i made it through the wilderness
Artist Residency Program
Led by Lisa Cristinzo, “i made it through the wilderness” is a two-week visual arts residency on Mnisiing/Toronto Island for artists creating work about and within landscape and who wish to spend time contemplating what it means to be an artist at this point in our climate history.
We will be examining the importance of landscape art in the context of the deforestation of 85% of the world’s forests, uncontrollable wildfires, and catastrophic climate hazards that disproportionately affect the most vulnerable. In the geological era of Anthropocene, an era defined by humans’ extensive impact on the earth’s geologic makeup, how can humans deepen and balance the relationship between the material and energetic world? What if we held vital matter and its properties with the same rights and freedom, we all strive to have? And are artists the ones that are truly in the position to make ‘matter’ matter?
This residency is an attempt to collectively understand more deeply through the practice of art the vibrancy and agency of the world around us. Although the theme of the residency sounds somber, participants will be encouraged to access this knowledge through gratitude, play, and emergent experiences in co-authorship with the site and with each other. There will be a full program of guest artists, studio visits, studio time, time outside and fireside chats. Confirmed guest speakers include Christina Battle, Johnathan S Green, and Fake Art School’s Leida Englar and Jim Belisle.
This is a facilitated residency, but the aim is to work non-hierarchically and in co-authorship across the collective of visiting artists and participants.
I made it through the wilderness
Somehow I made it through
Didn’t know how lost I was
Until I found you
– Madonna, Like a Virgin
Christina Battle, “Learning the Signals/Change is Coming”
SURVEY FOR “LEARNING THE SIGNALS/CHANGE IS COMING - the main page is here
Residency Artists Biographies
2023 Residency Facilitator
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(She/her) is a queer painter and installation artist, and a first-generation Canadian settler living in T’karonto on Turtle Island. Cristinzo’s large-scale painting installations traverse natural history, climate hazards, materialism, and magic. She holds a BFA from OCAD U and an MFA from York University, where she received a graduate scholarship and SSHRC federal funding for her research into fire and climate change. Cristinzo’s writing and artwork about fire was recently published in Fire Season II by Liz Tooney-Wiese and Amory Abbott. Lisa was accepted into the Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence Program for 2023. Along with being an artist, she has spent over a decade managing arts programs and community cultural hubs, including Artscape Gibraltar Point, an artist residency and event space on Mnisiing/Toronto Island.
While completing a Masters degree, a medical diagnosis prompted Cristinzo to conduct her work outside of institutions both academic and medical. Through a Canada Council for the Arts research-creation grant she spent 60 days at four artist residencies, including a residency at Vermont Studio Center, where she explored the tradition of “plein air” painting through the lens of climate change. “i made it through the wilderness”, 2023’s thematic residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point, is inspired by her experience.[www.Lisacristinzo.com] @lisacristinzopainting
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M. Gnanasihamany is an artist, writer, and curator in Tio’tia:ke. Their practice explores the political world of pictures through their dissemination, collection, and reproduction, examining the image’s capacity to at once mirror and enforce the conditions of its production. Their written work can be found in Leste, Peripheral Review, BlackFlash Magazine, SNAPline, and elsewhere, and their mini-chapbook, Unconscious Method, was published by Ghost City Press in 2021. In 2022, they opened The Equivalence of Alloyed Gold, a year-long experimental commissioning and exhibition process featuring nine artists, co-curated with Morgan Melenka and hosted by Critical Distance Centre for Curators. M. has presented performance work and writing at Geopolitics Artists Symposium at Hollyhock Cortes, Access Points at Concordia University in Montreal, Art & Social Strata at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton, and elsewhere. At Hollyhock, they presented a sample of their current research project, which critically examines the material implications of highly networked and reproduced images, beginning with an exploration of visual media depicting sunsets.
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(B.1997) Afifa Bari is a contemporary realist oil painter and textile artist based in Toronto. She earned her BFA from York University in 2020. She is currently pursuing her MFA from OCAD University. Through representational art, she examines the contemporary world through the lens of capitalism, uncovering consumerist values in her work. She discusses issues around ideas of capitalism, such as poverty and the cycle of consumerism. Her work focuses on material possessions and the desire for materialism in the newly advancing society. She discusses fast fashion trends and the constant desire to purchase more in modern society from a socio-political and environmental outlook.
