she/her

During the residency, Sian will create a quilted textile piece that remixes the archive, with an image of Kathleen Borden serving as its anchor. Kathleen was Sian’s great-grandmother’s sister, who left New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, for Toronto and died young. Little is known about her life, but Sian’s family has this badass photo of her. Sian intends to create a textile collage, recreating Kathleen’s silhouette and queering her surroundings through inspiration drawn from archival materials. The story of this project is one of Black Canada and queerness, combating the invisibility of Sian’s identities through imagining and creating with the archival record.

she/her

During the Remix Residency, Kizzy plans to create a mixed-media painting that complements and extends her Master's research on the school-to-prison pipeline while drawing from her personal and familial experiences with the issue. By incorporating archival materials such as family photographs, handwritten documents, and personal writing, she hopes to explore how her family, alongside many other Black families, has navigated systems of surveillance, discipline, and inequality. Through visual storytelling, the work seeks to humanize the realities of the school-to-prison pipeline while highlighting the resilience, complexity, and strength of Black families navigating these systems.

she/her

As part of the Remix Residency, ZARI is focused on refining a distinct artistic voice, expanding into music production, and contributing to Canada's next generation of electronic artists. Inspired by the communities that have shaped house music around the world, they continue to push toward a sound that is both globally influenced and unmistakably their own.

During the Remix Residency, ZARI will explore the Black queer origins of house and techno music through archival research and sound-based practice. By engaging with oral histories, recordings, photographs, interviews, and other archival materials, they aim to investigate how DJs function as archivists, preserving and reinterpreting cultural memory through music. This research will inform the creation of a DJ mix and original musical sketches that weave historical narratives into contemporary house music. Through this process, ZARI hopes to deepen their artistic practice while honouring the communities whose creativity transformed electronic music and continues to shape its future.

she/her

We Do It All: A Queer Candid Collection

During The Remix Residency at Cultivate Art Commons, Shanique will build on her ongoing project, Intersection. She seeks to shift from documenting others' stories to creating a personal archive that explores her identity as a Black, queer artist. Over the course of one month, she'll conduct archival research, facilitate community portrait sessions, and source materials that speak to QTBIPOC presence in Kingston. The work will weave contemporary portraits with found archival materials, culminating in a cohesive body of work that will anchor a 2027 group exhibition following her Q4 artist-in-residence term at the Tett Centre.

he/she/they/Noel

During the residency, Noel will expand on previous work to further imagine themselves in relationality with the land and peoples of Katarokwi by focusing on the archival materials of Indigenous, Black/African, queer people, and students. They plan to re-map the city, analyzing sites of institutional resistance, cultural resurgence, and queer presence. Taking the land as present, they will study its entrenched past and catapult it into a new, abundant future.