UN/making Waste and the Archive!

To begin, I would like to congratulate my dear friends Amy Bagshaw and Jeanette Luchese for being nominated for the 2024 Barrie Art Awards! Their creative contributions and achievements should be considered noteworthy even beyond our small community.

On a more personal note, this summer and fall have been a rollercoaster of mixed emotions while shifting from academic obligations to creative aspirations. Luckily, I have continued to meet and surround myself with wonderful people who have made this transition a little easier. As usual, I must give a shout-out to Frances Thomas who continues to initiate so many wonderful evenings and collaborations out of Studio 8 in addition to all of the amazing work she is doing at the Royal Victoria Hospital to build their contemporary art collection! For those of you who like to thrift, shop local, and collect art, be sure to catch our collaborative Art Emporium at the Spare Room Gallery starting Friday, November 29th at 5 pm to check out all of the interesting things and art we have accumulated and traded for over the years. Follow us @ https://www.facebook.com/ptartcolab to see updates about items for sale.

Yes, we know it is Black Friday, but this "everything old is new again" two-week event stands in resistance to the accelerated rate of online shopping and global industrial capitalism that disconnects us from one another and wreaks havoc on the planet. Can't make our listed hours above? Give me a call at 705-229-5211 to book your private shopping experience by yourself, with a friend, amongst office cohorts, or even alongside the whole family.

Other interesting developments are in the works for the Wht-trSH project as a result of a recent photography residency on Toronto Island with the amazing artist April Hickox. Using the week to play, I began to experiment with cyanotypes by using collected clear plastic wraps and bags to create dark watery patterns on reclaimed papers. Sometimes producing a dark blue like the deep waters of the ocean, and sometimes arriving at lighter with swirling areas of white, I am currently working towards an installation for the MacLaren Art Centre inspired by the depth and shape of Kempenfelt Bay. With plans to run a free cyanotype activity during Kempenfest next summer, I am also in the midst of designing rinsing contraptions that will allow the public to rinse their cyanotypes safely in the bay; a strategy which helps to drastically reduce the amount of running water normally used during this process. As I have just received an exhibition assistance grant from the Ontario Art Council for this upcoming project, I would like to extend my thanks to Interim Director, Tyler Durbano for his support in moving this project forward in the MacLaren's exhibition timeline.

Three other amazing events I am currently involved with include Modern Fuels' annual members exhibition entitled Re-Member, the MacLaren Art Centre's annual Off-the-Hook Art Auction, and Westland Gallery's Square-foot exhibition. Important revenue generators for their affiliated institutions, be sure to show support by adding one of the many wonderful works on display to your collection. To check out which reconfigured collages and assemblages I have made available for these exhibitions, click the images below.

I am also grateful to a lovely young curator named Maya Allison studying with the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities at Western University who included me in an exhibition entitled Cluttered Delicacy at the Satellite Project Space. Inspired by her grandmother's maximalist aesthetic, it was fun to pull out elements from previous installations to honour the materials and objects that fill our lives with joy and hold memories.

Looking forward to seeing everyone at the Art Emporium starting next Friday. Jill

Jill Price Studios and the UN/making Network respectfully acknowledge that they reside on Treaty 16 and Treaty 18 Lands, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe peoples, including the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Pottawatomi nations, collectively known as the Three Fires Confederacy.

So now what?!

As many of you may know, in June I finally walked across the stage at Queen's University to mark the end of my PhD journey. Although a little anti-climatic in that I had defended in November 2023 and as a doctoral student you don't walk across the stage with your entire cohort, it felt like an important moment none the less as I now had to start thinking about what I was going to do next!

Also co-hosting a lovely event of walking, planting, and eating out at the Hickling Farm as a way to say thank you to members of the Barrie community who have been integral to the journey, I can honestly say that as much as I was feeling a sense of relief about being done, there was a huge amount of anxiety building up in me at the thought of needing to come up with and stick to goals / projects outside of any existing institution or funding.

As such, since April, I have been busy applying for grants, exhibitions, residencies, conferences, and any other opportunity that spoke to me in an attempt to escape the post-Phd blues. With many of those applications ending in rejections, luckily, it was an amazing walking artist residency on Toronto Island with Simon Pope and Sarah Cullen that provided me with some direction and inspiration that helped me to arrive at a current project entitled Wht-trSH.

