negotiating: sticky sites of affection & infection, influence & inheritance, obligation & commitment, encounter & entanglement, dreaming & waking, inside & outside, you & me, us & we

riding: the breath of that common wind

thinking: about recent or upcoming projects & sustained conversations with artists: Leeay Aikawa, Amanda Boulos, Helen Cho, Derek Coulombe, Patrick Cruz, Liza Eurich, Brendan Flanagan, FASTWÜRMS, Stefana Fratila, Maggie Groat, Jessica Groome, KikoSounds, Faith La Rocque, Katie Lyle, Colin Miner, Tegan Moore, Sarah Nasby, Claudia Rick, Erica Stocking, Ella Tetrault, Dustin Wilson; curators/writers: John Goodwin, Jacqueline Mabey, Lillian O’Brien Davis, Daniella Sanader, Sunny Kerr

working: on Moire--a digital artist-run publisher--at our own, unhurried pace

teaching: as artistic practice to radically reimagine relation and communication via play, thought-experiments, (witch)craft, dreams, sustained mentorship, study/writing-groups, and collaborations that generate collectivist modes of participation

living: in Saskatoon on Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis. I recognize the violence that makes my presence on these lands possible, while feeling thankful for the refuge my Slavic ancestors found here. Within these words, I pronounce my personal responsibility to confront the enduring impacts of colonialism and that a statement like this is never enough

reflecting: upon how I was raised an hour from the city recently-named Vancouver on the unceded territories of Coast Salish Peoples-specifically the Kwantlen|qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓, Katzie|q̓ic̓əy̓, Semiahmoo|SEMYOME, and Tsawwassen|sc̓əwaθən məsteyəxʷ Nations

rangling: miwwi & mooni

Links:
edm.garden
Professional CV 
Moire.ca
Mystictruths.org

Their writing has been published by numerous outlets (esse magazine, CMagazine, Public Journal, Momus, among others) and their work has been exhibited across Canada, the United States, China, the Philippines, and Europe, having been shaped by residencies in Tambopata National Reserve, Peru; Bergen, Norway; Berlin, Germany; Banff, Alberta (Treaty 7 Territory); and Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Quebec. Alongside Liza Eurich and Colin Miner, they co-edit the publishing project Moire.ca and serve on the board of directors for Peripheral Review.

I was raised within a community whose practices of existence (ontology) and systems of knowledge (epistemology) were made possible through material curiosity, technical ingenuity, physical labour, and persistent bindings of communal obligations through acts of giving and receiving care—craftspeople. Their tools are my tools. Their craft, my craft. Their art, my art. Their attention, my survival.

In this image, I come to teaching as a core component of artistic practice that enables an exchange of understanding and experience. Not just as a method for sharing knowledge and skills, although this is a critical component—but more, as a radical space to reconceptualize relations and communication. For this aim, I use imagination, gamified activities, sustained mentorship, and collaboration to nourish collectivist modes of participation in conjunction with an extensive vocabulary in critical theory, curatorial-studies, studio-practice, and art-history—all of which I work to expand beyond a Western cultural frame.

As an interdisciplinary artist and educator, I urge students to explore how meaning is given and received through both form and action. My primary ambition for students is to motivate a sense of critical curiosity—to become deeply interested in the world’s material details, while understanding how this interest is shaped and expressed. With every activity, I work to facilitate students transition from passive learners to active participants who are intrinsically driven, rather than extrinsically motivated. My teaching style draws upon the students’ and my own multifaceted subject positions. This provides a horizontal, student-centered learning environment that establishes adaptable learning objectives which encompass specified capacity and experience. By designing challenging, yet supportive curriculum, I have found that learners are able to move to more complex forms of thinking that synthesize various knowledge systems.

My teaching philosophy is guided by Sol Lewitt’s “First Sentence on Conceptual Art… 

Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

Elizabeth Grosz’ description of concepts in “The Future of Feminist Theory: Dreams for New Knowledges”… 

We need concepts in order to think our way in a world of forces we do not control. Concepts are not a means of control, but forms of address that carve out for us a space and time in which we may become capable of responding to the indeterminate particularity of events. Concepts are thus a way of addressing the future, and in this sense are the conditions under which a future different from the present—the very goal of every radical politics—becomes possible. Concepts are not premonitions, ways of predicting what will be; on the contrary, they are modes of enactment of new forces; they are themselves the making of the new.

& Paul Chan’s explanation of Art in his essay, “A Time Apart”… 

Art is art when what is made unmakes itself in the making, and realizes, in barely recognizable form, the discordant truth of living life.

