2023 Creatives in Residence
Ontario Culture Days are excited to welcome its fourth lineup of residents in the 2023 Creatives in Residence program. Each year, Creatives work within communities, and across artistic disciplines, to develop new work for the fall Festival. The 2023 Creatives in Residence cohort is inspired by themes of material culture.
Alisa McRonald
Based in Guelph
Alisa McRonald is a contemporary textile artist who experiments with themes of folklore, fables and the esoteric. For her residency, Alisa will create colourful, contemporary punch-needle wall-hangings and host an exhibition of these wall-hangings. She will facilitate a large-scale collective art piece during the 2023 Queen West Art Crawl that takes place during the Ontario Culture Days Festival. Here art lovers will be invited to learn the art of punch-needling on-site and to contribute to this collaborative art piece.
Betty Carpick
Based in Thunder Bay
Betty Carpick is a multidisciplinary land-based artist, educator, and environmentalist, who offers stewardship of land and water shaped by her Cree and Eastern European heritage. Through a series of workshops and photographs, Betty will bring together hundreds of ink marks made by participants to “form patterns in a galaxy”. The resulting composition will be presented as an outdoor installation in Thunder Bay during the Ontario Culture Days Festival, alongside an artist talk at CoLab Gallery.
Chelsea Smith
Based in Temiskaming
Chelsea Smith is an artist of mixed European and Anishinaabe descent from Northern Ontario. Chelsea will grow her own plants to create dye, which she will use to tint natural fabric. The fabric will then be made into a traditional hand-tied quilt through a series of community quilting and story sharing sessions. The artist will exhibit the resulting artwork and host an artist talk and participatory workshop, inviting attendees to experiment on paper with natural pigments created by the artist.
Juliane Foronda
Based in Toronto
Juliane Foronda (based in Toronto) is a Filipina-Canadian artist, writer, and researcher. During her residency, she will research the board game archive at Ottawa’s Canadian Museum of History. From there, she will create a text-based installation scattering extracted board game phrases throughout the city of Ottawa. Through this, the city becomes similar to a game itself, with the public as participants. A complementary artist talk and interactive event will take place during the Festival.
Kevin A. Ormsby
Based in Toronto
Kevin A. Ormsby, along with KasheDance, will draw from Pan-Africanist based movement and host the ‘Kultcha Live Yah’ series at Citadel + Compagnie during the Festival. The series includes in-person and online workshops leading up to a final performance, which will feature a spectrum of dancers performing against a backdrop of digital artwork. The series is part of the organization’s 15th anniversary celebration that will incorporate dancers and the general public.
Mushtari Afroz
Based in Pickering
Mushtari Afroz is a classical dancer trained in the North Indian classical dance form called ‘Kathak,’ and is director of the Kathak Bandi Dance Collective. For her project, Mushtari will work with dancers to surprise and engage the audience through a series of dance performances that will interact with Pickering’s public spaces and invite public participation. The project will raise awareness of the importance of these shared spaces as gathering points and places of pride within diverse communities.
Myung-Sun Kim
Based in Toronto
Myung-Sun Kim is an artist and a recognized curator. She will be creating a new edition of a larger body of work called ‘Rituals for Belonging’, in which she invites artists across cultural backgrounds to exchange an art object and an associated ritual. For the Festival, she will create an installation where participants will be invited to an in-person sharing of food-related rituals that center around the practices of joy, desire, and belonging.
Owen Marshall
Based in Toronto
Owen Marshall is an artist and printmaker who examines the way text and signage influence the surrounding environment. He will present a series of stitched flags which use humour to challenge and undermine the perceived authority of signage. The works will be presented on flagpoles throughout the Queen West neighbourhood, so that viewers may accidentally stumble upon them. In partnership with the Queen West Art Crawl, the artist will provide a series of informative and performative guided tours of the works in this neighbourhood.
These programs would not be possible without the support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of Ontario, the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund and the Toronto Arts Council.The Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund is a program of the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport, administered by the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund Corporation.