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Born in Quebec, raised in Ontario, and currently living in British Columbia, Diane Blunt is an artist of mixed descent – Anishnawbe (Ojibway) on her father’s side and German on her mother’s. She is a member of the Kawartha Nishnawbe Nation. A recent BFA Graduate in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University, the nature of her work explores the life, history, and bark of the birch tree through drawing, painting, and material practices. She has been the recipient of multiple funding awards including the Brissenden Scholarship, the Ian Gillespie Aboriginal Scholarship, and the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Scholarship. This year she will attend awarded artist residency’s at the Banff Centre for the Arts and at Mnisiing/Toronto Island at Artscape Gibraltar Point.
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JudyBlue Anderson was born and raised in Toronto. She graduated from Sheridan College in Technical and Scientific Illustration. For the past 20+ years, she has made her home and studio in Hamilton, Ontario. She has shown in over 130 solo, group exhibitions and shows in Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland and the Czech Republic. Her work is held in both corporate and private collections throughout Canada, the US and Europe. She has completed artist residencies in Georgia US, Newfoundland and Ontario.
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Liz Toohey-Wiese is a settler artist residing on the homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. She is a graduate from the MFA program at NSCAD University. She completed her undergraduate degree in painting at Emily Carr University, also undertaking coursework at the University of Victoria and the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. She has taken part in solo and group shows across Canada, and recently was the artist in residence at the Sointula Art Shed (2019), the Caetani Cultural Center (2020/21/22), Island Mountain Arts (2021), and upcoming at the Similkameen Artist Residency (2023). Deeply interested in the history of landscape painting, her paintings explore contemporary relationships between identity and place. Her most recent work explores the complicated topic of wildfires and their connections to tourism, economy, grief, and renewal. She is the co-editor of the artist book "Fire Season" and faculty in the Fine Arts department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
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Michelle Purchase is a Kitchener, Ontario based artist, educator, and landscape architect. Growing up in the small rural community of Fenwick, Ontario her artistic practice delves into the concepts of home and how we try to feel connected (or disconnected) to our surrounding environment. Drawing inspiration from her love of field botany and cartography, Michelle creates works using printmaking, fibre arts, and drawing. Her artistic endeavours have been recognized with awards and grants from organizations such as the Ontario Arts Council, the Riverdale Art Walk, Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, and Room Magazine. She was also honoured with the 2019 Arts Awards Waterloo Region (Denney Award). Her artworks have been showcased in various exhibitions across Canada including at the Mackenzie Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Guelph, OCADU, and Art Toronto. Michelle's works can also be found in private collections, including the Bank of Montreal and the Burnaby Art Gallery.
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Shawn Grey is a visual artist whose practice is rooted in connection and transformation. Combining elements of cloth, video, and narrative, her work documents the everyday as a method to locate overlooked stories that carry and share collective knowledge. Her 2022 MFA thesis project, "When Nobody Was Here," at York University, documented the collaborative making of a 45-foot cloth banner that served to articulate the meaning of personal presence and relationship in relationship to self, others, and local histories. Shawn's video montage, "Occupied Acknowledgements," was screened at Toronto’s 2019 Nuit Blanche and her work is recognized by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. Shawn is 3rd generation British/Hungarian descent, born in Nanaimo, British Columbia, living and working in Toronto, Ontario on territories covered by Treaty 13.
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Taline Kavoukian is a T’Karonto/Toronto-based multimedia artist who uses an ecofeminist lens in her portraiture, figurative work and landscape painting. Her formal education includes an MA in Creativity and Intrinsic Motivation from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and she recently graduated with a BFA from York University. Taline is an enthusiastic reader, walker, traveller, and curious learner who believes that life is an adventure to be lived with love, joy and in community.
