| Plan ahead! Oxygen’s Fall 2023 Semester is now open for registration. Continue learning a medium, explore a new one, dream, sing, and gather together, make your own screen printed artist book, and learn to paint! Learn about the classes, instructors, and how to register via our website. Spaces limited. Contact Natasha Smith (Education Coordinator) with questions or registration support.  |
LEARN MORE Figure Drawing #3 (no instruction)IN PERSON4 Classes: Sept 17, 24 Oct 1, 8Sundays: 6:30 – 8:30pmDrawing sessions will provide the opportunity to draw from a model with poses ranging from 1 minute to 20 minutes. No instruction is offered. Students are expected to provide the drawing materials of their choice.TOTAL FEE: $60REGISTER  Art Speak – Peer to Peer Work Sharing Facilitated by Emilie Leblanc KrombergIN PERSON4 Classes: Sept 21, 28, Oct. 5, 12Thursdays: 5 – 6:45pmArtists of all disciplines (professional or not) are invited to share their work in a safe space and engage in contemporary art dialogue with other open-minded art loving individuals. Themes will be proposed as a potential starting point for exchanges and artistic practices to grow collectively. The objective for this workshop is for artists to make, share, discuss, and learn together. TOTAL FEE: $40REGISTER  Dreaming into Poetry with Rose NielsenIN PERSON8 Classes: Sept. 19, 21, 26, 28, Oct. 3, 5, 10, 12Tues. & Thurs.: 10am – 12pmThis course offers a poetry-writing approach that looks through the lens of Jungian dreamwork as we search for images, symbols, and metaphors in our dreams, bringing unconscious material into consciousness. In the process, we will explore a variety of fixed form and free verse poetry to learn which forms might best serve the dream’s tone and theme. TOTAL FEE: $230Registration Deadline: SEPTEMBER 12REGISTER  Balkan Choir with Bessie WappIN PERSON8 Classes: Sept. 21 – Nov. 9Thursdays: 7 – 9pmAdd your voice to the bold dissonance and clear sweetness of ancient multipart Eastern European a cappella songs of love and lust, harvest and hearth, wartime, badly arranged marriages, and drunken husbands. No prior experience required. In the last class we will enchant an audience with what we’ve learned. Material Fee: $10Course Fee: $230TOTAL FEE: $240Registration Deadline: SEPTEMBER 14REGISTER  Lino Printing – Making Greeting Cards and Exploring Colour with Myra RasmussenIN PERSON1 Class: Sept. 24Sunday: 1-4pmIn this class we will explore a few different ways to use colour in lino relief printmaking including rainbow rolls, coloured backgrounds, and reduction technique. Each participant will then carve and print one or two lino blocks (depending on time). We will work with 4” x 4.5” blocks, which are a perfect size to experiment with new techniques and to make handmade greeting cards. No previous lino printmaking experience required.Material Fee: $15 (all materials provided)Course Fee: $50TOTAL FEE: $65Registration Deadline: SEPTEMBER 15REGISTER  Drawing The Costumed Figure with Deborah ThompsonIN PERSON4 Classes: Oct. 4 – 25Wednesdays: 5:30 – 8:30pmThis four week imaginative and process-based course will focus on drawing skills through the study of the costumed figure. Staged poses with a costumed model will serve as the main prompt throughout the course. Review of primary drawing elements such as line, mark, value, and space will be covered as an introduction to the language of drawing. Specific exercises will explore compositional strategies, use of value or tonal range, and contrasting textures will be part of the curriculum. Studies will be used to develop a narrative drawing. Photographs taken of the model or from other sources will also be explored towards their use in developing a drawing. One-on-one and group critiques will be ongoing. Attention will be drawn to the use of the costumed figure throughout the history of art. Materials: graphite, coloured chalks, charcoal, conté, and a variety of papers.Note: This course is best suited to students with some previous drawing experience and an interest in exploring narrative qualities of the figure. Material Fee: $20 + Material ListCourse Fee: $205TOTAL FEE: $225REGISTERJOINSupport your artist-run centre by becoming an Oxygen Art Centre Member. Oxygen Memberships run from $2 (Senior/Student) to $5 (Single) to $10 (Families) and significantly help our organization. Become a member today! MEMBERSHIP BENEFITSEvents, Tours and Artist TalksVolunteer, Networking and Mentorship ExperienceRegular mailings and newslettersVoting Privileges at Oxygen Art Centre’s AGMAccess to current Exhibition Publications and CataloguesArtist-in-Residence and Exhibition ToursRegister ONLINE or by MAIL Already a Member? Consider making a Donation.REGISTERImages (top to bottom): (1) Promotional image for “Tracelines” exhibition by Vance Wright, 2023; (2-6) OAC 2023 Fall Semester promo image, 2023; (7) “Become a Member” text overlaid on an image documenting an installation in progress at Oxygen Art Centre, 2015; |
Vance Wright
An emerging artist and curator, Wright is currently engaged in an undergraduate degree at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Critical & Cultural Practices and Sculpture. During their residency Wright intends to pick up various threads in their practice concerning concepts of trace and portals, and how they relate to curatorial practice. This will be primarily explored through textiles like technical camouflage and beadwork practices, as well as formal engagements with hegemonic exhibition tropes.
