2024 residencies
Born in 1980 in Shigaraki, Shiga Prefecture, Japan, Shigeru Otani (Otani Workshop) lives and works on Awaji Island, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. Otani graduated from Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts in 2004. Following his studies, he worked for Yoshitomo Nara and continued his own practice. In 2008, he began exhibiting as Otani Workshop. At this time, he was introduced to Takashi Murakami, who became his unfailing champion and advocate. In 2017, Otani left the city of Shigaraki, and moved his studio to a refurbished ceramic tile factory on Awaji Island in the Seto Inland Sea.
Otani Workshop: Monsters in My Head (Vancouver Art Gallery)
Karie Cardamone has lived her entire life in beautiful Burnaby, British Columbia. She grew up respecting the environment and loving all of nature’s many creatures. Karie practices out of Shadbolt Center for the Arts and is a member of the Burnaby Potters’ Guild, where she has translated her wonder for nature into ceramic art. Her sculptures are all hand built and range in sizes from one inch to four feet tall. Karie continues to strive to evoke feelings of empathy and love for nature through her work, her main theme being that all of nature’s creatures need a place to call home.
Mao and Chris met while completing their Masters of Fine Arts Degrees at the University of Calgary in 2017. The artists and life partners began collaborating in their home studio in Calgary in 2020, shortly thereafter creating the collaborative studio, Mao Projects. Combining different cultural backgrounds, Mao being born and raised in China and Chris having grown up on the west coast of Canada, the artists look to create works that reflect upon their individual and shared perspectives. They have attended residencies together in Canada and have exhibited collaborative works within Canada, the US and Asia.
Melodie Reay is an artist and educator living in Los Angeles. She received her BFA in ceramics and photography at Concordia University in Montreal, and her MFA in ceramics at Louisiana State University. Compelled by the indexical nature of clay, her work explores ideas of documentation and preservation based on impressions of her surroundings. Throughout her artistic career she has worked as a ceramics technician, university adjunct professor, instructor for community outreach programs for all ages, assistant gallery director, and small business owner. Her work has been shown internationally and she has been the recipient of several scholarships and awards. She was the artist in residence at AARK in Finland in 2016, MAWA in Winnipeg in 2019, and Vermont Studio Center in 2024.
Artist talks: September 10, 2024
Michaela Bridgemohan is an interdisciplinary artist of Jamaican and Australian descent who grew up in Calgary A.B., but now gratefully resides on Syilx territory, in Kelowna, B.C. She received her BFA in Drawing (with Distinction) from the Alberta University of the Arts, and holds a MFA in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Through her paternal Caribbean heritage, Bridgemohan’s artistic research is driven to reinscribe new notions of multiplicity and multi-dimensionality within Black identity in Canada. She includes cultural ways of making as a legitimate form of artistic expression and creative power.
Sun Forest is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is informed by a lifetime of movement through the United States, Canada, and South Korea. Working across sculptural materials, video, performance, and new media, Sun’s work engages with conditions of racial violence and social inequity, as well as our collective capacity to enact resilience and propose new orientations within our bodies and ecologies. Sun has participated in numerous residencies including BANFF, Belkin Art Gallery, Quantum Matter Institute, Diasporic Futurisms, Griffin Art Projects, Centrum, and the Arctic Circle. She currently works within the practice-based PhD in Contemporary Arts program at Simon Fraser University.