Imagine a relay runner handing a baton to another runner then another and yet another. Instantly, the feeling of grasping a thing and the tangibility of sweat and chalk is given and received. Object and subject rub against one another, conferring awareness, meaning, and knowledge. As she runs, she breathes heavy and deep, inhaling the world—grass, exhaust, humidity—while exhaling her own damp interiority. Over and over, she turns inside-out and outside-in. The runner is engaged in an emergent process, a sensational affair, an accrued composition that enables becoming-with. Likewise, my practice pursues relays as assemblies of contact and exchange through sculptural processes capable of making and unmaking malleable materials.

Working primarily in sculpture, my research develops through encounters across specific terrains— from urban pollinator gardens of Berlin and Toronto; to dense rainforests of Tambopata, Peru and Sloth Island, Guyana; and intertidal zones of Bergan, Norway and Quebec, Canada. Following a consistent methodology, my work finds form through sculptural gestures (pouring, covering, building, and hanging) combined with easily accessible materials (papier-mâché, used clothing, common vegetation, salt-dough, wax, composite clay, found objects) to make visible certain obscurities—an abstract thought, a kind of feeling, those half-remembered dreams, some elusive site, or the transience of social space. And while many of these sculptures resemble something nebulous or amorphous, others form recognizable shapes: buckets, chairs, t-shirts, slabs of floor, single socks, a pair of shoes, assorted pillows, and objects that might be described as aliens. As one body of work makes way for another, the previous sculptures tend to melt back into their environment only to reform again at another time & place, as something similar but somewhat different. In this way, the preceding works are both present and absent from whatever current works are under production. Instead of negating past-progress, the work allows for methods of active inclusion and reincorporation.

Supported by sustained practice as an artist, I recently completed my doctoral dissertation, titled “We Change Everything We Touch and Everything We Touch Changes,” which developed a conceptual framework for “Extimate Aesthetics”—an articulation of aesthetics registering the ontological inseparability of exterior-objective forces with interior-subjective experience. To question the distinctions between surface as exterior objective reality and depth as interior subjective experience, I drew upon the vast, expressive potential of beds in their many forms, human and otherwise (coral-beds, death-beds, flower-beds, fossil-beds, river-beds, sedimentary-rock-beds, sleeping-beds). Like breath, the bed is a familiar found object, a place we simultaneously lie both in and on. Qualities of horizontality and support draw these topics together, but also a certain nondistinction between surface and depth, exterior and interior, which reminds us that when we are in-the-bed we lie on-the-bed.

Applying the logic of collage, the project encompassed personal narrative, art history, psychology, ecology, and sleep science (among other topics) to ask—What forms (in their many forms) do beds make it possible to imagine? What grows from their fertile soil? What weird wanderings does a drowsy mind follow? What does a tired and/or sick body deem important or irrelevant? What conventions undo themselves when lying prone, released from the vertical “I”—the upright standing I, the individual I, the restless I, the I who scans the horizon in search of somewhere else; when we are in a hammock, a burrow, a mat in the corner, some warm patch of grass, or soft sand, where we cannot be blown down by the storms of history because we are already hugging the earth, settled by gravity’s pull, dreaming the world into existence. What then? What thoughts? What emotions? What sensations and perceptions? What possibilities? What strange affinities nestle into and around us?

Current research is grounded in the ethical obligations and constraints of contemporary land-based-practices, sculptural and otherwise. Like the social and environmental upheavals of the 1960s and 70s that expanded contemporary art beyond the gallery and into the landscape, our current period of massive change has initiated a desire for radical refigurings of artistic practice. However, in contradiction to land-art’s problematic aspects, contemporary artists (myself included) demonstrate a progressive concern for the social, ecological, and decolonial politics of land use. My work in this field considers ambitious artist-driven collaborations that negotiate artistic production as forms of environmental activism. A primary aim for this research is to demonstrate how these practices offer an immanent argument for extimacy as a subjective, material, and political counterweight to the dominance of extractivism in its refusal of relational imbrication.

Since I often bear an exterior perspective to the environments within which I work/exhibit, the politics of social engagement are critical, and my practice is shaped by initiating reading/discussion groups, workshops, and collaborative writing projects. A notable example includes Moire, a digital publication I co-founded in 2012 with artists Colin Miner and Liza Eurich that supports expanded artistic practice.

PhD, Visual Arts, School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design, York University (2023)

MFA, School of Fine Art & Music, University of Guelph (2013)

BFA, Art History/Visual Art Department, University of British Columbia (2007)