Artist-led Cohort Residencies
Artist-led cohort residencies are thematic residencies that explore learning and making in cohort models. For the 2025 season, the artist-led cohort model reflected a mentorship model, with mentorships led by Ramey Newell, Jay Pahre, and Jay White and attended by two mentee artists for reach residency. In 2026, we are shifting to an artist-led cohort model, with three artists joining an artist lead at the residency. This is a period for artists to develop their practice, engage in conversation and research, and collectively think through intersections in their practices and ways of working.
2025 Mentorship Residencies are generously supported by the BC Arts Council.
2026 Artist-led Cohort Residencies
Fielding Abstraction - painting and drawing - blurring the lines with Mark Dicey
May 29 - June 12, 2026
Is abstraction a big part of your practice? Is your work in abstraction planned, spontaneous, intuitive and/or improvised? What influences your work?
This residency will support your personal investigation into abstraction in your practice, and where it can be rigorously developed through discussion, dedicated studio time, and reflection. We will consider why we are drawn to abstraction, and how considering our own personal journey, and the complex history of abstraction can be both integral and inspiring in our practice.
A studio practice is an intense, thoughtful process vital to rigorously pursuing your work. This residency period is an opportunity for you to continue your practice, along with input from the residency cohort you are a part of. While time in the studio may be mostly solo, we will collectively think through the ideas, questions, and persistent concepts at work in our practices. Time at the Empire of Dirt is focused time to reflect on your practice and converse with others in a natural setting. Outside of the bounds of an institution, this is an opportunity to ask and reflect on what your practice is doing, and how you are engaged in your practice, on your own time and terms.
Mark Dicey is a practicing visual artist living in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Active in the city’s art scene throughout his over 40-year career, Dicey has pursued painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, installation, music, teaching, and curating. Collaboration has been a strong part of Dicey’s career running parallel to his personal practice; working with various artist groups in all of these areas. Currently, Dicey works collaboratively primarily with the drawing trio “Drunken Paw” (MD, Leslie Sweder and Janet Turner). Dicey has worked and volunteered in the arts community through artist-run centres, various boards, teaching, and working as an art technician. Mark Dicey’s work is represented in private and corporate collections throughout Canada and abroad.
Hot & Dry: Crackling Images of the Present with Alejandro a. Barbosa
July 24th - August 7, 2026
In the digital present, photography and video are dry practices that consume materials to store and expend energy in the endeavour of producing images. Energy is then an indispensable consumable; yet an excessive flow of energy equals a sudden halt to the camera's operability. What do digital images offer toward thinking through the times we inhabit? How do images contribute to the persistence or erosion of what is deemed im/possible or in/evitable in the present?
Hot & Dry: Crackling Images of the Present invites applicants who are interested in exploring the intersection of heat and dryness both literally and metaphorically in the pursuit of an understanding of the relevance of lens-based image-making in torrid times.
Alejandro A. Barbosa (they/he) is a 2SLGBTQIA+ latinx visual artist born in Argentina who lives and works on the unceded territories of the sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, and the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Band. Alejandro’s practice focuses on lens-based media and investigates the flaws of representation, queer lived experience, and the politics of looking. Alejandro holds an MFA in visual art from the University of British Columbia, and a BFA in photography from Concordia University, and they are Non-regular Faculty at Emily Carr University of Art + Design since 2023. In 2025 Barbosa presented their projects I Got Us the Moon at The Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, and Unsavoury Witness at SUM Gallery in Vancouver. Their work has been exhibited and collected in Canada, Argentina, Peru, and the United States.
2025 Artist-led Cohort Residencies
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.