THE KENT HARRISON ARTS COUNCIL
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Past Artists/Writers in residence

Colleen Brown
Artist in Residence: 2022 - 2023

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 Colleen Brown explores the relationships of objects and materials to think through abstraction and social encounters. Brown holds a BFA from Emily Carr University, a BA Psyc, Simon Fraser University and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, New York. Her recent solo exhibitions include, That Mountain is a Good Listener,  Burrard Foundation and Low Pressure Idaho, Unit 17. She has participated in exhibitions and events at Living Lab, Emily Carr University; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Vancouver Art Gallery; Western Gallery, Bellingham; Hedreen Gallery, Seattle; and The Apartment, Vancouver. Colleen's first book, If you lie down in a field, she will find you there was published in the Fall of 2023.
​colleenvbrown.org 
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Lewis Bennett
Artist in Residence: 2021 - 2022

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Lewis Bennett is a documentary filmmaker originally from Langley, now based in Vancouver. His films have screened on The New York Times Op-Docs website, in galleries such as the Portland Art Museum, and at film festivals such as TIFF, Hot Docs, and Tribeca. His most recent documentary work has been made using found footage - material he compiled from numerous sources including home video tapes and video-sharing websites like YouTube.

www.lewisbennett.com
www.vimeo.com/lewisbennett


Ava P Christl
Artist in Residence: 2019 to 2021

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Ava P Christl was born in Duncan, BC, on Vancouver Island, and moved to northern BC with her family when she was three. Ava finished high school in Terrace, then moved back to Vancouver Island for a few years, after which she returned north, this time to Yellowknife, NWT. Ava left Yellowknife to attend art school, and graduated from NSCAD University in 1986. She then spent a year in Baker Lake, Nunavut managing the Sanavik Printmaking Cooperative after which she settled in Whitehorse, Yukon for about 18 years. Ava began her art career during the Whitehorse years and, over time, held public gallery exhibitions across northern and western Canada. During those years she taught drawing and painting in a variety of capacities from after school art programs to artists in the schools to private workshops. Ava also sat on the board of the Yukon Arts Centre and was actively engaged in the Yukon arts community through paid work and volunteerism. In the early 2000’s Ava moved south to Victoria, BC where she became a professional cook, an organic gardener, and a student, leaving her full-time art practice for some 10 years. She continued to paint throughout those years and was actively engaged in community arts by starting an annual art walk/studio tour in her Vic West neighbourhood where she also designed and hosted a number of community arts projects as part of neighbourhood events such as Vic West Fest. Ava began a return to her full time art practice in recent years by seeking out and participating in artists residencies in Canada and the USA. Ava is pleased to be Artist in Residence at the Ranger Station Art Gallery.
https://avapchristl.tumblr.com/


Aileen Penner
Artist in Residence: 2018-2019

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Aileen Penner is an emerging mixed-media artist and encaustic painter based in Victoria, BC. Her formal training is as a writer and poet and it is her love of language, science and nature that informs and inspires her work. Themes in her work centre on loss: loss of species, loss of family, trauma and where to place our collective chaos and grief. She is heavily influenced and curious about scientific ways of understanding the world and she is equally interested in what goes into the “scientific method,” as what is left out.  Her work has been exhibited at the Fortune Gallery, the North Vancouver Community Art Gallery, Gulf of Georgia Cannery in Steveston, and the VIVO Media Arts Centre in Vancouver. She was the Artist in Residence at Camosun College this last summer working on a series of cyanotypes for a solo show of her work at Xchanges Gallery in Victoria, BC on October 5, 2018.
 
While in residence, Aileen will be working on a series of mixed-media and collage panels that look at animals, the museum and natural history and ask what role humans play in this (un)telling. She will draw on her love of scientific ways of knowing and a collection of natural history journals gifted to her by her science communication mentor, Jay Ingram, in creating objects the viewer can interact with.
www.aileenpenner.com


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Sean Karemaker​
Artist in Residence: 2017 - 2018 


​Sean Karemaker is an artist living in Vancouver, BC. After a childhood obsession with reading and writing comics, he obtained a diploma in graphic design from Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo (2002) and began a career in 3D design for video games, while also doing freelance work in graphic design and illustration. Personal narrative is a common element in his body of work, which encompasses diorama sculptures, comics, scrolls, and paintings. Sean’s work has been exhibited at such local art galleries as the Gam, the Gropps, the Seymour, the Pendulum, and the Ayden and YVR airport. 

