2021 Zoom Project Producer for Bill Burns with Co-Collaborators in Argentina. In late March 2020, Bill Burns returned from Argentina, where he was working on a project alongside artist and poet contributors in Buenos Aires and Charjari. This project has now pivoted, and the collaborative work is currently taking place over Zoom, Instagram and WhatsApp. The project will be presented as an online Zoom performance in Fall 2021, which will include an unboxing video, poems about donkeys being read, a discussion between the contributing artists, video compilations of Charjari, as seen on a bicycle ride during the early morning, along with photo documentation of large-scale posters Bill printed before he left Buenos Aires that have now been installed around the city. The performance will be hosted by the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan.
2021 Exhibition Host + Community Facilitator for Jill Downen, Truth Speak, as part of Terrain Biennial. Terrain Exhibitions is a Biennial that decentralizes art, moving it away from galleries and conventional exhibition spaces and into everyday residential neighbourhoods. For the 2021 edition, I am working with the Kansas City artist Jill Downen to install her work in my neighbourhood—a vulnerable, under-served, high-density community. Her ink drawings based on soundwaves from people telling their Truth will be printed on vinyl and wrapped around the nine-foot light posts in the exterior courtyards of three apartment buildings.
2021 Project Producer for Bill Burns, The Salt, the Milk, the Goats, the Honey, the Donkey. This project is a happening that took place in October 2021 at the Oculus Pavilion along the South Humber River in Toronto. This multi-faceted event included a parade of brass band players who performed songs about milk and honey as they walked along a path through the forest until they reach the site. Surrounding the modernist pavilion, four goats were present along with their keeper and one of them was milked. There was a honey rendering demonstration and two donkeys were also part of the festivities with their minder and an MC who will enthusiastically engaged the public. Under the architectural gem, Bill Burns mixed the milk and honey on a small bunsen burner. This event is part of a series of educational and artistic works about trade economies and food production that Bill Burns has been developing for several years. You can read more about the project on ART-AGENDA.
2021 Ceramics and Pit Firing Workshop, Facilitator, O:se Kenhionhata:tie Land Back Camp. O:se Kenhionhata:tie is a Land Back Camp—they are a group of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer individuals (primarily young people) reclaiming culture, space and land with settler allies, standing strong together. I was brought onto this project by Logan Macdonald, an Indigenous professor at the University of Waterloo, who had wanted to provide a creative series of workshops for the campers. As a co-facilitator, I reached out to Shawna Redskye, a ceramicist and Kelsey Dawson, a clay researcher. Her practice includes harvesting wild clay and exploring our environmental relationship with the soil in various regions. Together we hosted a ceramic making workshop with commercial and wild clays from across the territory and another workshop a few weeks later where we dug out a pit and fired the ceramics pieces in the ground.
2021-2023 Student Links. Visual Arts Mentorship through Community Living Ontario. Student Links is a provincial initiative of Community Living Ontario, a non-profit provincial association that advocates for people who have an intellectual disability to be fully included in all aspects of community life. This program assists high school students with an intellectual disability to consider various possibilities for their future by exploring their identified area of interest. I work as a volunteer with Jenay (over Zoom) once a week for a year-long commitment. We discuss and research contemporary artists, do weekly live drawing together, and I help to connect her to programs and introduce her to artists in my community. We are working towards a two-person painting exhibition in June 2022 at Artscape Weston Common Hub in Toronto.
2018 Visiting artist and Coordinator for Kids Fest, which took place at Giant Steps School for Tangled Art + Disability. Giant Steps is a school & therapy centre that builds the skills and abilities of children with autism through academics, specialized therapies, life skills and inclusion. This role included coordinating and reporting to funders, project budgeting, program development and providing a series of workshops over a 3-month period. The festival concluded with a fully accessible exhibition at Tangled Art + Disability Gallery, 401 Richmond St. W, Toronto.
2017 Associate Producer for Abedar Kamgari’s durational performance-for-video The Journey West. The performance retells her experience as a refugee and immigrant. The 87km walk between Toronto and Hamilton covers the land between her two adoptive hometowns.
2017 Coordinator for Tangled Art + Disability’s Kids Fest. The program led by Luca ‘Lazylegz’ Patuelli worked with students at Monsignor Percy Johnson Catholic High School and James Cardinal McGuigan Catholic High School. Students workshopped weekly with hip hop dancers to collaborate in creating a choreographed performance. The routine was presented at an interactive school assembly with a cohort of special guests.
2016 Producer for Big Pond Small Fish, The Great Chorus at the Royal Ontario Museum. Big Pond Small Fish is a not-for-profit organization that promotes and disseminates conceptually rigorous works of art, publications and performances by children and youth through the Dogs & Boats & Airplanes Choir. I acted as the project’s producer between the Royal Ontario Museum team and Lord Lansdowne and da Vinci Alternative Public Schools in Toronto. Under the leadership of Bill Burns, choral director Alan Gasser, librettist Krys Verrall, the children met weekly to create a choral repertoire that consists of sounds inspired by their research from visits to the backroom collections where they worked alongside the scientists at the Royal Ontario Museum. The final event saw the student perform music they wrote that responded to four galleries within the museum, along with outdoor components.