Visual Arts Nova Scotia is pleased to officially announce the participants of this year’s Mentorship Program. After receiving some great applications, the program will be supporting four dedicated emerging Nova Scotian artists. Annik Gaudet, Hila Peleg, Andrea Tsang Jackson, and Jack Wong have been individually paired with established artists and mentors Becka Barker, Marilyn McAvoy, Frances Dorsey, and Steve Higgins.

MENTEES:

Annik Gaudet

Annik Gaudet is an interdisciplinary artist based in Halifax, NS. She holds a BFA from NSCAD University (2010) and has exhibited her drawings, installation and video work in Canada and the USA. Growing up in rural New-Brunswick has influenced Gaudet’s work, imprinting on her a meaningful connection to the outdoors and wilderness. She uses hiking in forests, along coastlines and venturing into remote places as a source for inspiration. Her artwork often documents and reflects on these experiences, contemplating human relationships with the land and recounting journeys through surreal and evocative imagery. Using her artist lens, she examines the strange, the weird, the wonderful, the overlooked, the small details that makeup our natural spaces, creating a sense of otherworldliness. Annik Gaudet is an avid forager and naturalist, she collects materials and ideas during her wilderness excursions. Her work often relies on her body and found objects contrasting against a landscape, resulting in installations, drawings, videos and performances that somehow teeter on the line between environmentalism and folklore.

Hila Peleg

Hila Peleg is an Israeli-Canadian visual artist working and living in Halifax. Prior to her move to Nova Scotia, Peleg studied design and architecture in Tel Aviv, establishing herself as a graphic designer and illustrator. She has since participated in residencies and exhibitions in Israel, Germany and Canada, and completed a post baccalaureate in painting at NSCAD University in 2018.

From her studio in Halifax, Peleg addresses themes of political instability, immigration, displacement and belonging through painting and drawing. Her work utilizes forms and colours reminiscent of the Israeli landscape, addressing a complex and layered relationship filled with nostalgia, criticism and grief. From the safety of her studio, Peleg has been able to establish a path to clarify the complexities and contradictions of her Israeli-Canadian identity

Andrea Tsang Jackson

Andrea Tsang Jackson is an emerging textile artist, quilt designer and educator based in Halifax, Canada. After working in various design fields ranging from architecture to museums, the quilting medium called to her as a way to explore place, belonging, and agency. She holds a Master of Architecture from McGill University and Master of Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was the 2017 Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Immigration at Pier 21.

Tsang Jackson’s work takes the traditional craft medium of quilting and applies it to a contemporary context, often using bright hues and bold graphics. She abstracts intentionally accessible imagery, inviting points of connection from the viewer to spark discussion and inquiry. She strives to push the limits of the quilting medium by exploring scale and dimension and moving traditionally domestic objects into the public realm. The rich history of quilting heavily influences her practice; she sees it as an extension of a close-knit community across time. Through her work, she aims to initiate conversations about the role of domestic arts in the fine art world. The boundaries around folk art, fine craft and fine art are a continual source of enquiry in her practice as she operates within all of these areas.

Jack Wong

Jack Wong is a visual artist based in Halifax, NS. True to his name, Wong is also a working illustrator, bookkeeper, and office administrator, as well as a past bicycle mechanic, repair shop owner, research laboratory assistant, educator, academic writer, and civil engineer, and maybe a few other things he’s forgotten along the way. He’s not certain what lessons this experience has imparted upon him, except perhaps either that he has a short attention span, or, that it isn’t a requirement for the chain of events that make up a life to have anything to do with each other. Working as a freelance illustrator, Wong found an analogue to this perspective, wherein each project lives as a discrete entity with its own concerns, demanding its own solutions. In his own art, Wong does not keep longstanding or overarching themes and methods, preferring to discard continuity in favour of turning to the preoccupations of a given period. As a newly married, newly full-time-employed young professional, Wong is currently thinking about contentment, family, and friendships in adulthood. His current medium of choice is the picture book.

MENTORS:

Becka Barker

Becka Barker (www.beckabarker.info) is an artist of settler ancestry who lives in Halifax. She uses hand-drawn moving images, participatory performance and collaboration to explore intersections of geography, memory, mediated communication, ideas of ‘community’ and transnational identity. A defining feature of her artistic production is the use of hand-craft processes as media art methodologies. Film and video frames serve as starting points for developing intimate relationships with visual increments, affording new relationships among knowledge, learning, and experience. Since 2015, Barker has also maintained an ongoing collaboration with Singapore-based artist Gerard Choy (as barker&choy).

Becka Barker’s work has taken her to venues such as the Ottawa International Animation Festival, EXiS Seoul (winner 2007, Best International Film), Images Festival (Toronto), Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (Montreal), Universities Art Association of Canada, KunstDoc Art Gallery (Seoul), Nocturne: Art at Night (Halifax), Society for Animation Studies (Montreal, Lisbon), Art in the Open (Charlottetown), Butter Elbow Animation Festival (Chicago/Taipei), and Echo Park Film Centre (Los Angeles). She is grateful to have been supported by the NFB, Canada Council for the Arts, Arts Nova Scotia, the city of Halifax, and various artist-run organizations throughout her career. She is a regular part-time faculty at NSCAD University (2005-present) and was visiting foreign faculty at Soonchunhyang University (ROK) from 2008-2012.

Marilyn McAvoy

Born in St Catharine’s, Ontario, Marilyn McAvoy studied at the University of Guelph before completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design where she continues to teach part time. McAvoy studied printmaking and drawing but turned to painting shortly after graduating.

In recent years McAvoy’s work has turned to figure painting. The inspiration for this work initially was fueled by song lyrics and her connection to having lived a life surrounded by live music and back stages. The individuals represented are women who wove in and out of her life during this time. The backdrop for these paintings reflects the atmosphere of this time and space. Marilyn’s visions are developed through a small stage setup in her studio. Here digital projections of photos from music hall concerts and back stages create the lighting. The addition of props and her models completes the scene, creating a filmic quality in this work.

Marilyn has been the recipient of Canada Council and Nova Scotia Arts Grants. A finalist in the 2003 RBC New Canadian Painting Competition, McAvoy has exhibited in galleries across Canada and the United States. The former competitive figure skater works on multiple canvases at once, always having a painting on the go that is technically demanding, another more playful and spontaneous. “It’s the figure skater in me,” says McAvoy: “freestyle and compulsory figures”.

Frances Dorsey

Frances Dorsey taught at NSCAD in Foundation and Textiles. Since retiring from formal teaching she has focussed on a studio practice, moving back and forth between weaving, dyeing and printing on found material, and experimenting with natural dyes and pigments. Cloth speaks so eloquently perhaps because it receives one’s impulse and then always replies, pushes back – often in an unexpected way. Working with the material itself becomes a conversation, it is a receptive surface upon which to record the thoughts and experiences of ordinary daily life while answering back in sometimes surprising ways. It responds to gravity, is tactile, and talks to the human body while retaining its own voice, resisting domestication.

Dorsey has been the recipient of many awards and grants and her work has shown widely throughout Canada and the United States as well as Korea, Australia and most recently China. Her work is included in the Canada Council Art Bank, the Nova Scotia Art Bank, the Cambridge Gallery Collection of Contemporary Textiles, Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery Collection and private collections.

Steve Higgins

In Steve Higgins‘ sculptures, prints, installations and drawings, he plays out post-industrial narratives of power and class, with privilege and oppression pushed to absurd excess through schemas of order and collapse.