Please join us in welcoming Karen Kar Yen Law to the RBC Emerging Artist Residency Program! To learn more about Karen’s artistic practice and her plans for the artist studio, visit her profile and read her blog post below!

My current food fixation is crispy salted egg yolk battered bitter melon. The rich umami quality of the salted egg yolks perfectly balances the fresh and earthy taste of the bitter melon. Only in recent years have I begun to appreciate the taste of bitter melon despite it being a common vegetable prepared by my grandmother for dinner.

In my work, I am interested in cultural practice and diasporic identity. I have found Chinese food and Chinese cooking an authentic place for me to approach these interests. In Chinese cooking philosophy, harmony in taste is achieved through five flavours: salty, sweet, spicy, sour, and bitter. Chinese medicine also requires balance in the five flavours because they each correspond to an area of our bodily health. During my residency, I will be engaging with the flavour of bitterness.

Bitterness shows up in many places in our lives, but how do we choose to confront the bitterness? Do we let it consume us or do we consume the bitterness? In Chinese culture, there is an expectation to “swallow your bitterness,” to conceal and contain pain, sadness, and suffering. I’ve seen how this expectation can be harmful, but I have also seen how it can be about survival.

So, will I be spending my time at RMG just eating piles of bitter melon? No, I will not (but I think that would make for an interesting project too.) Instead, I will be experimenting with a combination of printmaking and painting to produce a body of mid-sized paintings. My approach to painting is heavily informed by the same process of layering printmakers utilize. For these paintings, I would like to lean into the visibility of layers and use printmaking techniques like screen printing.

I am excited to spend time in Oshawa at the RMG. The best way to get to know a place is through its food and its people. Where are your favorite places to eat in the city? What are your beloved family recipes? What are your current food fixations? If you have recommendations, let me know!

---

---

Tune in to our Instagram account on Friday, November 22nd for her “Welcome to the Studio” Artist Talk and on Friday, January 24th for a Residency Check-in. Both virtual studio visits will be at 12:00pm EST @rmgoshawa.

Please join us in welcoming Vanessa Godden to the RBC Emerging Artist Residency Program!

During their residency, Vanessa will create a series of new works in mixed media and performance. Exploring themes of immersion, acceptance, and joy, this work will embrace the complex layers of queer and diasporic identities. In particular, their research will consider how materials, cultures, and geographies can together serve as an insightful lens for understanding oneself and their place in the world. Seeking connection and support from other members of the Trinidadian diaspora in Durham Region, Vanessa’s project will be presented in the form of an exhibition and live performance.

Vanessa Godden is a non-binary Queer Indo-Caribbean and Euro-Canadian artist, educator, and curator. They are a sessional lecturer at universities across the Greater Toronto Area and a cofounder of the curatorial collective Diasporic Futurisms. Godden holds a PhD from the Victorian College of the Arts (Melbourne, Australia; 2020), an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, USA; 2014), and a BFA from the University of Houston (Houston, USA; 2012). Their transdisciplinary practice explores how the relationship between the body, personal histories, and geographic space can be conveyed in multi-sensory performances, videos, and installations.

Tune in to our Instagram account on July 10 for Vanessa’s “Welcome to the Studio” Artist Talk and on September 17 for a “Residency Check-in.” Both virtual studio visits will be at 12:00pm EST @rmgoshawa.

Please join us in welcoming Ioana Dragomir to the RBC Emerging Artist Residency Program! To learn more about Ioana’s artistic practice and her plans for the incubator lab, visit her profile and read her blog post below!

Recently I’ve been reading Virginia Woolf and making work in response to her writing, and as February approaches I keep thinking about the structure of an artist residency and how it relates to the ideology Woolf puts forward in A Room of One’s Own. If you’re not familiar, here’s a rundown: in 1928 Virginia Woolf (iconic modernist writer) was asked to give a lecture on women and fiction at Cambridge University and the point she makes is that, above anything else, women doing creative work is an economic problem. In order to do so, they must have access to £500 per year and a quiet room in which to work. Which is essentially what a residency program like this one provides. In my case, I’ll also be moving into another room as I temporarily relocate from my home in Montreal to Toronto for these three months.

My plan for my time at RMG is to really use the space and what I find in it. I’m interested in what information is housed in the archive, what other artists in residence have left behind, what the institution has collected, what installation materials have not been fully exhausted, and whatever else I may find. But I’ll also be thinking a lot about Virginia and the politics of having access to this space and its resources.

Much of my work is influenced by literature and my reading lists are guided by desire. I read Woolf’s work for the first time maybe 5 years ago because it seemed like the thing to do. She was the kind of literary, feminist, modernist writer that you’re supposed to consume in part because everyone around you is. You hear that her writing is difficult to follow, difficult to jump into, and so you wear reading her work as a badge of pride. At some point it became something more. I would write about art and end up writing about her, comparing her novels to artworks they had nothing to do with, like a person newly-infatuated who drops the name of their crush into every conversation, just for the thrill of saying it and letting others know. I wrote about her novels and made artwork about them to give myself reasons to read them. And now a residency.

I’m really looking forward to bringing my obsession with this long-dead writer to RMG, seeing what happens when I try and create work about her in a studio of my own. Perhaps you’re interested in her too – drop me a line about your favourite book if you’d like. 

Please join us in welcoming Kendra Yee to the RBC Emerging Artist Residency Program! To learn more about Kendra’s artistic practice and her plans for the incubator lab, visit her profile and read her blog post below!

Close your eyes and picture that one time, not so long ago.

Maybe the minutes that comprise your thought stumble between a single second or perhaps it wobbles over weeks or they just might motor through many months.