Recently accepted into an exhibition entitled The Ecology of Freedom; an ecological broadside campaign presented by ecoartspace in collaboration with The Crow's Nest, in Baltimore, Maryland, author and climate action advocate Leonardo Martinez-Diaz and Patricia Watts selected twenty-four artists to be part of the show including Mark Armbruster, Lynn Benson, Christina Bertea, Mazerick Betko, Pamela Casper, Nicole Dextras, Environmental Performance Agency (EPA), Holly Fay, Carol Flueckiger, Helen Glazer, Lawrence Gipe, Karen Hackenberg, Katie Kehoe, Deborah Kennedy, Pierre Leichner, Taina Litwak, Minal Mistry, Constance Old, Hugh Pocock, Jatun Risba, Jann Rosen-Queralt, Ruth Wallen, and Bart Woodstrup.

Excited to be included in the exhibition, I was immediately re-energized to introduce the project to Simcoe County during the 2024 Culture Days in which I have invited others to help clean up Johnson's Beach, Centennial Beach, Couchiching Beach, Innisfil Park Beach and Minet's Point before the first snow.

Inspired by own childhood spent playing on the beaches of Lake Ontario and reclaiming and refocusing the derogatory saying of white-trash to reference waste as a colonizing force, not unlike the five white gifts/lies of flour, sugar, dairy, lard, and salt given to Indigenous communities during the formation of reserves and reservations in North America, this performative and interactive project acknowledges how the shininess of mass-produced objects and their packaging disguise multiple ills contained within their material bodies that wreak havoc on human and more-than-human conditions.

The project also attempts to redress how walking as an artform has become problematized due to having a foothold in early practices of Euro-colonial exploration, appropriation, development, and industrialization of lands not one's own. To read more about social issues around walking, you should definitely visit the Walking Lab website directed by Dr. Stephanie Springgay and Dr. Sarah E. Truman, two scholars also extremely influential in the areas of research creation.

Still trying to figure out how to grow this project so as to incorporate my drawing practice, I am beginning to think on how I might also a create a store that sells some of the bizarre and valuable things I find on the beach during the clean-up walks.

Commercially, I have also continued to show my Landscapes on Tables series that involved painting over old work, and UN/make old works on paper to create a series of collage works entitled Notations. Initially abstract and minimalist in their output, this has led to a couple of interesting commissions in which I have been asked to create very personal collages to commemorate a volunteer award and a wedding ceremony! Sometimes you never know where your work will take you. A big thank you to Frances Thomas, Lagom Gallery, Wildewood Gallery Royal Victoria Hospital and Pamela Ross for making all of this possible.

A new UN/maker Series Interview, Artist Retreat and Studio!

Thank you for all the support you have shown The UN/maker Series interviews. There has been quite a hiatus between conducting the interview with Elvira Hufschmid and being able to publish it for the public due to many technological difficulties that required its re-recording, editing and learning a new video editing program due to Microsoft deeming my old program obsolete. These delays were additionally prolonged due to the production and refining of a 250-page thesis paper (yikes), harvesting seeds from the garden I planted at Union Gallery and the creation of more seed paper at the Paperhouse Studio in Toronto in preparation for the hand rendering of the UN/making Methodology. Now ready for viewing or listening, I hope you will gain new insight into how to further UN/make harm through your creative practice and share with others interested in embracing more eco-ethical ways of thinking and doing.

For those curious about how my Ph.D. is coming along, I am scheduled to defend on November 10th in Kingston, Ontario! Am I nervous? Absolutely! However, I have been distracting myself by trying to figure out what I will do next beyond starting to research how I can get more involved with groups/artists working with forests in the Simcoe County region. If anyone has any suggestions, please reach out, as I would like to continue incorporating environmental care and repair into my research and output.

Botanical Drawing by Jill Price

So what do I know? I know I have been asked to lead a mixed-media artist retreat in Sicily, Italy, in March! This workshop will focus on the unique beauty, materiality and agency of plants within this Italian landscape, so whether you like to draw or paint landscapes, animals, the human figure or plants themselves, it will be a rich week of experimentation and discussion to explore how we are connected to these magical beings and how artists can respectfully use trees or other botanical bodies as substrate, subject or medium. Here's the link to discover what the retreat includes and book one of the few spots left. Please note this is not strictly an oil painting retreat, as we will be playing with plants as pigment.

The other good news is I am sharing an studio with Tyler Durbano at 8 Sarjeant Drive in Barrie, Ontario in the same building , where Frances Thomas has her studio space. We would love it if you would join us for an open house later in November to celebrate this coming together of bodies, ideas and art.

For those of you who would like to follow along a little more closely, you can follow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/unmakingnetwork/, where I often publish the performative aspects and outcomes of my research. To check out some of the works I have been creating due to making UNmaking older works, visit my new page of Peggy to view and collect my latest abstract collages and graphite drawings.

Have a great fall, Jill.