Call for Volunteers: Gallery Hosts
Oxygen Art Centre is currently looking for a candidate to fulfil the role of Education Assistant. Funded by Canada Summer Jobs, the employment opportunity is open to students who intend to return to studies in the Fall of 2023.
Workshop #2
Zoe Kreye creates interdisciplinary art projects that explore transformation, embodiment and collective experience. Recent projects include De Fem (WAAP, Vancouver), Make Our Own Air (SPACE, London), Our Missing Body (Hochparterre Berlin, Western Front, Kamloops Art Gallery), FutureLoss (grunt gallery), Unlearning Practices (Unit Pitt, Goethe Satellite, <rotor> Graz). Working in the realms of sculpture, dance/movement, drawing and somatics, her projects take shape as installations, workshops, rituals and journeys. Materially she works close to the body using clay, cloth, foam and gestural lines. She creates artworks through transcendent experiences, then invites publics and performers into the installations to embody, disrupt and explore the transformative capacity of sensation, narrative and ritual. She holds an MFA in Public Art and Social Practice from the Bauhaus University Weimar and a BFA in Sculpture from Concordia University Montreal. She co-founded the Berlin artist collective Process Institute. She is currently based in Vancouver and teaches studio and Social Practice at Emily Carr University.
Oxygen Art Centre
Vance Wright
Workshop #1
Workshop #2
Nadia Chaney was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (Treaty 6) of Indian descent. Performing and presenting since early childhood, Nadia has been professionally active since 1998 in poetry, music, creative non-fiction, visual arts, social practice and performance installation. She has also trained in clown, short and long fiction, memoir and action theatre. At the core of these many modes is community art and the belief that creativity is an illimitable birthright for all beings, human and beyond.
Kathy Friedman + Erin Robinsong
Kathy Friedman studied creative writing at UBC and the University of Guelph, and she was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Grain, Geist, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, and Canadian Notes & Queries. Her first collection of short stories, All the Shining People, was published in April 2022 with House of Anansi. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about travel, music, and mental health.A full-time professor in Humber College’s Bachelor of Creative and Professional Writing program, Kathy has been teaching creative writing to diverse adult communities since 2013 through NISA/Northern Institute for Social Action, Workman Arts, The 519, Progress Place, CAMH, and the Toronto Public Library.Kathy is also the co-founder and artistic director of InkWell Workshops, which delivers free creative writing workshops to people with mental health and addiction issues. She is the publisher of four literary anthologies with in-house imprint InkWell Books, and she edited the anthology Brilliance Is the Clothing I Wear, published by Dundurn Press in June 2021. Quill & Quire called this latest anthology a “polished, triumphant collection.”Kathy emigrated with her family from South Africa to Thornhill, Ontario, when she was five. She now lives in Toronto, an uninvited guest on the shared Ancestral territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit and other Anishinaabe Nations, as well as the Wendat and other Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. She endeavours to live in right relation with the land and its original inhabitants and caretakers, and to uphold the values embedded in the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Treaty.
Lino Printing – Reduction Technique
Magic of Memory w/ Rayya LiebichONLINE
Plan ahead! Oxygen’s Fall 2023 Semester is now open for registration. Continue learning a medium, explore a new one, dream, sing, and gather together, make your own screen printed artist book, and learn to paint!