Hexagon Fellowship Artist Talks 2017
Date: November 16, 2017 | Time: 6:00 - 8:00 PM
Hexagon Special Projects Artist Talks: Thursday, November 16, 2017 from 6:00pm to 8:00 pm
Through the support of an anonymous donor, the Hexagon Special Projects Fellowship Residency provides an annual fellowship to support a mid-career or established Open Studio Artist Member through the provision of six consecutive months of studio time to create and complete a specific project.
Hexagon Special Projects Fellowship Residency Recipient 2016-17: Liz Menard
Liz Menard is a printmaker, book artist and arts educator. Menard grew up exploring the forests, streams and fields in Agincourt and near her cottage in the Kawartha Lakes. Canoe trips into Algonquin Park helped nurture her love and respect for these ecologies and the plants and animals that struggle to survive. Menard’s work addresses our relationship to nature and how it shapes our sense of place and sense of self, reflecting us as a society and as individuals. Human development has created loss of connectivity, fragmented ecologies and marginalized habitat, threatening our environment. There is much to lose. Menard is cautiously optimistic, as nature has proven resilient. Resiliency is essential for recovery from trauma; trauma results in loss of connection, fragmentation and marginalization. Recovery involves many factors, but connection to nature is vital. Recent exhibitions include River’s Nature, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, University of Toronto; SHIFT: Environmentally Responsible Print Practices, McMaster University; and The National Printmaking Exhibition, Edinboro University, Pennsylvania. Menard has participated in national and international residencies. Her work is held in public and private collections. She was Open Studio’s 2012 Nick Novak Fellow. During her time as Hexagon Fellow, Menard explored connections between nature and resiliency .
Hexagon Special Projects Fellowship Residency Recipient 2017-18: Pascaline Knight
Pascaline Knight weaves disciplines such as printmaking, micro-publishing, writing, concrete poetry, drawing, stop-motion animation, and performance featuring the book object as a vehicle for non-semantic narratives. She holds a Bachelor in Studio Art from Concordia University and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design from OCADU. She has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, participating in self-publishing art book fairs Tirage Limité (Lausanne, Switzerland) and Toronto Art Book Fair (2017), as well as GRAFF: Le Livre d’Artiste Repensé at the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec (Montreal, 2017).
The Hexagon Fellowship residency will be used to incorporate the Standard Cahier Canada student exercise book to deconstruct and examine the effects of standards and their consequences in our daily environment, specifically, by using the red margin and blue lines to demonstrate how implicit standards (within language and technology) regulate thought. Knight hopes to make a bespoke version of her research thesis, in a small edition of 25 to 50 and to learn letterpress.