Mentorship Residencies
Mentorship Residencies are artist-led thematic residencies that explore learning and making in cohort models. For the 2025 season, two emerging mentee artists will join a mentor artist at the residency for a 2-week period to develop their practice, engage in conversation and research, and collectively think through intersections in their practices and ways of working.
The 2025 program will include three Emerging Artist Residencies with Ramey Newell, Jay Pahre, and Jay White. The Open Call is active, with a deadline of November 15th, 2024 for submission. Learn more on the Emerging Artist Mentorship Residencies page, or download the PDF call.
2025 Mentorship Residencies are generously supported by the BC Arts Council.
Trans Ecologies with Jay Pahre
May 30th – June 14th, 2025
Open Studios June 11, 2025 from 6-7:30 PM
What do trans ecologies look like? What does they smell like, taste like, sound like, feel like? How can trans ecologies impact how we think about and think through artistic practice, place, and belonging? This residency will consider the textures and sensations related to trans ecologies in artistic practices, and is open to emerging trans, 2S, non-binary, and gender non-conforming artists working across any mediums.
Mentor:
Jay Pahre is a queer and trans settler artist, writer, and cultural worker currently based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ peoples. His work engages trans and queer ecologies, interspecies collaboration, and place in the context of settler colonialism. He has attended residencies at the Western Front, Banff Centre and Minong (Isle Royale National Park). His work has been exhibited across the US and Canada at traditional galleries and community spaces, and his writing has been published in academic journals and comic anthologies.
Mentees:
Kylie Fineday is an emerging nehiyaw (Plains Cree) artist and curator from Sweetgrass First Nation, Saskatchewan. Kylie completed the BFA-Art Studio program at the University of Lethbridge in 2020 with great distinction, an honours thesis, and the Faculty of Fine Arts Gold Medal, and is now an MFA candidate at the University of Victoria. Kylie’s art practice often focuses on themes of personal identity and family history, as well as addressing social and environmental issues and injustices, particularly those affecting Indigenous communities within Canada. Kylie’s material practice is multidisciplinary, and includes drawing, photography, performance, sculpture, textiles such as sewing and beadwork, as well as engaging with natural materials. Fineday has exhibited work in various institutions in Alberta, and has been involved in curatorial projects across Canada.
Ardyn Gibbs is a Queer and Trans, Settler-Indigenous (Mohawk) Artist, Designer and Arts Worker located on the territories of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, and the Mississauga's of the Credit First Nation otherwise known as Hamilton, Ontario. Using digital new media technologies Ardyn’s work explores the themes of Queer Futurity, Digital Dreaming and Visibility/Legibility of Queer bodies in public spaces. They are a recent graduate of McMaster University’s Studio Arts Program (B.F.A.) with a Minor in Community Engagement. Ardyn is passionate about collective dreaming, place keeping and fostering meaningful connections. Their work is constantly shifting, adapting and growing with the world around them.
Relationships with Ancestry, Land, and Grief with Jay White
August 1st – August 16th, 2025
Where are we from, and how did we arrive where we are now? How does it feel to have gaps in our personal histories? In feeling grief and discomfort around our past, how are we better able to heal and grow, and deal with the present in an authentic and transformative way? How can our practices adjust towards kindness, and better accommodate our unique individual needs? How can we be humbled and grateful for our dependence on others (human and otherwise), and have that present in our work? This residency will create and hold space for artists to consider these questions collectively and in their own practices.
Mentor:
Jay White is an illustrator, sequential artist, storyteller, animator and art instructor living on Nex̱wlélex̱wm Bowen Island, BC Canada. His animated short films have won awards internationally.
Mentees:
Chantal Gering’s practice gestures towards collective liberation through community movement improvisations, interspecies collaborations, ritual, sound, and poetry. They organize through a few artist collectives: Shapeshifter Media Collective, Queer Soul Poets, and Liberated Planet Studios. They have recently written a piece 'Seed Stories: Dreaming Beyond Latin America' and have researched, performed and created pieces in many festival and spaces: Vines Arts Festival, Future Leisure, Still Moon Arts, The Frank Theatre, Boca Del Lupo, National Theatre School, Ignite Youth Festival, Blackout Theatre, Ruby Slippers Theatre, Runaway Moon Theatre, The Only Animal, Lobe Studio, The Training Society, UBC, The Birdhouse, and the Push Festival. Currently they are dancing through EDAM's scholarship for contact improvisation, co-creating a piece Gay Ancestors in the STAND festival, and premiering ‘before transforming we exist’ in the FORM festival.
Anélia Victor is a Toronto based mixed media textile artist. They revisit the methods and discourses from the past to better innovate a new trajectory for the future to give life through texture and feel, to give people a vision of the future. They rely on the act of re/membering; talking and feeling the body in the present about the past and the connections to self and others. They create art pieces with used and new textiles as a primary material with mixed media such as natural plants and flowers, natural dyes, paint, discarded and dry food, photographs and found items to create collages, sculptures, and installations. Their work seeks to explore the depths of their own identity and culture to tell stories that have been forgotten or tucked away and bring it into the light. Their founding themes are identity, herbalism and Africanfuturism with a focus on Black & Queer Histories, Caribbean textile history, textile sustainability, food cultivation and access from farming to cooking.
Asymmetries of the Anthropocene with Ramey Newell
August 17th – September 1st, 2025
The idea of the Anthropocene is a sign for an extremely troubled and infinitely complex present – an age in which myriad anthropogenic, biomorphic, and geomorphic forces coalesce, converge, and collide to generate networked causes and effects that are massively distributed across time and space. It is an age of climate change, mass extinction, and urgent uncertainty at planetary scale that in many ways demands a paradoxical dual consciousness. This residency encourages artists to explore how the intimate act of artmaking might generate possibility space and open new ways of “staying with the trouble” of our era.
Mentor:
As both an artist and filmmaker, Ramey Newell is interested in issues relating to ecology and mass extinction, deep time, scientific epistemologies, climate change, anthropocentrism and human/non-human relations, cultural mythologies of the American West, and the expectations of documentary image. Newell works in both moving and still image media, digital and analog, and often incorporates biologic, geologic, and/or chemical materials and processes.
Mentees:
Forouzan Afrouzi is a visual artist with a BA and MA in Fine Arts from the University of Tehran. Over the past decade, her practice has focused on biomorphic forms created with natural materials, particularly textiles, exploring themes of the human body’s impermanence. Her work primarily spans sculpture and drawing. In recent years, Afrouzi has expanded her practice to research and develop bio-plastics—an ecofriendly alternative to traditional plastics—motivated by her environmental concerns. She is dedicated to promoting sustainable materials in art, seeking to replace harmful substances like resin and petroleum-based adhesives with biodegradable options.
Tanya Yeomans is a geospatial scientist who uses textile art and digital media to investigate the relationships between technology, the environment, and personal experience. As a geographer, her practice is often site-specific, engaging directly with place to inform her work. She works with both textile and digital mediums, including embroidery, knitting, and hand-dyeing fabric with locally foraged materials, as well as drone imagery, Geographic Information Systems, and game design. She is interested in how arts-based methods and scientific knowledge can co-create rich and complicated understandings of place.