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Alexandra Iorgu is an Etobicoke land-based artist who received a rigorous art education in Romania, as well as degrees from OCAD U and York U. After years of sculpting using casting and mouldmaking, she spotted. Her environmental views could no longer justify the energy used and debris left behind this process. In her current art practice, she is developing Living Sculptures, a series of site-specific ephemeral sculptures using natural materials, seeds and clay. Exhibiting themes of transformation and endurance, the sculptures will deconstruct, eventually disappearing. The work shows respect to the surrounding natural world and our future generations by maintaining a low environmental footprint.Alexandra’s belief in the power of making and creating is often executed in the context of community where she has received multiple grants to support projects across many diverse neighbourhoods. In the past five years, she focused on intergenerational programs and collective art installations in nature. Alexandra involves the community in slow artmaking experiences, inspiring participants to form connections with the land where they live, before they are invited to explore materials and co-create. She strives to provide children and their families with the tools they need to speak, understand and communicate through the language of art while reconnecting with nature.
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Annie is a land-based painter and art therapist who makes her own materials out of foraged and natural color sources. Annie’s painting expresses landscape, a sense of place, and embodiment; she paints out on the land using ingredients from the surrounding place and her garden. This includes indigo dyeing and making inks and paints from wild pigments found in the earth, botanicals, and metals left from decaying industry. Annie’s personal art practice and practice in art therapy intertwine through the use of material, connection to the land, and her fellow artmakers in qathet, BC, the territory of the Tla’amin People.Originally from Ohio, USA, Annie studied at Ohio State University, Maiwa School of Textiles, and Vancouver Art Therapy Institute. She has shown her work in Columbus, OH, Port Angeles, WA, Vancouver, BC, and the Sunshine Coast, BC.
Annie’s art practice is inspired by a deep desire for joy with people and a connection to the land. She is fueled daily by mothering her two daughters and enjoys all of it with her husband and fellow artist, Joshua deGroot.
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Hannah Materne is a Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal) based artist. She is compelled to communicate her felt sense of intimacy with and understanding of non-human and abiotic beings. Recently this has manifested as low-impact land poetry installations, textural photography and printmaking, and her two poetry books little cures volume I (2019) and volume II (2020). In 2020 and 2021 she ran an artist residency at her family cottage to support other artists in their journeys with nature. Materne holds a BFA in Design, with a minor in Sustainability from Concordia University. hannahmaterne.com
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Lee Angold is a Kitchener-based botanical and natural science artist working primarily in watercolour. Lee creates bold and colourful, intricate and detailed illustrations highlighting overlooked aspects of our natural world. Currently, Lee is working on "On the Skin of Giants", an exploration of tree bark as ecosystem.
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Liz DeCoste is a cross-disciplinary queer artist living and working on Treaty 13 Territory in Toronto, Ontario, the territory of the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabeg, the Wendat, the Chippewa, and the Mississaugas of the Credit nations. They graduated from OCADU in 2022 with BFA in Cross-disciplinary arts and a minor in printmaking and publications. DeCoste grew up on Treaty 4 Territory in Regina, Saskatchewan, an upbringing that has influenced their work about human-nature relationships. Based in the sustainable collection of natural and salvaged materials, their work explores the environment as a source of inspiration, metaphor, and material, while layering aesthetics from opposing ways of knowing.