While Sean is in residence, he will be completing his graphic novel, Feast of Fields, forthcoming with Conundrum Press (Halifax) in 2018. The book weaves through a cerebral account of his mother's childhood in Esbjerg, Denmark in 1961, Sean's interpretation of her stories, and his relationship with his mother. Sean is also working on a virtual reality component of the book that will provide an immersive storytelling experience. 

www.seankaremaker.com  


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Bren Simmers

Writer in Residence: 2016 - 2017

An award-winning writer whose work is rooted in a sense of place, Bren Simmers is the author of two books of poetry, Hastings-Sunrise (Nightwood, 2015) and Night Gears (Wolsak and Wynn, 2010). Set in East Vancouver, Hastings-Sunrise is a book-length poem that chronicles the search for home in a city with an increasingly high cost of living and was a finalist for the 2015 City of Vancouver Book Award.

Bren completed a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and the Squamish Arts Council. She won the ARC Poem of the Year Award and has been a finalist for The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize and the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award.   www.brensimmers.com



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Anne J Steves
Artist In Residence: 2015 - 2016
Anne J Steves is a visual artist working primarily through textiles, drawing and thread based media. Her work examines the narratives of place using the aesthetics of common craft materials. Anne engages with new places and communities through artist residencies, exhibitions and other travel opportunities and allows these experiences to influence her making process. So far this has included a canoe journey in Ottawa, a string figure themed artist book project in Victoria and a study of traditional wool blankets in Wales.

Born in Wales, Anne made British Columbia her home in 2000 and has since received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2007) and a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria (2010). Anne has taught drawing at the University of Victoria and classes at the intersection between art and craft at the Vancouver Island School of Art, Gower College in Wales and various community spaces. Her work has been included in several juried exhibitions including Painting On The Edge, the Wales Portrait Award and the Salt Spring National Art Prize.
WEBSITE: http://annejsteves.myportfolio.com
BLOG: www.annejsteves.wordpress.com

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Aimee Henny Brown
Artist in residence: 2014 - 2015


BIO
Aimée Henny Brown, an artist and educator of settler ancestry, completed her BFA at the University of Alberta and obtained her Master’s in Fine and Media Arts at NSCAD University. Aimée’s artistic practice engages archives, research, and printed matter to question historical content within her contemporary art practice. She has received several awards and grants, notably the Joseph Beuys Scholarship for Artistic Merit and several Canada Council Production Grants. Her collages, drawings, performances and bookworks have been presented nationally and internationally, with group shows in Japan, Germany, Scotland, Knoxville, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and solo exhibitions across Canada. She has attended numerous artist residencies and presents regularly to artists, students, and international audiences.  Represented by the Vancouver Art Gallery Art Rental and Sales program and Ian Tan’s Online Art Gallery (OAG), Aimée is an Assistant Professor: foundations, 3D and extended media with the University of the Fraser Valley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
As a project-based artist, I activate printed matter in flat, spatial, and time sensitive manners.  Archives, historical documents, and photo-based media are investigated through the practice and methodology of collage.  Analogue collage - cut and paste - encourages a liminal space where print and paper transcend their material qualities and shift from their initial meanings. My practice addresses both the history and fate of printed matter as tangible elements in a virtual era. 
Inspired by architectural structures and traditional landscape photography, my collage works are assembled from hand-cut, 20th century paper publications.  Close observation of light, shadow, colour, and resolution of printed matter from this era inform the meticulous components and compositions. I choose collage as a way of making so that I can challenge recorded histories and re-envision known terrains.  In the series ‘Performing Nature’, I am colliding photographic fragments of exterior, ‘natural’ phenomena with domestic interior elements featuring patterns inspired by flora and fauna.   The composite ex/in-terior sites foster a dialogue about the meaning and romanticism of the word ‘nature’, at a moment when the living                                                                                  world is deeply entangled with human intervention.

