Category: Oxygen Art Centre

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.  

FOR   IMMEDIATE   RELEASE: Register for upcoming online performance events with local artist Bessie Wapp held throughout January

Schedule of Events: Residency and Exhibition

Exhibition dates:    14 January – 30 January 2022

Hosted Events:  Fridays & Saturdays 5:00 – 6:30 PM PST, Sundays 2:00 – 3:30 PM PST (Zoom)

Artist Talk: 19 January 2021 4:00 – 5:00 PM PST (Zoom). Register to attend via EventBrite.

Oxygen Art Centre’s winter artist in residence, Bessie Wapp invites us to cultivate our curiosity in a revisioning of the ancient Greek Pandora myth. Wapp spent the month of December engaged in studio-based research and creation towards a participatory, theatrical, and especially musical, experience. She is now ready to open the project to the public as a work-in-progress via a series of interactive online zoom events. Equal parts storytelling, song, historical examination, and personal reflection, Pandora’s Jukebox upends the problematic original myth, and seeks to transform our collective burdens into soul medicine: music!

For Wapp, a seasoned and talented musician and performer, the residency afforded time to reflect on her interest in the Pandora myth, and to expand her understanding of its contemporary relevance. The residency offered studio time and space to move freely between keyboards, accordion and vocals through the use of a looper to develop complex musical pieces.

The title of the project, Pandora’s Jukebox, comes from Wapp’s interest in the Greek Myth of Pandora, and its relevance regarding contemporary environmental, social, and economic challenges. By empowering Pandora as a healer Wapp intends to re-imagine and re-write the fate of the heroine. Wapp’s motivation for the project springs from both her personal healing journey with cancer and from her concern for the health of the earth. Utilizing music as the elixir of life, Wapp seeks to conjure remedies of hope for the crises of today’s world.

Wapp’s creative journey into the origin of the Pandora Myth has led her to understand the story as a biased expression that seeks to place blame and to punish the female character for an act of innate curiosity. As the story goes, Pandora’s fateful opening of a gifted box unleashes all the evils of the world. In re-articulating the traditional cultural paradigm, Wapp has ambitiously set out to create a tale of redemption through an interactive musical drama.

During her residency Wapp transformed the gallery space into a theatrical environment. Starting January 14, 2022, Wapp will host a series of online events in this space where she will virtually lead participants into Pandora’s Jukebox. Wapp will lead participants through interactive processes of engagement aimed to elicit and gather raw material in the form of spoken word and poetry from which to build musical compositions.

At each event, Wapp will challenge herself to work intuitively and spontaneously with her audience in the creation of new musical compositions. For Wapp, this project brings a culmination of her experience and skill in improvisation, choir direction, theatrical design, and community engaged art practice.

Hosted events run from January 14th until January 30th, 2022. Space is limited to five (5) participants per event and registration is required. Interested participants can register by visiting Oxygen’s website and EventBrite links. No previous experience in singing or performance is required. Each event will be one and a half hours in duration and requires connection to Zoom. Events will not be recorded.

Bessie Wapp will also offer an artist talk on her residency and scope of the project on Wednesday, January 19th at 4:00 PM PST (Zoom). To attend, register via EventBrite links on Oxygen’s website. The participatory online events will be offered on Friday and Saturday evenings ( with the exception of January 15th) from 5:00 – 6:30 PM, and Sundays from 2:00 – 3:30 PM PST. The public is invited to register online through the Oxygen Art Centre for all events.

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 innovation and multi-disciplinary theatre groups such as 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 began to develop an autobiographical body of work sourcing material and stories from her ancestry and family life. This little Piggie, 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. Wapp has performed in festivals and theatre productions throughout British Columbia. 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.

EventBrite links:

14 January 2022, 5:00 – 6:30 PM PST

16 January 2022, 2:00 – 3:30 PM PST

21 January 2022, 5:00 – 6:30 PM PST

22 January 2022, 5:00 – 6:30 PM PST

23 January 2022, 2:00 – 3:30 PM PST

28 January 2022, 5:00 – 6:30 PM PST

29 January 2022, 5:00 – 6:30 PM PST

30 January 2022, 2:00 – 3:30 PM PST

Image: Image of Pandora by Fredrick Stuart Church

 OXYGEN LAUNCHES FREEZER CHEESE ONLINE ART EDUCATION VIDEOS AND FREE ART SUPPLIES

Oxygen Art Centre launches the first phase of an online youth arts education program entitled freezer cheese. Generously supported by the BC Arts Council Pivot Program and Osprey Community Foundation, freezer cheese offers a series of six free art demonstration videos for youth (ages 15 – 30) and gift cards to purchase art supplies to follow along.

Art demonstration videos are led by Oxygen’s artist instructors featuring mediums such as concrete poetry, stop-motion animation, colour theory, painting portraiture, and everything in between! All videos are available on Oxygen’s YouTube channel and website beginning January 10, 2021.

Instructors include regional artists Kristy Gordon, Jaymie Johnson, Rayya Liebich, Brian Lye, Deborah Thompson, and prOphecy sun, and features a digital animation by Jonathan Ramos and an original soundtrack by Ok Vancouver Ok. All six of the videos are edited by emerging videographer Grady Robertson.

Free art supply gift cards are generously supported by Cowan’s Office Supplies Ltd. (Nelson, Canada) and are available to youth, ages 15 – 30, who are located in the West Kootenay region on a first come first serve basis. Sign-up to receive your gift card today by clicking here or visiting Oxygen’s website. Gift cards will be mailed to participants with a material list and freezer cheese sticker. Each video is accompanied by a material list for folks to access the same or similar supplies.

