FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: REGISTER FOR OXYGEN’S SPRING BREAK WORKSHOP SERIES WITH VISITING ARTISTS ALEXIS HOGAN AND CHRIS DUFOUR
Between Futility and Future with Alexis Hogan and Chris Dufour
IN PERSON @ OXYGEN ART CENTRE
4 Classes: March 26 – 29, 2024
Tuesday to Thursday: 6:30pm – 8:30pm + Friday: 3:00pm – 5:00pm
TOTAL FEE: $30 for all four workshops
OR
FEE PER WORKSHOP: $10 – $20 ea.
Sliding scale available with an option to pay it forward for other folks to attend.
Oxygen Art Centre is delighted to offer the workshop series entitled “Between Futility and Future” with visiting B.C.-based artists Alexis Hogan and Chris Dufour. The series entangles ecologically-centered practices of ink making, dyeing, and plant-based film developing alongside the use of the body.
Comprised of four workshops in total over spring break, workshops take place in the evenings from March 26, 2024, to March 28, 2024, from 6:30 – 8:30 PM, and in the afternoon on Friday, March 29, 2024 from 3:00 – 5:00 PM. The series builds off the duo’s social practice, which includes working with invasive species, making charcoal, community-led sciences, permaculture and studying the places where queerness and ecology meet.
This series of workshops invites participants into studio-based explorations where the artists are encouraging the tangling of different elements of their creative and physical disciplines. The goal of this commingling is to create a new vernacular with which to carry the ongoing dialogue on grief, futility, anxiety, movement, and rupture that lives in the roots of their collaborative practice.
Interested participants are encouraged to attend all four workshops, but attendance at all sessions is not required. The workshop is open to emerging and professional artists, and those interested in social practice, plants and the environment, and experimentation with materials and movement.
All sessions take place at the Oxygen Art Centre facility, located at #3-320 Vernon Street, Nelson, B.C. via alleyway entrance. Accessibility notes can be found on the artist-run centre’s website.
Registrants will receive additional information about locations, how to prepare, and materials to bring, at least one-week before the workshop series begins.
To register to attend any or all workshop sessions, and to learn more information about the workshop and the artists, please visit Oxygen’s website. Registration fees are based on a sliding scale from $10 to $20 per workshop or $30 for all four workshops with an option to pay it forward for another person to attend.
“Between Futility and Future” is a contemporary art workshop series facilitated by visiting artists Alexis Hogan and Chris Dufour at Oxygen Art Centre from March 26, 2024, to March 29, 2024. More information available via Oxygen’s website and social media. The deadline to register is March 18, 2024, by 12:00 PM Midnight via Google form.
This program is generously supported by the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance.
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Image Credit: (L) Alexis Hogan, (R) Chris Dufour, Courtesy the Artists, 2023.
Press Contact:
Julia Prudhomme
Executive Director
Oxygen Art Centre
250-551-6329
Artist Bio:
As a duo, Hogan and Dufour have collaborated since 2019 via social & studio practices that are driven by community collaboration, political & queer ecologies, and material practice as a site for both co-regulation and inquiry. In 2022, thoughtful integration of two multi-year projects, Dufour’s 6,000 sq foot permaculture partnership with Artemis Secondary School, and Hogan’s lichen programming space, culminated in the pair’s first exhibition, ‘with busy hands’, supported by Canada Council for the Arts.
Alexis Hogan (she/her) is a queer white settler with Indigenous heritage (Irish & Quebecois on her mom’s side and Irish and Anishinaabe from Sharbot Lake, Ontario on her dad’s). Alexis was born in Indonesia, grew up in Saudi Arabia and has lived as an uninvited guest, on T’Souke, Scia’new, Lkwungen, and W̱SÁNEĆ territories off and on for the past 24 years. She holds a BFA in Visual Arts (2015) from Emily Carr University of Art and Design with a focus in printmaking, sculpture and critical, cultural theory.
Alexis currently works through the project lichen, which seeks to model its namesake in its capacity for transformation and collaboration; it is a mobile programming and gathering space that is designed to be responsive to place-based and ecologically-centred art practices and communities. Her practice with and through lichen is driven by collaborative partnership, and tends to focus on site-specific projects, social practice, sculpture and print media.
Chris Dufour is an interdisciplinary social practice artist working between Kanien’kehá:ka and Lekwungen territory. Their work seeks to intersperse explorations of ecology, (non)belonging, and relation within queerness, gender, and climate apocalypse and survival. Chris’ work focuses on social and community engaged practices that have incorporated collaborative projects in ecological stewardship, encounters for relation, and broader community building. Chris uses mediums of plants, gardening, ecological wandering, textiles, installation, darkroom manipulation, leather tanning, and sculpture to process questions of how do we cultivate a sense of belonging within and among systemic power dynamics? How do we push against empire while cultivating resilient communities and cultures of care? What practices of living can we recuperate, develop, and employ within contemporary cultures of crisis?
Of Irish and Quebecois heritage, Chris grew up outside of Kjipuktuk (so called Halifax, Nova Scotia) and has spent the last 8 years working and living across many territories on Turtle Island. After attending the Yukon School of Visual Arts, Chris took on a practice of grassroots learning that brought them to social practice, permaculture, and accessible community-based education. Throughout, Chris values projects which seek to utilize material practices as a facilitator, to process connections and relationships to ecologies, modalities of care, alternative futures, and ruminations about world building.–
Julia Prudhomme (she/her)
Executive Director / oxygen art centre
info@oxygenartcentre.org
#3 – 320 Vernon St. Alley Entrance
Nelson, British Columbia , V1L 4E4
Tel: 250 551 6329
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 Sylix, Ktuxana, and Yaqan Nukij Lower Kootenay Band peoples are also connected with this land, as are Métis and many diverse Indigenous persons.