ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE

Here lay the artists joining the inaugural Village Canoe Floating Residency (VCFR!) from August - September 2019.

Sam Costello

For Sam Costello, art is a lot like trying to solve a mystery. Her favorite part of the process is the revealing of unintended lessons and surprises about her identity and surroundings. Working with natural materials and outdoor spaces helps her exp…

For Sam Costello, art is a lot like trying to solve a mystery. Her favorite part of the process is the revealing of unintended lessons and surprises about her identity and surroundings. Working with natural materials and outdoor spaces helps her explore relationship to the natural world and create art that feels more connected, interactive, alive, and dynamic. As a Village Canoe Floating Resident artist, Costello is researching, reflecting, observing, and creating on the river with place-based art as a goal.

Sam+Costello+Headshot.jpg

Chloe Dubois

Chloe DuBois is a multimedia artist and designer who lives and practices in Boston. Her focus is on making three dimensional, abstract artworks. By using material as metaphor, she extracts the poetic relationships between humans and nature. She pair…

Chloe DuBois is a multimedia artist and designer who lives and practices in Boston. Her focus is on making three dimensional, abstract artworks. By using material as metaphor, she extracts the poetic relationships between humans and nature. She pairs contrasting materials to derive more meaning from them, by using form and structure, she can guide the story a piece tells. Her artwork requires the use of her whole body and bold approaches to problem solving.

DuBois is devoted to community arts, she is the designer and director of a popup gallery called, GPS: Gallery Possibility Space. During her time with Village Canoe, she will experiment with more ephemeral and sustainable ideas while continuing to solidify the conceptual backing to her practice as it relates to the American landscape.

IMG_20180903_084512.jpg

Alex Hackett

Alex Hackett works as an artist, writer and anthropogastronomer. Her work exists in the shifting boundaries of the natural and the unnatural, across fields of poetics, photography, installation and the edible. Her artistic practice draws on the wate…

Alex Hackett works as an artist, writer and anthropogastronomer. Her work exists in the shifting boundaries of the natural and the unnatural, across fields of poetics, photography, installation and the edible. Her artistic practice draws on the watery as reflection of our mental and emotional states, investigating how we can recognise aspects of ourselves within the natural landscape and the landscape within ourselves. She endeavours to find a ‘becoming with’ the natural world for us as humans, again.

She currently lives in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, learning (slowly) the old ways of living and being within this environment. Island living provides a very much land based experience of water; the island is enclosed, affected and delineated by this element. The residency is a means to explore water as path instead of restriction, and the canoe as a vessel in which to trace the edge of the land, encountering place and its indigenous cultural heritage.

Alex+Hackett-1.jpg

Amanda Kidd-Schall

Amanda Kidd Schall is a printmaker and mixed media artist. She creates abstract landscapes that are inspired by her wanderings in nature and around her garden. She fuses the micro and macro with broad strokes and tiny detail work. Amanda often embroiders and stitches found natural objects into her mixed media pieces. Sewing is a form of mark-making. It also lends an interesting contrast between domestic home spaces associated with sewing and the natural world that is the inspiration for Amanda’s work. The abstract patterns and line that are recurrent in Amanda’s work are reminiscent of mapping, the migration of birds and insects, botanical seed dispersal, and cells under a microscope.

IMG_20180911_112845.jpg
 

Matea Mills-Andruk

Matea Mills-Andruk is a dance artist and choreographer based out of Morrill, ME. She graduated from Middlebury College with a degree in dance and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies. Much of her love for movement and social justice was largely f…

Matea Mills-Andruk is a dance artist and choreographer based out of Morrill, ME. She graduated from Middlebury College with a degree in dance and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies. Much of her love for movement and social justice was largely formed through leading extended canoe trips for young girls in Maine.

