Germaine Koh
University of British Columbia
“The products of fallow fields”
I will present three ongoing projects which look at what might arise when we slow down to reconsider systems of production. For Mound, a collaboration with Lou Sheppard, a pile of dirt is the subject of a year-long study around regeneration and commemoration. My production of clothing from gleaned, grown and recuperated fibres is an exercise in patient circularity. The Hemlock Micro Studio rural artist residency offers opportunities to undo certain expectations for productivity. The deliberate slowness of each of these create timespace to produce other conditions: friendship, mutual support, remediation and rematriation.
Germaine Koh is an artist/organizer who adapts familiar objects, everyday actions, and common spaces to consider communal experiences and the connections between people, technology, and natural systems. She received a 2023 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts and has recently served as a Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University and as the City of Vancouver’s first Engineering Artist in Residence. Beginning Fall 2024 she is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. Koh’s ongoing projects include the Home Made Home initiative to build and advocate for alternative forms of housing; the related Hemlock Micro Studio rural artist residency; and the League project focused on play as a form of creative practice. https://germainekoh.com
jake moore
University of Saskatchewan
Repeat after me, a round
Melodic utterances and choral structures that mirror or repeat swell into amplitudes that conflate spatial and temporal distinctions. Working alongside vocalic works of art like Lowlands from Susan Philipsz, Repeat After Me II, by the Open Group Collective, and Listening Air by Shilpa Gupta, i will examine the structures of rehearsal, reiteration, and echo within contemporary installation works whose sonic materiality resonates in ways that suggest human interconnection is ever known, fomented in indeterminacy (formed as loss and grief), that both drives resistance and asserts presence as something inherently collective.
jake moore is a neurodivergent intermedia artist whose primary medium is space and its occupation. She works at the intersection of material, gesture, text, and vocality to make exhibitions, events and other kinds of interventions public. Originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba on Treaty 1 Territory, she gained early art and life experience as the singer in the all-female punk rock band, The Ruggedy Annes; sonic potential has informed her practice ever since. Her investment in social and cultural practices has led to positions in organizations as varied in size and intention as MAWA (Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art) in Winnipeg, Studio XX in Montréal, and the FOFA Gallery at Concordia University with active feminist and decolonizing intentions. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University and the Director of University Art Galleries and Collections at the University of Saskatchewan on Treaty 6. She has exhibited nationally, at the Walter Phillips Gallery, Winnipeg Art Gallery, ace art inc., Plug IN ICA, MAC, Optica, Remai Modern plus, and her critical and creative writing has been published in C MAG, ESPACE, ESSE, Canadian Art, .dpi as well as many exhibition texts and catalogues. While moore considers her primary medium to be space and its occupation, this idea expands the understanding of her artistic practice to include her administrative projects and other acts of building capacity as a sculptural method, one of changing the form and volume of public spaces.
Sheri Osden Nault
Western University
of a tenuous I / now
The current ecological and social state of the world evokes great anxiety. We discover that the boundary between ‘I’, other(s), and the non-human is permeable, less locatable than it was supposed to have been. As this comprehension coalesces, the time and space I/you occupy shifts, seems to catch the light, disappears; a binding web of relations, sticky and unseen but felt; grasping us while we traverse wooded paths. Should we cultivate alternative ways of being, intimacy, sensitivity, and responsibility, through shared stories, relayed connections, and (perhaps) learn to attend to webs – rather than become tangled in surprise – I/we may come to know other bodies through their relation to our own. Through touch and gaze, hunger and digestion, light, scent, warmth, cyclically, seasons reveal themselves; parsed through innumerable shapeshifting beings that surround us. Noticing this, we might begin to replicate these rhythms – I find myself replicating these rhythms, in my day to day, as creative praxis; rhythmic being like breathing. Then, abruptly (it is recent, right?), I/you/we observe blandly, ‘every year the seasons seem less what we believed them to be.’ How, then, are we to breathe or be? With fingertips grazing the future, the edges of futurism are not out of grasp but present in concurrent moments, small like fallen seeds and thriving in crevices. ‘Now’, if it is the seemingly apocalyptic present, must be refused and the refuse salvaged. To do so, we must traverse the soft and indeterminate form of time; accept, understand, and enact living and creating as microcosms of being. Attempting to speak to the ecological, daunting, near-future and recent-past through the present; this paper traces research-creation; recollections of intimate moments between myself, others, and my environment; a set of patterns by which we might find my/your/our body, and ways of being, permeable.
Sheri Osden Nault is an artist, community worker, and Assistant Professor in Studio Art at the University of Western Ontario. Their work spans mediums including sculpture, performance, installation, and more; integrating cultural, social, and experimental creative processes. Through this, they consider embodied connections between human and non-human beings, land-based relationships, and kinship sensibilities as an Indigenous futurist framework. Methodologically, they prioritize tactile ways of knowing and learning from more than human kin. Their research engages anti-colonial, queer, Indigenous feminist, and ecological theory and praxis. They are also a tattooer in the Indigenous tattoo revival movement in so-called Canada, and run the annual community project, Gifts for Two-Spirit Youth.