A memory feels magical because it’s alive; metamorphosing with every recollection (for better or worse). Memories turn inanimate objects into sentient things. Throughout the day we listen to the whispers of daily diaries and the laughs of hand-me-down jeans. By interacting with taste, touch, smell, hearing and sight, the senses activate an objects cache, revealing the saga of memories. Memories can blur and they are not inherent truths, rather they coexistence with falsities. This is just a part of living; things are not always as they seem. 

Documentation of self reflections can take on a variety of different shapes and forms. These stories are often left out from cannon institutions, yet their dialogues cannot be silenced; they still chatter. Over the course of single seconds, wobbly weeks, and motored months, I will be looking at the enchantment of personal record keeping, observing the preservation of experiences and how we keep conversations through curated objects.

Here is a prediction that is also a promise: on the starting date of the residency, I will have consistently written in a journal for 68 days (everyday)!!

Here is a confession: I hate writing. This journal is the start of something daring, acting as an initial guide that stores daily antidotes. Sometimes, it is my friend. Tightly within the pages the scratched ballpoint ink keeps joy and fosters excitement. Similar to a vessel, it is responsible for storing, a paper pot for stories. Other times, it is my enemy. I do not want to write. Each word is poison. There is nothing to feel. 

Perhaps, you will visit me at the studio and we will have a conversation on a memory that you had. I wonder if some secrets will be disclosed? We could swap pages from our journals, embarrassed by the mundane details. It could also be awkward; we are strangers after all. Anything could happen. It’s just like the initiations of a memory, you never really know what will stick or what will fade away. With your collaboration, an installation will be built to preserve the memories of others through the creation of objects / items / things. Using clay and drawings as a foundation, the artworks created will combine donated paper paraphernalia and other items provided by the community. Coming together as a collection, these works will build a memory palace. Some things important to us… for a time that we cannot recall. 

We are pleased to welcome Alex Close to the RMG as part of the RBC Emerging Artist Residency Program. To learn more about Alex’s artistic practice and her plans for the incubator lab, visit her profile and read her blog post below!

Hi! My name is Alex Close and I am excited to come back to my hometown of Oshawa this February as the next emerging artist in residence at the RMG Gallery.

I have recently been focusing on the ways we navigate through layered experiences that inform our sense of place. In the past I spent a lot of time thinking about how we can lose our ability to pay attention or even visualize for ourselves when we constantly participate in immersive or engineered experiences. From this, the idea of trust became a big theme for me, and I have been thinking about how this applies to large public events and spectacles, where immersion and movement of crowds can be physically seen. For example, being lulled into a comfortable and pleasant experience in a mall can encourage you to stay there longer. I am interested in the ecology of big public events or places, the characters that come up (like predator and prey) and the movement patterns from center to edge.

During my residency I will be working on a series of large-scale paintings that are informed by experiments with a few different avenues of abstraction; sound bites, animations, drawings/prints, and small-scale maquettes. I will be focusing on the theme of navigating public events and recalling memories that develop our sense of place. The process of navigating a new or challenging environment can almost be seen as a scavenger hunt – finding fleeting moments of thrill or an intuition of what might be next. I am interested in the emotions that come up in this state of navigation and the process of orientation in general – interpreting the reality around us and the trust in well-worn paths including our own memory.

When I travel back to Oshawa, I will also be reflecting on my experience living abroad for the last year in Eastern Europe where I started to get used to different codes and customs to navigate everyday life. This has gotten me to think about the idea of “home” and how I define it, as well as mobility and my own journey into orienting myself when going from a certain set of communication norms and into another.

I am so excited to get to work at the RMG artist incubator lab and am looking forward to meeting new people while I am at the studio so please feel free to drop by or get in touch!

With thanks to RBC for their generous support, the RMG is pleased to present three new artists in the Emerging Artist Residency Program. Alex Close, Noah Scheinman, and Kendra Yee will be bringing exciting projects to the RMG over the coming year, each developing new work in our residency studio and exhibiting that work in an eight-week solo show. We look forward to sharing their work with you!

Learn more about the residency program here.

We are pleased to welcome Brigitte Sampogna to the RMG as part of the RBC Emerging Artist Residency Program. To learn more about Brigitte’s artistic practice and her plans for the incubator lab, visit her profile and read her blog post below!

Just like Annie Lennox sings in Who’s That Girl?, I’m sure many of you will say “who is that odd girl talking to herself in a public, mostly glass studio space at the RMG?” That would be me, Brigitte Sampogna! Unlike her song, however, I am not the other woman; I am the next emerging artist in residence.             

I’ve grown up in Whitby/Oshawa and still reside here. Most of my experiences have been dictated by this suburban landscape. I tend to work with items and material I find around me. Some may call keeping everything that makes you feel a little something hoarding, but I call that being an artist with a mediocre memory, emotional attachment, and a tendency for collection. As the saying goes, you never know what is going to come in handy.

I have found that much of our experiences in life collect on us like clothes on a laundry line, soaking wet, heavy and fresh, but as they slowly dry in the warm hug of the sun they no longer need to be hung. Both the duty of the laundry line and the quest of the clothing has completed. Often, when we have forgotten what we had hanging on the line, we may need to repeat the process with additional care and mending.

During my residency, I will be exploring domestic and suburban spaces through an abstract mapping process, which manifests in accumulation and collection. With found items from nature, home, and the suburban environment, I would like to put a frame around domestic repetition, nostalgic adolescence and locate where in suburbia this all lays. 

I am always down to see friendly faces (and ones considered not as much) so feel free to stop by the studio and have a chat!