Winter Island 2022: Artist Residency

Merle Harley and Sara Maston

Residency Dates: January 31st – February 28th

SK Maston and Merle Harley met on Toronto Island and bonded over mutual themes in their artistic work. With a specific interest in the comingling of multispecies life worlds, Maston and Harley began developing an artistic collaboration.

SK Maston is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the vantage point of animals such as insects, single-celled organisms, domestic horses, birds and rodents. Her work takes the form of ceramics, paintings, and textile installations to articulate parallel lifeworlds that are indicative of a distant ancestor’s sense of physicality or distinct rhythm of nature. Maston holds an MFA from York University and is pursuing a degree in Information Science at UofT to develop methods of archiving and mediating ephemeral nonhuman animal knowledge. Additionally, she is a member of the Asian-pop-girl-band-artist-collective XVK, founded by Maston, Xuan Ye, and Veronique Sunatori.

Merle Harley works slowly, creates continually, and builds alternate visual realities. A chaos-creature with no fixed medium, works include drawing, watercolour, knitting, weaving, comic books, videos and installations. Merle has had illustrations and comics published in many online and print publications and exhibited work across Canada and beyond. As well as a full arts practice, Merle has extensive experience facilitating workshops and coordinating community art programs. Catch them on the shoreline as they zip back and forth between the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Ontario.

Ej Nussbaum

Residency Dates: January 31st – February 14th

Ej Nussbaum earned her MFA at University of Illinois at Chicago and her BA from Hampshire College. Her filmmaking practice traverses both analogue and digital time machines.  She uses humour and sentimentality to question how larger power systems are embodied and contested in the intimate realms of desire and memory.  Whether engaging in speculative conversations with family members or historical revolutionaries, she finds value in imagining the presumed impossible and re-shaping the static presentations of histories and self narratives we too readily give to others.

Mary Dyja

Residency Dates: February 21st – March 7th

Mary Dyja is visual artist and parent, mostly working with threads also with drawing and painting media. Mary was born in Minsk, Belarus. They received BFA from York University, Toronto.

During Winter Island at Artscape Gibraltar Point I will be offering mending services for local residents and the community members. I am looking forward to learn about their relationships and connections with the items through stories.

Alternatively, I would like to create works based on requests for a “symbolic” mending, that could be done for anything from a physical object to a concept, an issue or a complaint.

Mushtari Afroz

Residency Dates: February 28th – March 28th

Mushtari Afroz is a GTA based dancer and emerging choreographer with training in North Indian classical dance form ‘Kathak’ and has been practising within the South Asian diaspora since early 2000 following her immigration to Canada from Bangladesh. She has received extensive training in Lucknow style of Kathak under the tutelage of Ontario based teachers, dancers and choreographers Joanna de Souza and Saveeta Sharma. Currently she is advancing her training in the nuances of the dance form under the guidance of India based Kathak artist Anurekha Ghosh. Alongside the classical dance, Mushtari continues to train in contemporary dance and performance aesthetics. Recently she has joined US based Shawngram Institute for Performance & Social Justice’s NextGen platform for professional dancers where she is training in ‘Yorchha’ – an Indian contemporary movement form.

In 2016, Mushtari established her dance collective ‘Kathak Bandi’ that has created and presented original works for the stage in Canada and in the US. She is a recipient of supports from both Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council. While she continues to create work for the stage, with the project ‘Drifting Dialogues’ for Artscape Gibraltar Point, Mushtari is planning on creating work for outside of the stage. This is the beginning of a new phase in her artistic journey. She hopes her effort will critically engage the community in thinking about the corporeal experience of its urban spaces and she plans to achieve it through her process of dance/performance as urban intervention.

Studio Rat

Residency Dates: February 28th – March 28th

Studio Rat is an emerging creative practice pursuing research and experimental design work between the cities of Toronto and Montréal. Studio Rat was founded in 2018, between work-partners Dominique Di Libero and Emily Allan who are committed to DIY fabrication techniques & resource-sharing rooted in circular design principles.

To learn more about Studio Rat you can visit their website or follow them on Instagram @studio__rat!

This March, Studio Rat will be exploring emergent relationships between plastic, craft and art during their Winter Island AiR on Wards Island. Over the course of their stay at Artscape Gibraltar Point, they will be experimenting with textile arts and fibre crafts by challenging the material origins of these practices and connecting them with art-making in our age of disposability and consumerism.

You can join Studio Rat’s investigations on ‘Making-with Plastic’ by participating in their culminating community workshop on DIY plasti-crafting and low tech recycling techniques as a means to reconcile with the irreversible binding of plastic with landscape and everyday experience.

Miranda Black

Residency Dates: March 7th – April 4th

Miranda Black is an artist and environmental justice advocate whose Indigenous lineage is from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory. She is currently obtaining a masters degree in Environmental Applied Science and Management at X University where her thesis focuses on Indigenous relationships to Toronto Island. Prior to her career in academia, Miranda worked as the creative genius of Mirandala Art (www.mirandala.wordpress.com) where her paintings and installations were inspired by her Mohawk heritage, relationship to oral histories, and environmental conservation. To promote community engagement in April 2022, Miranda will be hosting an unveiling of the decolonial mapping project that she will be creating during the Winter Island residency at Gibraltar Point that is inspired by the stories shared with her during the qualitative research portion of her thesis research.