My focus as an artist is to create environmental art that roots nature into our everyday urban experience. I work across diverse mediums, blending textile arts, natural materials, performance, photography, and most recently film, to create ephemeral installations and social interventions.
Sam Rose Phillips is a filmmaker and writer based in Yuułuʔiłʔatḥ Territory. She focuses her lens on human-wildlife stories and their ecological & cultural significance to coastal communities. Sam specializes in off-grid, remote storytelling both from land and on the water, spending the first 5 years of her career as a one-woman film crew. Framing narratives alongside NGOs like Conservancy Hornby Island, Sea Shepherd, North Coast Cetacean Society, Clayoquot Action, and Cetus Research & Conservation Society, has instilled in
her a dedication to ethical filmmaking practices and communicating with clarity. She is currently directing a documentary about coexisting with wildlife.
Lou Sheppard works in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation based practice. His work is often responsive, investigating the material and discursive contexts of a site and their affect on bodies and environments. His research is often evidenced through graphic notations, scripts and scores which are then performed in collaboration with other artists and in community gatherings. Lou’s recent projects include Phase Variations, an exploration of queer archives, The Exquisite Corpse, a meditation on post human worlding, and I Want To Be a Seashell…, responding to the Dalhousie Arts Centre with collaborator Will Robinson.
Beau Wagner is an artist and woodworker who began carving as a young child. He lived for five years with a teacher from Sztuminus, who every day provided him with Snawayalth and knowledge of our connections to wood and the wilderness. This carving teacher, who cannot be named during the period of mourning, as is Salish custom, understood these relationships as sacred. He told Beau a story about their family travelling to Fraser River to fish and visit with relatives while there. More importantly, in terms of his family history, he told Beau that he too was a relative. Today, there are very few carvers who have been taken under a senior carver’s wings to receive daily teachings about life and our relationships to all living things.
We are an integral part of nature’s delicate and beautiful balance. Through several of my drawing series I have sought to represent that balance, between the landscape and myself. This includes the disruption of that balance and its effect. These series were called “LAND_BODY”, “When Water Falls” and “-by length and by depth- “.
As a visual artist I am ever conscious about the materials I use in my practice. I am currently working towards choosing more natural materials that can be used and reused, and eventually be naturally returned to the earth without disruption.
Joyce’s work examines connection to place/north and the natural world. Past careers as a biologist and wilderness adventure guide in the Yukon Territory, Canada have augmented and contributed to her artistic practice and taken her to remote wild spaces in the north and elsewhere. She is a keen observer and collector of objects, fascinated by the complex intricacy and interdependence between ecosystems and all living beings.
François Michaud combines sculpture, painting and installation to create artworks that focus on environmental issus arising from man’s interaction with nature. In his works, the animal is a caricature of our emotions, aspirations and ambitions, he becomes an iconic and anthropomorphic allegory of who we are, and the manufactured objects (chair, boat, etc) symbolically represent man’s presence. His pictorial and sculptural approaches have evolved with his environmental concerns related to climate change. His narrative representations raise questions with a poetic and tragic touch of derision and delusion. Michaud often paints animals in a red boat, symbolizing climate refugees, nomads in search of new territories or transporting their habitat to a better world; the red boat sailing in troubled water on rising seas.
Yo is an installation artist, community arts facilitator, and art director out of Montréal/Tiohtià:ke. Rooted in land and fiber arts, she forages, sources and needle felts natural materials into large scale creations. Yo’s Nomadic Nest installation and performance series contemplates constructs and concepts of home, territory, security, migration, and movement. The act of cocooning herself and others in these giant nest-like ephemeral creations aims to comfort, confront and ultimately connect its inhabitants to a deeper sense of belonging (to the land, to themselves, to the world outside the warmth of these deciduous homes). These unique pieces and immersive experiences serve as a reminder to her and others to tread lightly on the land.
Kelly Andres is a research based artist of settler origin. She has produced installations, performances and sensorial experiences that blend cosmologies and ecologies. Andres recently completed a practice based Ph.D in Fine Arts at Concordia University, Montréal, titled Radicle Assemblages (2020). Her current research intertwines ecological art practices, plant studies, performative placemaking, co-creative community/urban planning, and experiential approaches for multi-species interactions. Recent exhibitions include Particle + Wave, Calgary, Les yeux dans l’eau, Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop University in Sherbrooke, Sandstone City, The Lougheed House, Calgary, The Garden of Speculations, articule, Montréal, le Centre des arts actuels Skol, Montréal, La Maison des arts de Laval, Laval. Andres’s past work has been generously supported by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.
The Jasper Community Habitat for the Arts opened its doors on July 1st 2016.
This is Jaspers’ first dedicated community space for exploring the arts, any of its disciplines, and for all ages. A place to share expertise, experience something new or be entertained.
The space was designed, from its inception, to be one that could accommodate the arts and artists who would be using the spaces. When we were invited to sit with the architects in 2011 we had no real idea of the light, the wood, the concrete, and how they would work together in making something so truly unique.
The Climate Art Web (CAW-WAC) is a grassroots network that brings together climate artists living in northern Turtle Island (Canada).
