Summer Residency
Chris Dufour
1 July – 18 August 2024

Open Studio Workshops: July 13, July 20, and August 10, 2024, from 1:00 – 4:00 PM *updated*
WKRAC Culture Tour: August 10 + 11, 2024, from 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Closing Event: August 17, 2024, at 1:00 PM
Admission is free.

About the Residency:

Concerned about the ways that relationships get built or cast aside with ecologies altered by industry, Chris will be working on researching material practices that collaborates with the deforested cut block.

Chris will be utilizing plant-based dyes, plant-photo developers, quilting, printmaking, and social practice to gather around what it might mean to care for the remnants of extractive industries. During the residency Chris will be hosting open studio gatherings/workshops to share the practices and invite folks to bring their own relational practices to ecologies.

Image caption (1 +3): The Fireweed Quilt (2023) was a social practice quilt with Danika Azevedo (@kingrat_ on instagram) that invited forestry workers into using materials from the cut block to make natural dyes and cyanotypes. 
Image caption (2): The collective dye sheet is from Alexis Hogan and I’s exhibition with busy hands (2022) which indexed our closing conversation with 10 youth from Artemis Place Secondary where we discussed relationships of climate, queerness, belonging (alienation), identity, and ecology. 

Artist Bio:

Chris Dufour (they/them) is an interdisciplinary social practice artist working between Kanien’kehá:ka and Lekwungen territory. Chris uses mediums of plants, gardening, ecological wandering, textiles, quilting, installation, darkroom manipulation, leather tanning, and sculpture to process questions of how do we cultivate a sense of belonging within and among systemic power dynamics? How do we push against empire while cultivating resilient communities and cultures of care? What practices of living can we recuperate, develop, and employ within contemporary cultures of crisis?

Of Irish and Quebecois heritage, Chris grew up outside of Kjipuktuk (so called Halifax, Nova Scotia) and has spent the last 8 years working and living across many territories on Turtle Island. After attending the Yukon School of Visual Arts, Chris took on a practice of grassroots learning that brought them to social practice, permaculture, soil ecology, and accessible community-based education. Throughout, Chris values projects which seek to utilize material practices as a facilitator, to process connections and relationships to ecologies, modalities of care, alternative futures, and ruminations about world building.

This program is generously sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Regional District of Central Kootenay ReDi program, and Columbia Power.