Visiting Artists’ Residency Exhibition

We are excited to announce our 2020 – 22 Visiting Artists’ (VA) Residency exhibition featuring work by Nour Bishouty, Rachel Crummey and Laura Findlay.

The Visiting Artist Residency Program allows artists to realize a creative project in print media using traditional and experimental methods.

During the residency, visiting artists work with a collaborative printmaker and are encouraged to explore how print can contribute to, or expand, their artistic practice. The culmination of this exploration results in a dynamic group exhibition.

The 2022-23 Visiting Artist Residency Program was also made possible thanks to the educational and collaborative support of the following printmakers: Heather J.A. Thomson, Meggan Winsley and Joy Wong.

---

Nour Bishouty
During her residency, Nour Bishouty developed new work that expanded on current themes and concerns in her practice including landscape, land, and botany—this time centring on cartography as a mode of knowledge production.

She created four screenprints in which she used reproductions of illustrated plants native to Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria as primary motifs to generate compositions that play with visual tropes of cartography and map-making and create distorted and abstracted landforms. Bishouty tapped into printmaking as a medium historically used for disseminating knowledge, thinking of her “maps” as abstracted gestures that subvert their own form.

This project was printed at Open Studio in collaboration with Miles Ingrassia under the auspices of the Visiting Artist Residency Program, 2020-22.

Nour Bishouty is an artist working with video, sculpture, digital images, installation, works on paper, and writing. Her practice engages familial and material histories exploring colonial legacies and posing questions around dissonance, opacity, legibility, and the generative possibilities of misunderstanding. Bishouty has an MFA in Visual Arts, the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2014) and was a fellow at the 2014/15 HWP program at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and internationally including Gallery44 (Toronto), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Toronto), Access Gallery (Vancouver), Darat Al Funun (Amman), the Beirut Art Centre, Casa Arabe (Madrid & Córdoba), and the Mosaic Rooms (London).

Nour gratefully acknowledges funding support from the Ontario Arts Council.

—

Rachel Crummey
During her residency, Rachel Crummey created A Spider’s Diary, a series of hybrid monoprints/screenprints that emerged during a fraught and uncertain time. The residency was begun just as the pandemic gained momentum, and its disjointed rhythm echoed the closures and re-openings that came to punctuate the time that followed. The drawing process became both a refuge from and an extension of uncertain outcomes. What does it mean to think with the hand? What do our bodies know? What links objects and events, and how do they spread through space and time? An unhinged web becomes a loose framework for delineating space.

This project was printed at Open Studio in collaboration with Jessica Palmer under the auspices of the Visiting Artist Residency Program, 2020-22.

Rachel Crummey is a visual artist and writer of settler descent based in Tkaronto / Toronto. Her poetry and visual art have been published in the Capilano Review, Maisonneuve, and the Malahat Review. She is currently working on a research project, What Can Fungi Teach Us About Improvisation, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts.

—

Laura Findlay
Working primarily through gestural representational painting, Laura Findlay compresses massive sublime natural forces to the confines of a canvas, while exposing and enlarging the quiet and mysterious world of nocturnal bodies.

During her residency, Findlay used a dark field monotype printing process to render images from a garden at night, considering it as a transitory site to examine the interplay in notions of nature, the environment, and technology. A garden serves as a junction between natural and man-made environments, offering both unmistakable and ambivalent encounters with beauty. The imagery she used to make this work reference photography through an exaggerated flash and artificial lighting that points to photography’s quality of freezing time. This draws from the theories of the photographic medium and its ontology of death: a subject captured in a photograph is made real by being recorded in a tangible form. The works permanently affix the life and death cycle of a living garden, not alive but also impervious to death.

The cycle of life and death and rebirth in a garden echoes the sequence of how Findlay produces a print by adding, manipulating, and wiping away ink to produce an image before affixing it to paper. She explores how these subjects and actions can be intertwined in a project that marries the process and the idea on the surface of the work.

Pamela Dodds provided educational support for this residency project under the auspices of the Visiting Artist Residency Program, 2020-22.

Laura Findlay (b. 1984 Montreal) received her BFA from Concordia University in 2011 and her MFA from the University of Guelph in 2014. Her practice encompasses painting, drawing, and installation, with recent exhibitions at Gallery 1C03, Winnipeg; Norberg Hall, Calgary; Egret Egress, Toronto; Galerie Division, Montreal; Arsenal Contemporary, Toronto, and Forest City Gallery, London. She has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, the Banff Centre, and at the Brucebo Foundation in Gotland, Sweden. She now lives and works in Toronto, Canada.