The overarching project takes place until April 2022 under the title, freezer cheese, 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. It is a reminder of the ongoing pandemic, but also evokes a sense of play and curiosity.

Art demonstration videos are available on Oxygen’s YouTube channel and website. Register for a free art supply gift card to Cowan’s Office Supplies Ltd. by visiting by clicking here or visiting Oxygen’s website. Gift cards are available for youth, ages 15 – 30, on a first come first serve basis.

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

Image Credit: Animation still by Jonathan Ramos, 2021

Oxygen Art Centre’s Author Reading Series Presents Aisha Sasha John and Alexei Perry Cox

Alexei Perry Cox and Aisha Sasha John will read online for Oxygen Art Centre’s Author Reading Series, 26th January (images provided by the authors)

Join Oxygen Art Centre on Wednesday the 26th of January at 7:00 PM PST for an online reading featuring poets Aisha Sasha John and Alexei Perry Cox. The evening will open with readings from students in the Selkirk College creative writing program.

Alexei Perry Cox will read from her forthcoming collection, PLACE, arriving from Noemi Press in Virginia. In the words of Megan Fernandes, “Place begins from the psychology of ruin, as in, where do we go when the dust lifts and settlers remain, when countries are bombed and people displaced, when arbitrary boundaries have been locked into one’s statehood but not one’s imagination? […] She dives into the archive and uses transliteration, aphorism, and meta-critical thought experiments to construct her own epistemological groundwork.”

Aisha Sasha John will read from the second edition of her most recent chapbook, TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in New York. Written primarily over the course of four months in the fall of 2018, when the poet spent time in her native Vancouver. The chapbook sees John reckoning with narrative in the wake of returning to a place at once familiar and strange. Says John of the collection: “the other name for this work is DAUGHTERHOOD. What if instead of shaming your parents about their need to grow up, you went on ahead and did it yourself? […] Centrally I was confronted with growth as a function of daughterhood.”

Students from the Selkirk College creative writing program will include Andrew Wood and Gwen Higgins. Both will read from work developed in their coursework at Selkirk, and during their mentorship through Oxygen Art Centre with Susan Andrews Grace.

Attendees can register on Eventbrite through the following link. https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/author-reading-series-aisha-sasha-john-alexei-perry-cox-tickets-219346389957

Copies of PLACE and TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED can be ordered online.

Everyone is welcome to attend the 26 January 2022 Author Reading Series event at 7:00 PM PST featuring Aisha Sasha John and Alexei Perry Cox. To attend, register via the EventBrite link. More information 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:

Alexei Perry Cox is a writer, teacher and organiser. She is the author of Night 3 | اليوم الرابع (Centre for Expanded Poetics), Re:Evolution (Gap Riot Press), Finding Places to Make Places (Vallum), as well as the full length collection Under Her (Insomniac Press). PLACE is forthcoming with Noemi Press. Her poetry and criticism has graced the pages of a wide variety of publications, including Journal Safar (جورنال سفر), Arc Poetry Magazine, Moko Magazine, Carte Blanche and The Georgia Review. At the core of her makings is the belief that we imagine relationally, sometimes with words and sometimes with grace.

Aisha Sasha John medium is energy. A poet and choreographer, Aisha is the author of I have to live. (McClelland & Stewart), finalist for the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize, THOU (Book*hug), finalist for the 2015 Trillium Book Award, and TO STAND AT THE PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED (UDP 2021). Aisha was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto (Scarborough) in 2018 and served as guest faculty for the 2019 Writing Studio residency program at The Banff Centre. Aisha is also the 2019-2022 Dancemakers’ Resident Artist—in 2022 she continues research on the ensemble work DIANA ROSS DREAM.  She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and a B.A. in African Studies and Semiotics from the University of Toronto.

Student Writer Biographies:

Andrew Wood is a professional snowboarder with photos published in Kootenay Mountain Culture, Coastal Mountain Life and National Geographic’s “100 Slopes of a Lifetime.” At Quest University Canada he explored the parallels between physical and social risk trying to understand why reading poetry in front of a small group of supportive peers felt so similar to jumping off thirty foot cliffs on his snowboard.As a writer Andrew has published in Coastal Mountain Life, CV Collective and a mixed-medium collaborative arts publication: W.E.R.D. Magazine. Andrew was a student of Leesa Dean’s Manuscript Development course and is a 2021 recipient of an Oxygen Arts Center mentorship program with Susan Andrews Grace for his in-progress first novel: “West of Hope.”

Gwen Higgins is an accountant by day and writer by night who lives in Castlegar with her husband, two teenagers, and a dog. In her spare time, Gwen volunteers with Girl Guides. She’s currently a student in the Selkirk College Creative Writing program and a participant in Oxygen Arts’ mentorship program with Susan Andrews Grace. Gwen loves to read and is never far from her Kindle.

Image Credit: Photographs contributed by the writers

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.

For more information: www.oxygenartcentre.org,  education@oxygenartcentre.org.

 Press Contact: Natasha Smith, education@oxygenartcentre.org

Schedule of Events: Residency and Exhibition

Residency:      1 – 30 December 2021

Artist Talk:     19 January 2022, 4:00 – 5:00 PM PST (Zoom)
Register to attend via EventBrite.

Exhibition:      7 – 30 January 2022

Hosted Events:  Fridays – Saturdays, 5:00 – 6:30 PM & Sunday Matinees, 2:00 – 3:30 PM (no event on Saturday, January 15,2022)
Visit Oxygen’s website to register to attend hosted events.

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