Artscape Gibraltar Point is proud to announce the official recipients of the Winter Island 2023 artist in residence.
After receiving a great deal of strong applications, our jury selected six artists for two week, and month-long residencies.
Read on to learn more about our selection below and find out how you can be a part of the unique and wonderful self-directed residency opportunities during Winter Island 2023.
A special thank you to the K.M. Hunter Charitable Foundation for their generous support. Without them we wouldn’t have been able to offer a record breaking eight residencies. We’d also like to thank our jurors Alicia Nauta, Alize Zorlutuna, Kristi Chen, and Suzanne Simon for their time and support.
Winter Island Artists 2023
Sadia Awan (Jan 16 – Feb 13)
Sadia Awan (they/ them) is a queer transdisciplinary artist whose practice traverses many realms, including the physical, the virtual, and the energetic. Their experimentations seek to articulate the enmeshment of internal phenomena with the tempo-spatial reality through video, installation, and sound.
Sadia recently presented an installation at Nuit Blanche TO exploring chimeric hybridization between the Self and the space it occupies. Visitors were encouraged to use their body as a navigational tool within the interactive multi-media projections. This cyborgian embodiment in an emancipatory digitized dimension highlighted the value in blending borders of defined categories.
During their time on the Islands, Sadia will delve into themes of hybridization, immanence, and fractals. They intend to document and evaluate environmental data using sound and the moving image. Much of visible reality remains obscured from us because our brains can only compute so much. In harnessing the computational power of synthesizers to process field recordings, Sadia aims to extend perceptual limitations beyond biological capacities.
Anélia Victor (Jan 30 – Feb 13)
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 and Queer Histories, Caribbean textile history, textile sustainability and food cultivation and access from farming to cooking.
They are a self-taught artist with a Bachelor of Honours in Communication Studies from York University and have received grants from the Ontario Art Council, Rising Youth, Platform A, Canada’s LGBT+ Chamber of Commerce.
Juliane Foronda (Feb 6 – March 6)
Juliane Foronda (she/her) is a Filipina-Canadian artist, writer, and organizer whose work is invested in radical care, feminist hospitality, and traditions of gathering. Her practice is marked with an investment in the relationship between architecture/space and emotion, focusing on how domestic practices shape our understanding in cultural, societal and political ways with their ability to preserve and decolonize. Predominantly through object, intervention, and text, she’s influenced by (found and fabricated) structures, built environments, and hidden labour. Her work negotiates how these notions play with the tension between reality and possibility, truth and imagination, and knowing and not knowing. Juliane holds a BA in Studio Art from the University of Guelph, and an MA in Fine Arts from Iceland University of the Arts/Listaháskóli Íslands. She is based in Toronto, CA and Glasgow, UK.
Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram (Feb 27 – March 27)
As a Métis environmental designer and artist, with roots in northern BC while growing up in a W̱SÁNEĆ (Salish) community near Victoria, I experiment with inter-cultural conversations around land, Indigenous ecological legacies, and contemporary Indigenous visual languages often in contested public space. Educated as a photographer (BFA San Francisco Art Institute) and then in early digital, environmental, and public art (PhD University of California College of Environmental Design) and with more than twenty solo and group exhibits, I work in a range of two and three-dimensional practices combining multimedia with outdoor and indoor, site-based works and performance —– along with field research and archives.. Based on ĆUÁN (Salt Spring Island) near where I grew up, I work in small collaboratives of artists and scientists on projects spanning traditional Indigenous knowledge, environmental science, and contemporary design and multimedia. In 2022 and 2023 with successive support from the Canada Council and the First Peoples’ Cultural Council, I am creating sculptures that are homages to Métis and Cree basket weaving used as scaffolding for projection of audio and video storytelling related to growing up as an Indigenous person in absurd intercultural tensions. These slow videos are to comprise a series entitled, “meditation4NDNs everbodywelcome.”