Interested in radical communication and honest interactions, she believes in dance as a medium in which to reimagine the ways we interact with each other and our environments. She hopes to share the delights of the baby leaves in the spring and am curious about what happens during the final moments before an emotion shifts. Her work is process-based and values collaboration and risk-taking. Drawing from holistic medicine and plant communication, with a background in neuroscience and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, Mills-Andruk’s process includes improvisation, radical interaction exercises, and somatic exploration. Her work celebrates creation over production and is informed by disruption of the nuclear family, the generative power of staying, compost, and the moon.

1234551_523472101078811_517275462_n-1.jpg

A. Reid

A. Reid is an artist, writer, and educator in Worcester, MA, operating under the idea that artmaking can be a rigorous way of learning and doing work - even if it doesn't look like it, even when it's fun. She runs the Harriet Hemenway Bird Report, a…

A. Reid is an artist, writer, and educator in Worcester, MA, operating under the idea that artmaking can be a rigorous way of learning and doing work - even if it doesn't look like it, even when it's fun. She runs the Harriet Hemenway Bird Report, an open-ended series of works that includes field guides, urban bird walks, a hotline to catalog sightings, and the embroidered records of her own birdwatching life list.

AReidbio.jpg

Gabby Schulz

As a cartoonist, my work inhabits a (rare) niche outside the medium's more orthodox genres -- sequential art allows me to tap intimate liminal spaces which more formal media either can't or won't access. I've embraced gallows humor, a lifelong frien…

As a cartoonist, my work inhabits a (rare) niche outside the medium's more orthodox genres -- sequential art allows me to tap intimate liminal spaces which more formal media either can't or won't access. I've embraced gallows humor, a lifelong friend of comics, as the only sane response to the forces hurrying our own kaleidoscopic collapse, and I see absurdity as one of our few remaining pathways to beauty and joy. Standing at the end of civilization's failed collective dream, my work is a humble plea to decolonize our minds, abandon the machinery of spectacle, and weave ourselves back into what remains of the immediate, tangible world. I'll spend my time in the Village Canoe with my eyes peeled for instructions from the land, water, and fellow travelers for better ways to amplify the voice of nature.

gabbyinarizona.jpg

Paige Speight

Paige paints unusual portraits of the lives and stories that intersect her own, drawing particular inspiration from moments of unexpected vulnerability. Her work with the Village Canoe Floating Residency will explore the intimate interpersonal trium…

Paige paints unusual portraits of the lives and stories that intersect her own, drawing particular inspiration from moments of unexpected vulnerability. Her work with the Village Canoe Floating Residency will explore the intimate interpersonal triumphs and failures inherent in navigating waterways by canoe. Working with wet-on-wet oils she builds thick paintings: flawed and emotive.

speight_paige_portrait.jpg
 
 

Brian Wasser

At the heart of my photography has always been a search for the hidden nature of things. Land, objects, plants - everything has memory, and places are always secretly holding thoughts from another time, just below the surface. This subtle refraction…

At the heart of my photography has always been a search for the hidden nature of things. Land, objects, plants - everything has memory, and places are always secretly holding thoughts from another time, just below the surface. This subtle refraction of the familiar is what my photographs try to imitate. I have always been drawn to the places which lead me to wonder what was there before, places which suggest something that is not always apparent unless you slow down and really communicate with the landscape. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to be a part of the Village Canoe, to work and play and live and move with the other residents, and to connect and communicate with the Maine coast in this immersive and communal way.

33.jpg

Willow WildHeart

Willow WildHeart is an environmental activist and performing artist. Weaving together found or repurposed objects, environment; indoor or outdoor spaces, and her individual self she creates performance style expressions of expansive life in the form…

Willow WildHeart is an environmental activist and performing artist. Weaving together found or repurposed objects, environment; indoor or outdoor spaces, and her individual self she creates performance style expressions of expansive life in the form of puppet magic. Using puppetry magic, there is nothing you can not create, no galaxy you can not traverse nor sea too deep to creep. With breath from her body she brings to life the objects of focus. When organizing with community the opportunities grow larger in size. Directing community puppet pageantry and group movements expand her work to another level.

willowworkingHEADSHOT.jpg