Gallery in 2021. She is a board member of the Conseil des arts de Montréal and is a co-founder of daphne, a new Indigenous artist-run centre in Montreal. Claus is a member of Kenhtè:ke, next to the Bay of Quinte in Ontario. Having grown up away from her grandfather’s community, she is privileged to live and work in Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtià:ke [Montréal].
Lindsay Dawn Dobbin is a Kanien’kehá:ka – Acadian – Irish water protector, artist, musician, storyteller, curator and educator who lives and works in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of Lnu’k (Mi’kmaq). Dobbin’s relational and place-responsive practice is a living process—following curiosity rather than form, the way of water, with the intent of understanding and kinship. As a human being with intersecting identities as well as personal and ancestral displacement and trauma, their practice honours direct experience as a way of coming to (un)know while listening for the shared beingness, health and resilience in meeting waters. Their transdisciplinary work in sound art, music, performance, sculpture, installation, social practices and writing places wonder, listening, collaboration, play and improvisation at the centre of creativity, and explores the connection between the environment and the body, engaging in a sensorial intimacy with the land and water. Dobbin aims to bring attention to the natural world as witness, teacher and collaborator in learning—making visible and audible our interdependence with the larger web of living beings and systems in which human life is embedded.
Image Credit: Transitory Fish, 2021, Lindsay Dobbin, Performance, Bay of Fundy