After graduating from OCADU, DeCoste established the Toronto-based art collective, Carrier Bag Collective. The group is comprised of other recent OCADU alumni that engage with collection practices. Emphasizing community engaged creation and accessibility to arts knowledge, Carrier Bag Collective holds free public workshops, shows, and other initiatives to maintain community amongst early-career artists in Toronto. liz-decoste.format.com @lizdecoste
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Gizem Candan is a visual artist and researcher based in Toronto. She graduated with two BFAs, one in Plastic Arts and Painting and one in Graphic Design from Yeditepe University in Istanbul in 2019. She now continues her master’s in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University. She is represented by Sivarulrasa Gallery in Almonte, ON. Her works have been exhibited in Canada and Turkey, and are held in many private collections and the Special Collections of the Toronto Reference Library. She also works at Cooper Cole Gallery as a research assistant. Her artistic practice explores the tensions and depressions between humans and their surroundings in the Anthropocene. She employs a variety of approaches in her work to emphasize "figure" as both human and more-than-human, as well as the landscape-centered scenes around it. Her main area of focus is on narrating that examines the modern human and its enigmatic potential relationship through the lens of nature. "Structure" in her paintings is visible in two distinct ways: composition and colour palette
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Teresa Chan is a Hong Kong-born multimedia artist with an education background in ecology and anthropology. After a long stay farming with Indigenous People in Taiwan, she explores natural materials and everyday objects as a medium to portrait the interaction between humans and nature. Through research-based art practice, she collects narratives and examines collective memory and cultural identity with a multispecies perspective. She participated in public art project about island studies and had her first solo exhibition about urban trees at Hong Kong Arts Centre in 2022 before coming to Canada. She is currently working at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.
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Zoë Margot Alexis-Abrams is a Queer, Working-Class, late-connecting Algonquin Ardoch Métis interdisciplinary artist, musician and horticultural technician based in Toronto. Her art is interested in assessing the social strata that comprises the horticultural industry, through fine illustration and cartographic method, during a climate- and economic crisis. She has an experimental pop album out with her project JOY SHAPE titled "What's Already Here" (Remains Records). Most recently, her illustrations were exhibited in Pamila Matharu's "Where Were You in '92?" at Agnes Etherington Gallery, Queen's University.
Images: Jonathan S. Green, '& there's no more living on the land (top left), Jim Belisle, painting a shipwreck on Gibraltar Point Beach, Toronto Island (middle), Jim Belisle, plein air sketch “Uplifting Sidewalk” (top right) Leida Englar, plein air sketching on Toronto Island (bottom left) Lisa Cristinzo, “Just like the strawberry moon” (bottom middle) Leida Englar watching her mother plein air, 1946 (bottom right)
Virtual/In Person Visiting Artists
Christina Battle is an artist based in amiskwacîwâskahikan, (also known as Edmonton, Alberta), within the Aspen Parkland: the transition zone where prairie and forest meet. Her practice focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster: its complexity, and the intricacies that are entwined within it. Much of this work extends from her recent PhD dissertation (2020) which looked closer to community responses to disaster: the ways in which they take shape, and especially to how online models might help to frame and strengthen such response. [www.cbattle.com]
Jonathan S Green is of Mi’kmaq and Inuit, British and Scottish heritage from Labrador City, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. He does not know a lot about his indigenous heritage but is trying to learn more. Green earned an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Alberta in 2016, a BFA from Memorial University of Newfoundland – Grenfell Campus. He has been a Visual Arts Studio Work study at the Banff Centre. He has canoed down the Yukon River as part of the Canadian Wilderness Artist Residency. He currently resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada at his studio Campsite Press. [www.jonathansgreen.com]
Leida Englar’s formal education includes a Sciences degree from McMaster University and studies at Toronto School of Art. Leida is a dedicated artist, peacemaker, environmental and community activist and has been a Plein Air painter since 1980. Whenever Leida and her husband Jerry traveled around North America, Plein Air painting became the tool of record keeping. Leida was co-founder of Shadowland Theatre and band leader in Caribana from 1985-2005 where she built costumes for the Trinidad Carnival, in Toronto and Trinidad and Tobago. In 1993 Leida and Jim Belisle and Jerry Englar created L’Ecole de Faux Arts/Fake Art School, a base for their love of painting outside, PLEIN AIR.
Leida Englar and Jim Belisle (Landscape Architect/Painter) from the Fake Art School will be conducting an Artist Talk and taking participants on a Plein Air excursion.
The venue: Artscape Gibraltar Point @gibraltarpointto
In respect to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action (2015), we want to acknowledge this sacred land on which we live. Today, the meeting place of Toronto is the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to live and work on this territory.
We would like to begin by acknowleding that the land on which we will gather is part of the Treaty Lands and Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit.
It has been a site of human activity for 15, 000 years. This land was previously occupied by the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations and the Seneca.