Atanas Bozdarov (March 20 – April 3)
Atanas Bozdarov is an artist and designer whose recent projects have explored structures and systems of accessibility; unnoticed conditions of disability and design; and architectural propositions for public space. He received his HBA from the University of Toronto Mississauga and his MDes from OCAD University. He has exhibited at Contemporary Calgary, Calgary; the Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto; and MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels), Montreal. Bozdarov teaches design in the University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College’s joint Art and Art History program. Incorporating sculpture, photography, and graphic design, my practice is concerned with exploring the function, use, and uselessness of art and design objects to reveal failures of structures and systems. An ongoing series of objects that resemble access ramps borrows strategies from critical design to examine accessible and inaccessible architectural structures and the extent to which accessibility devices exist and serve their purpose. Making uselessness apparent in faulty design, absurd material choices, and incomplete construction, the objects’ makeshift construction speaks of urgency, while the absence of viable functionality calls attention to the failure of ramps as a minimal solution.
Jedidiah Mugarura (March 20 – April 24)
Jedidiah Mugarura is a storyteller born and raised in Kampala, Uganda. He comes from a community of people, the Banyankore, who are very expressive through dance, song, and oral traditions. When he sits down to write, there is usually folk music from Nkore or the Kitara region playing in the background. From a first draft – often written with pencil, his writing shifts to the laptop for subsequent drafts.
During the Winter Island residency, Mugarura will be completing and revising a book-length poem. The narrative, set in present day rural Uganda after a hailstorm brings down a banana plantation, is a series of verses sang between a banana plantation pit digger and a cattle herder. The poem contends with themes of love, climate change, and religious hypocrisy.
Get Involved
Want the unique opportunity of working in close proximity with our award winners? Interested in participating in the unique projects they are creating?
Apply for your stay during the Winter Island 2023 stay of the artist of your choosing.
Simply fill out an application at https://artscapegibraltarpoint.ca/artist-residences/book-a-residency/ and indicate your desired dates of residency.
Pursue your own work while participating in studio visits, socialization and interactive art projects.
Keep an eye out for public events and our Winter Island exhibition launch of April 22nd 2023 by following us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
About Winter Islands 2023
Now in its seventh, Winter Island is a unique, juried, artist-in-residence program aimed at emerging, established and, mid-career artists, working in community engaged practice and hosted at Artscape Gibraltar Point, an artist residency located on the picturesque Toronto Islands. The aim of the Winter Islands program is to recognize artists annually who have demonstrated a strong and unique artistic voice and provide them with distraction-free studio time to create and/or develop a new and exciting community-engaged work, or body of work, that seeks to collaborate with and/or activate the artist community at Artscape Gibraltar Point and the Toronto Islands. Selected artists will have the opportunity to present these works/projects to the public both during their residency and as a part of a Winter Island Group Exhibition to take place at the conclusion of the residency series at Artscape Gibraltar Point.
ABOUT ARTSCAPE GIBRALTAR POINT
Located in the former Toronto Island Public and Natural Science School, Artscape Gibraltar Point offers 35,000 square feet of affordable retreat space, artist studios and accommodations for artists and creative thinkers. The tranquil, idyllic setting is world-renowned as a centre for members of the artistic and non-profit communities to think, experiment, collaborate and share ideas.
More than 700 artists a year from across the globe experiment and create art through self-directed artist retreats and thematic residencies hosted in our overnight accommodations. In addition to hosting a maximum of 20 visiting artists at any given time, fifteen long-term artist work studios provide space for a range of painters, sculptors, musicians, filmmakers and a recording studio – all of whom contribute to the unique and collaborative atmosphere at Artscape Gibraltar Point.
ABOUT ARTSCAPE
Artscape is a not-for-profit urban development organization that makes space for creativity and transforms communities. Artscape is the operator of Artscape Gibraltar Point. Our work involves clustering creative people together in real estate projects that serve the needs of the arts and cultural community and advance multiple public policy objectives, private development interests, community and neighbourhood aspirations and philanthropic missions.