'A Wild Studio' is curated by Leanne Zacharias and co-created with Megan Smith.
Cellist Leanne Zacharias is a dynamic interdisciplinary artist known for collaborations with artists of all stripes. Her project Music for Spaces re-imagines public and natural space with sound; recent work includes an immersive soundscape created live within the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, CityWide: simultaneous recitals by 50 cellists opening the International Cello Festival of Canada, Sonus Loci: a sound installation on ice, selected by Winnipeg’s Warming Huts Art/Architecture competition, and Wheat City Nuit Blanche. An intrepid soloist, she was nominated for ‘Best Performer’ by the Austin Critic’s Table for River Measures: a solo series along the Colorado River in Austin, Texas and appeared in Portal Zero, a special installation presented in the 2019 Winnipeg Symphony New Music Festival. Numerous premieres include Pat Carrabre’s Prairie Sky for Cello and Symphonic Band, Concerto Laguna –performed from a rowboat - by Travis Weller and recordings with songwriters Christine Fellows, John K Samson, the Mountain Goats and percussionists Ben Reimer and Eric Platz.
On faculty at Brandon University, Leanne is a popular educator and speaker, with recent appearances at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and Parsons School of Design in New York. She was part of the inaugural Banff Research In Culture workshop, and appears as adjudicator and guest educator across Canada. Recent work includes a tour with Nicole Lizee's SASKPOWER and artist residencies at Nes International Artist Residency in Skagastrond, Iceland and the Churchill Northern Studies Centre were sponsored by the Manitoba Arts Council. Leanne teaches at the Domaine Forget International Academy and Cadenza Music Week. She also co-directs The Hybrid Intensive, an interdisciplinary performance workshop in San Francisco, California. She appeared as cello soloist with the Camerata Nova choir's groundbreaking TAKEN program at the National Arts Centre on National Aboriginal Day, and in the Pressure Waves new music intensive in Winnipeg. Her first solo album, recorded in unique architectural sites around Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario, was released on Redshift Records in 2021.
Megan Smith PhD, is a new media artist and curator. Her art practice probes new systems for delivering syndicated data through narrative structure and she often works with geo-location, live-feed installation, performance, and community projects as methods for storytelling. In December 2015 she embarked on a durational performance in physical computing called ‘Riding Through Walls’ which involves a live-cast cross-Canada cycle through Google Street View, from her studio in Regina. This project is part of the 2016 Project Anywhere global exhibition. She recently partook in ’Channel Surf’, a 12-day art residency travelling from Lake Ontario through the Rideau waterway system to Ottawa by canoe, in June 2015. During this time, she mapped and collected zooplankton samples on route. Her work has recently been included in ‘The Works Art Festival’, Edmonton (June 2015), ‘Conversations électroniques’, La Panacée, Montpellier, France (June-December 2013) and Electric Fields, Ottawa (September 2013). Smith was Creative Director and co-Founder of Canada’s national capital Nuit Blanche festival (2012-2015), a pop-up Contemporary Art event focused on embedding temporary transformative projects into public spaces. The festival annually hosted over a hundred artists from diverse areas of practice and is regularly attended by thousands of smiling people. Smith holds a PhD in Contemporary Art & Graphic Design from Leeds Beckett University and was Assistant Professor in Creative Technology and Adjunct in Visual Arts, @MAP at the University of Regina before accepting a position at University of British Columbia - Okanagan Campus.
2022 Guest artist presenters:
To be announced
2019 GUEST ARTIST PRESENTERS:
Helen Pridmore enjoys a career focused on contemporary scored music, experimental music and improvisation. She has performed across Canada and the USA as well as in Europe and Japan. Helen has performed with the voice/electronics duo Sbot N Wo, with the New Brunswick new music group Motion Ensemble, and as a guest with numerous other organizations, including Aventa Ensemble, the Five Penny New Music Festival in Sudbury, ON, New Music Edmonton, New Works Calgary, the Western Front in Vancouver, BC, Toronto’s Music Gallery, the Sound Symposium in Newfoundland, and more. She has adjudicated at music festivals and given workshops and master classes in Canada, the US and the UK.
Kevin Ei-Ichi deForest is a visual artist and educator. He is department chair of the Department of Visual and Aboriginal Art at Brandon University.
2017 GUEST ARTIST PRESENTER:
Peter Morin is Tahltan Nation artist, writer, and curator. Morin’s visual work concerns itself with understanding the complex relationships between land, spirit, and difficult political histories. Morin joined the Visual and Aboriginal Art Department at Brandon University in 2014.
2016 Guest Presenters:
Natalia Lebedinskaia is the current Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba in Brandon, MB. Since joining the gallery in 2011, she has produced projects and exhibitions by Lita Fontaine, David McMillan, Greg Staats, Kevin Conlin, Jillian McDonald, and Peter Morin, among many others. She holds an MA in Art History and a BFA in Art History & Studio Art from Concordia University, and has previously held internships at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Her research focuses on negotiations of personal and collective memory within the public sphere. Her curatorial approach aims to build communities, both ephemeral and lasting, through exhibitions and programming. Lebedinskaia has recently been named as one of the curators for LandMarks: Art + Places + Perspectives, a network of collaborative contemporary art projects that will take place in Canada’s national parks in 2017.
Lynn Whidden PhD, is a ethnomusicologist. She has maintained an extensive research carreer studying music, anthropology, and folklore, with a concentration on building detailed ethnomusicologies of the Inuit of the Northwest Territories, the James Bay Cree in Quebec, and the northern plains Indians. She has published several articles relating to the topic of Native music. She completed a prairie French/Métis/Native song collection for the SMEA in 1990. In 2007 she received a ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award, and was Shortlisted for the Manitoba Historical Society Margaret McWilliams Award for her book “Essential Song-Three Decades of Northern Cree Music”. Whidden was a faculty member within the Native Studies Department of Brandon University. She is a contributor to EMC.
Riding Mountain National Park Fred Sheppard (Park Interpreter and Visitor Experience Officer), Richard Dupuis (Visitor Experience Director), Laura Brandon (First Nation Park Interpreter)