 
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www.aimeehennybrown.com/ 


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Anouk Jonker
Artist in Residence: 2013 - 2014


Born in 1989 in Uithoorn, the Netherlands, Anouk became interested in art when she started practicing portraiture in high school. She received her BFA in 2011 from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and has since continued to develop her studio practice. She has tried to combine her passions for art and travel, participating in studio residency in Paris at 59 Rivoli and a year-long residency in Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia. Jonker’s paintings have been exhibited internationally in countries such as Ireland, France, the Netherlands, and the United States. She currently lives and works in Victoria, BC.
 
The imagery she uses in her art is influenced by her European upbringing in a rural Canadian landscape. Her work explores the physicality of paint and the duality between abstract and representational art.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKjCeBT4l2o
http://anoukjonker.com/

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Siobhan Humston
Artist in Residence: 2012-2013


Since being Artist in Residence at the Ranger Station, 2012-2013, Siobhán completed an MFA-Art & Environment at Falmouth University, England in 2016, Artist Residencies with Haida Gwaii Museum & Parks Canada, Sitka Center of Art & Ecology (Oregon, US), Earthskin (New Zealand), Cultureland (Netherlands) among others, ending with an extended two year residency at Marlborough College in Wiltshire, UK in 2020. Moving back to Canada in early 2021, she currently lives and works in a small barn on the shores of Lake Huron while creating multi disciplinary work that centres on human connection to and entanglement with our natural environment. 

www.siobhanhumstonart.com
 


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Aaron Moran
Artist in Residence 2011-2012

Aaron Moran is a visual artist based in Metro Vancouver. His practice incorporates sculpture, installation, photography and print. He received a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and an MFA from the University of Windsor. During his residency, he completed projects for Zara, Sperry Top-Sider, and Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, and has since exhibited his sculptures and site specific projects in Canada, the United States, and abroad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4wxyMVtviY 
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eH6hNuhvX8
http://aaronsmoran.com/


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Rhonda Simmons
Artist in Residence: 2010-2011


Born and raised in Fredericton New Brunswick
Creativity is the walk and talk of Rhonda's life, being a lifelong learner and traveler with a deep commitment to family,friends and community. Rhonda's projects and work reflect the diverse nature of  interests which include Public Art, Installations, Social "Artivism" and Creative Facilitation.  This diversity has provided a balance between making and maintaining public art installations, running workshops, facilitating one-on-one artistic expression sessions and producing commissioned private creative works.
 An integral part of Rhonda’s work is the self-empowerment that it offers. It also serves as beacon for others like herself, looking to find their own personal power. She feels that community however, is her most important creation; the supporting and caring for herself and others as they go along their own stretch of road.


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Charisse Baker
Artist in Residence 2008-2009

“Before my residency at The Ranger station I was focused on the commercial side of artmaking. Working with the local community and having a space to call my own on Harrison Lake encouraged me to ask more expanded questions of the potentiality of art. I started to feel a greater responsibility as maker and used the studio as a kind of lab open for the local communities participation. I took my portfolio and questions from the residency and applied to a Masters Program in Social Sculpture in Oxford. By far my experiences at the Ranger Station have left the biggest impact on my art practice and I feel immense gratitude to the Kent Harrison Arts council and the community of Harrison!”

Charisse Baker was a Social Sculpture Masters student at Oxford Brookes University from 2009-2010. During her study she was involved in two collectives, made 10 short films and created performative work, interventions and installations.
Throughout her program she became increasingly interested in dialogue as an expanded art practice and committed herself to exploring the transformative potential of questions. In film making, for example the necessity to build a story in advance runs counter to the documentation of an honest impression of place. Therefore it is essential to abandon preconceived ideas and structures while attempting to suspend judgment on people, place and specific issues.
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  • Home
  • About
    • History
    • News
    • Volunteer
    • Become a Member
  • Ranger Station Art Gallery
    • 2023 Season
    • Past Seasons
    • Submissions
  • Coming Soon
  • Artist in Residence Programs
    • Current Resident
    • Past Residents
    • pOP UP Artist Residencies
    • Annual Residency Submission Requirements
  • Workshops & Artist Talks
  • Visit Us
  • ART CLUB 98