Mentees:
Andrew Maize is an artist living in Lunenburg Nova Scotia. He loves a good pun. As an arts educator and organizer, he is involved in collaborative projects such as the White Rabbit Arts Residency and Festival, the Circus of the Confederation and educational projects with the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Bluenose Academy.
About his work:
The Marker Drawing Series is an exploration in process, colour and notions of time and space. The physicality of used permanent makers led to questions of the possible alternative systems or parametres that these makers could create “drawings” in. The ink is thus “drawn” from the markers through stacked paper and creating images using gravity, the fibres of the paper and the chemicals in the markers. Each drawing is unique as a moment in time, with the visible connections to the past and future as the colours blend, bleed and dry.
Annalise Prodor is a multi-disciplinary artist and art administrator currently living and practicing in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and followed her interest of Fine Art into post-secondary to Grant MacEwan University’s Fine Art program, and then further to receive her Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in 2011.
Annalise has exhibited solo as well as part of a group around the Maritimes and is currently being represented by Pavia Gallery.
About her work:
My work varies in media and is created by the layering of many ideas — a collaging of different aesthetic considerations. I am often unaware of how a project will unfold or of the exact aesthetic conditions before I start. I let an idea develop via research, writing, juxtaposition and timely consideration.
This work in particular is inspired by mainstream media’s definition of femininity. I notice absurdities from television, youtube, and social media and raise them to a platform where I can display them. The works language emerges out of the viewer’s own experiences as they encounter it. It is the goal of many projects to develop play between accessibility and ambiguity.
Sera Senakovicz is a printmaker born in Ontario, raised in British Columbia and currently settled in Nova Scotia. She completed her BFA at NSCAD in 2009 and is a current mentee in the VANS mentorship program. She has a passion for old buildings and can often be seen gleaning old wood and refuse from demolition sites.
About her work:
I am interested in utilizing printmaking as a way of investigating the temporal marks we leave in our environments; specifically, the relationship between human mark making and architecture. My focus is on the power and burden of our hands and the urge of ordinary people to leave a mark of their presence on the world. Artistically, I make marks on paper which are then translated onto a surface for printing. Thematically, I work with feelings of isolation and helplessness through the depiction of abandoned or underutilized architectural spaces combined with imagined, often¬fantastical narrative.
In my work, I respond to my community and the common architectural spaces that we share. I am curious about our place and space in a transitioning city. As we tear down our old buildings I question how we will remember our past skills and mistakes on our move forward.
To shape the narrative elements of my work I fastidiously render the architectural and human faces of my community. I want to illustrate a dialogue between spaces and people as they change. These narratives often contain symbols of destruction, contemplation and consequence. I use repetition of these symbols in attempt to show both mental and physical movement and interaction. By using permanent material such as wood, linoleum or lithographic stone I am trying to make these connections durable and enduring.
Mentors:
Sent from my I-Phone
About his work:
I intend to install my working drawing in
left over space
forgotten space
neglected space
hard to reach space
Coloured pencil on vellum
2012-13
Eleanor King exhibits widely, most notably at Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Nuit Blanche Toronto, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Confederation Centre Art Gallery, and Galleri F15 (NO). She received a BFA from NSCAD in 2001 and has participated in residencies in the US and Canada, most recently at The MacDowell Colony, The Banff Centre and Yaddo. She received creation grants from the Canada Council and Arts Nova Scotia, was short-listed for the Sobey Art Award, and is a Fulbright Scholar. Eleanor’s work employs interdisciplinary strategies to create site-responsive installations using provisional materials and improvisational methods. Her work is often influenced by music and playing in the bands Wet Denim and The Just Barelys. She teaches media arts at NSCAD University and is Director at Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In September 2014 she begins the Visual Arts MFA at the State University of New York.
About her work:
I generally make site-responsive installations that combine sculpture, sound, painting and drawing. The work takes many forms but there are consistent similarities: repetition, structure, provisional materials and ephemeral gestures. My thinking is influenced by lineages of Dada, conceptual art and feminist theory.
I grapple with ideas of lost information, mass production, and our asserted domain over nature. I consider recent works to be minimalist, referencing both art history (order / limited palette) and music theory (repetitive sequences / drones). My experience as a gig musician extends a pop sensibility to the work.
These drawings are part of on ongoing series made by systematically tracing a single object with rhythmic gestural improvisation. Each Dark Loops drawing is made simply by tracing a found tape reel over and over for as long as it takes to use up an entire black pencil.
Ericka Walker was born in Hartford, Wisconsin, USA. She received a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an MFA from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She currently teaches studio coursework in printmaking as an assistant professor in the Fine Arts Division at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Walker’s creative practice draws on the graphic media of late 19th and early 20th century, including propaganda, advertising, and printed ephemera. Her work has been included in numerous domestic and international exhibitions and biennials, as well as teaching and private collections in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Asia.
About her work:
My parents and grandparents were farmers, soldiers, teachers, and steel workers in the United States, through multiple generations of armed conflict, economic prosperity, and depression. My upbringing and socialization as an American in a working-class family, as well as subsequent employment in industry and construction throughout my young-adult life, has included a slowly evolving, somewhat illiterate sense of pride in words like honor, duty, patriotism, and service. These concepts seem apparent to all, then become increasingly opaque the higher the volume is turned up. That is to say, locating their origin and substance in my life has proven elusive; to say nothing of decoding the same rhetoric in today’s political, social, economic, and military climate both in my country of birth and–increasingly–my new country of residence.