NEWS RELEASE
CITY OF GUELPH
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The City of Guelph is pleased to announce its 2023 Artists in Residence: Miki Tamblyn, James Gordon, and Jude Akrey. The selected artists will create and present engaging community art experiences for the program’s 10th anniversary.
Miki Tamblyn’s “Animal Forms” is an interactive mask-making and meditation project about shapeshifting, playing, and empathy between species. This project aims to explore how participants can imagine themselves in the place of the animals they share the planet with, and how their thoughts and actions might change when seeing the world from another perspective.
James Gordon promises to capture real Guelph stories from local seniors of diverse backgrounds through facilitated workshops, and shape them into songs, poems, or spoken word. The final pieces produced through “Rhyme Capsules: Guelph’s Tale told in Story and Song” will be shared in a culminating performance involving the song creators and storytellers.
Jude Akrey will assemble 2SLGBTQI+ artists from Guelph to host a series of facilitated arts-based skills workshops, an artist talk, drop-in sharing event, and public exhibition that celebrates diversity of queer arts practices. Through their project “From One Queer to Another,” a body of work will be created for public display with each piece reflecting and memorializing the impact of the events. Artworks will be donated back to the spaces where the events are held.
The council-appointed public art advisory committee reviewed 46 submissions for the 2023 Artists in Residence program.
“We received more expressions of interest from artists than ever before,” says Tammy Adkin, manager of museums and culture. “The committee was very impressed with the range of proposals, representing a wide diversity of perspectives and artistic practices. We’re confident the three artists who will serve as Guelph’s Artists in Residence this year will engage a variety of audiences in moving and meaningful experiences.”
The public can participate in each project during the Culture Days celebration taking place Sept. 22 to Oct 15.
For more information, click here.
About the artists
Miki Tamblyn is a practicing artist and educator in Guelph who graduated from the University of Guelph’s Wildlife Biology and Conservation program, leading to her work with animals. Tamblyn uses her hands to create stories and to better understand her place in the world. Through this process she has become a printmaker, basket weaver, hide-tanner, costume designer and community space-maker. She is constantly collaborating with nature and artists that inspire her. She is an outdoor schoolteacher who loves working with children and teaching art.
James Gordon has had a remarkably diverse and resilient career in the Canadian cultural sector. As a solo singer-songwriter and a member of the ground-breaking trio Tamarack, he has recorded 40 albums and toured around the world. He’s written for symphony orchestras, musical theatre, dance works and scored films. For more than 10 years he was heard on CBC radio as songwriter-in-residence for the “Basic Black” and “Ontario Morning” programs. Between tours, Gordon is a record producer, playwright, community activist, and theatre director.
Jude Akrey is an artist living and practicing on the Between the Lakes Treaty Territory No.3, whose work is rooted in the ongoing exploration and redefinition of queer identity as something that is transitory and ambiguous. This fluid, complex and illuminating identity informs their painting practice. Their colourful, graphic paintings on wood convey the beauty and excitement of living queerly, layered in the ongoing displacement and recalibration they face navigating the world as a trans person. They are dedicated to investigating the power of empowered queer communities through shared experience and artmaking. Jude recently graduated from the University of Guelph with a BA in studio art.
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