The Creative Reuse Artist Residency is an opportunity for makers to focus on and highlight the dynamic potential for reuse and repurposing of materials.
Participants are encouraged to consider the full lifecycle of their creations and other themes including circular economies and social and environmental sustainability. Selected participants have full access to CUCCR’s materials and help in creating works that explore creative reuse and repurposing and care in material practices.
This year applications were open to undergraduate students from all departments of Concordia University.
Six artists were selected to have access to studio space at 4th Space between January and March where they will be experimenting with material processes focused on reuse. The residency culminates around March 22nd, when the Concordia Center for Creative Reuse will be celebrating its 6th year in operation.
For the CUCCR residency, Raviya Azad will be experimenting with used and found materials and exploring notions of immateriality with the aim of developing a more intentional, conscious and sustainable art practice. She will be making recycled paper, taking a lot of walks, and looking for the colour blue.
The subject of my residency explores possibilities of integrated somatic experiencing within contained eco-realities and eco-futures. Using mostly organic materials, or materials that can be reused many times, I’ll be cleaning and creating works with bones, growing large kombucha scobies as biomaterial, bottling and giving away kombucha starter, using practices like crochet, shadow art, paper sculpting, and more to create an interactive display of slow production. In connecting to the circular nature of life-death cycles, my process examines histories which have shaped certain contemporary ways of knowing and being. With critical reference to neo-liberal, neo-colonial expressions of technocratic futurism, the goal is to experiment with potential forms of restoration and resiliency through holistic eco-social networks. Using embodied techniques, organic decomposition / re-composition, analog documentation, performance, and storytelling, the aim is to document a life cycle analysis through sensorial expressions of an alternative eco-reality.
Kaitlyn is using fiber arts to explore concepts of nostalgia, the ephemeral, and meaning in an ever-revolving time that is defined by its desire to consume the next best thing. Influenced by the whimsy of fairy tales, her project intends to emphasize her notion that even a mere fabric scrap has meaning.
Emem Etti is a Nigeria-born, Vancouver-raised filmmaker and installation artist currently doing a BFA in film production at Concordia University. As a female growing up in a traditional Nigerian home in Canada, the dichotomy between the two cultures fuelled various projects she has taken on over the past few years and further pushed her to pursue storytelling in the form of visual arts. Emem strives to create work that challenges the notion of black portrayal, female representation, as well as explore the realms of Afrofuturism, surrealism and expanded cinema. Within the CUCCR Residency, Emem strives to create a masquerade suit from recycled material; utilizing ancestral ways of knowing in a contemporary and sustainable context.
Keith Fernandez / Drag persona KAJOL is excited to find creative ways to use plastics and other materials that have a short life span within a drag practice. Drag is expensive and often considered opulent, over the top and maximalist. But the first drag collectives had practices that were based in recycling items over and over again to reinvent each others looks every night they went out. What could a drag practice look like though the lens of sustainability? Keith is exploring through the building of wigs and clothing items, constructed entirely from items that are often forgotten and have short life spans. He is excited to use this residency to engage with the local drag community in an effort to built drag aesthetics based in creative reuse, sharing and with an eco conscious perspective.
Evelyn Rick is a disabled, immunocompromised white settler and dyke. Their Artistic practice deals with immunosuppression as a critical optic, access intimacies and queer desire, through painting, sculpture, comics and poetry. Throughout the Creative Reuse Artist Residency, Ev will be converting Styrofoam waste into castable resin to form small fleshy sculptures. They are interested in the ways that disability justice is often, incongruously, set at odds with environmental justice in popular critical discourse. As a way of scaling up the project through community involvement, they have set up a special Styrofoam recycling bin on campus for people to donate Styrofoam waste materials and to engage in developing shared strategies of resilience.
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