CONTEMPORARY ART MENTORSHIP SERIES, “WHORL,” CONSIDERS TIME, EMBODIMENT, AND SOMATICS WITH NADIA CHANEY AND ZOE KREYE
Artist Talk
Saturday, April 1, 2023 @ 1:00 – 2:30 PM
Nadia Chaney + Zoe Kreye
Free to attend; Register via EventBrite
Workshop #1
Saturday, April 15, 2023 @ 1:00 – 3:00 PM
Nadia Chaney
Registration fee: $20; Register via Google Form
Workshop #2
Saturday, April 29, 2023 @ 1:00 – 3:00 PM
Zoe Kreye
Registration fee: $20; Register via Google Form
Taking its name from something that whirls, coils, or spirals or whose form suggests such movement, and the concentric arrangement of a snail’s shell, Oxygen Art Centre is thrilled to present “whorl,” a public artist talk and contemporary art workshop featuring Nadia Chaney (Kanata, Canada) and Zoe Kreye (Vancouver, Canada).
To begin the series, Chaney and Kreye will present an online artist talk on Saturday, April 1, 2023, from 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM PST. The event will introduce the public and workshop participants to the artists and their respective practices. A short Q&A period will follow the talks, which will touch on the overlapping and divergent threads in their work. Free to attend, the public can register for the event through Oxygen’s website and EventBrite.
Following the artist talk, the whorl programpresents two online workshops with the artists on Saturday, April 15th and Saturday, April 29th from 1:00 to 3:00 PM PST. Emerging and established artists are encouraged to register to attend both or an individual workshop by completing a Google Form via Oxygen’s website. A registration fee of $20 will be required to attend.
Nadia Chaney is an arts facilitator, poet, and performer, whose recent research explores time through interdisciplinary collective reading practices. Her focus on relational attunement through musical improvisation, automatic drawing, and embodied synchronicities will be engaged in this workshop. Chaney’s current work is as the founder and caremaker of the Time Zone Research Lab, a non-local and nonlinear collective for arts-based research into the nature of time and temporality. Through her workshop, participants will be welcomed to the Time Zone Research Lab archive!
The Lab uses an intuitive process called Web Walking to trip lightly through the recordings of 102 daylong conversations about Time and Temporality. Participants in Chaney’s workshop will punctuate the Web Walking with silence (for making) and elongate its strands with whatever thoughts, bidden and unbidden, occur to us. Chaney’s workshop will employ the art of deep listening and tentacular thinking.
Zoe Kreye is an interdisciplinary artist whose performance and installation work engages audiences in participatory and embodied happenings. Her focus on motherhood, grief, and the experience of loss in the body are activated through painting, tapestry, and ceramic works, alongside her somatic and bodywork practices. Kreye’s workshop will invite participants to engage in a series of movements to engage with drawing and sculpture through somatic practices.
The workshops are two-hours in length each and provide participatory engagements with contemporary art discourses and practices to encourage non-linear curiosity in your creative approaches.
whorl is an Oxygen Art Centre contemporary art series that invites the public and artists of all stages and backgrounds to engage in intensive artistic mentorship on the topics of embodiment, somatics, and performance practice.
The artist talk featuring Nadia Chaney and Zoe Kreye will take place on Saturday, April 1, 2023, from 1:00 – 2:30 PM PST (Zoom). Admission is free and everyone is welcome to attend.
The workshops require a $20 registration fee and will be open to only twelve participants each. Nadia Chaney’s workshop will be offered on Saturday, April 15, 2023, from 1:00 – 3:00 PM PST. Zoe Kreye’s workshop will be offered on Saturday, April 29, 2023, from 1:00 – 3:00 PM PST. Registration will occur on a first come-first serve basis until filled.
This program is generously supported by Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance.
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Image Credit: Nadia Chaney (L), Zoe Kreye (R); Images courtesy the Artists
Press Contact:
Julia Prudhomme
Executive Director
Oxygen Art Centre
250-551-6329
Artist Biographies
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.
Her current work is as the founder and caremaker of the Time Zone Research Lab, a non-local and nonlinear collective for arts-based research into the nature of time and temporality. There are currently 332 international members of the Time Zone, plus a complementary drop-in research node designed for children ages 3-17, the Star Holders. We have completed 103 sessions, and over 75 children’s sessions thus far.
Our main instructors at the Time Zone are a ceramic octopus (Epok the Usher) created by Wai-Yant Li and designed to generate quantum oscillations and tentacular transversals across chronosocial materialities and a centenarian sourdough starter who hears everything.
Through practices of reading, care work, listening, singing, dreaming, sleeping, baking, improvising, puppeteering, painting, film, interrupting, transpersonal shift and rhythm(s) (and more) we investigate two major questions: 1) how can we be more intimate with Time 2) how can we help to liberate Time / how is Time incarcerated. Our methods are both a- and interdisciplinary, deeply social, intentionally secretive (both secret and secretion), generous, gentle, and fun.
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.