Western Front’s artists-in-residence program was initiated in 1977 by artist and Western Front co-founder Kate Craig. It remains the heart of our programming today.

This curated program provides invited Canadian and international artists to pursue new developments in their practices and to produce new work. It focuses on artists working across music, media, time-based visual art, performance, and literature. While in residence, artists are supported with a fee, production budget, and curatorial and technical expertise, and are hosted on-site at Western Front or off-site on location, as required. The number of residencies and their structure and duration are tailored to each individual artist and project.

Many projects produced through our artists-in-residence program are done so in collaboration with partner institutions in Canada and internationally. We also offer audiences opportunities to engage with residents and their work at various stages of a project’s development and presentation.

A portrait of Siku Allooloo looking directly at the camera with her hands in the pocket of her jacket. She is standing outside and a lake, snow capped mountains, and a mauve sunset can be seen in the background.

While in residence, Siku Allooloo will work on the development of a feature-length documentary in honour of her mother, historic Indigenous women’s activism, and Taíno resurgence.

Siku Allooloo is an Inuk/Haitian/Taíno filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist, poet, and community builder. She comes from Denendeh, Northwest Territories, by way of Haïti through her mother and Mittimatalik, Nunavut, through her father. Allooloo often reimagines conventional forms as imbued by her cultural traditions, oral history, and land-based practice. She resides in the unceded homeland of K’ómoks First Nation.

A selfie of Sheilah and Dani ReStack standing in front of a white wall that is in the process of being painted blue. Sheilah wears a black textured top and gold earrings. Dani, who is dressed in blue jeans and a black graphic t-shirt that reads “so many tools so little time,” stands behind her while holding an industrial hot glue gun overhead.

While in residence, Dani and Sheilah ReStack will further the development of a new feature length experimental video titled Stovepipe to the Sun. The work will bring together research on the Sanctified Sisters (a nineteenth-century separatist women community in Belton, Texas), a speculative fiction where they cast themselves as descents of this group, and autobiographical recordings of their domestic life as they struggle to raise their teenage daughter Rose within a patriarchal society.

Dani and Sheilah ReStack are collaborators. Feral Domestic, the trilogy of videos they made from 2016 to 2022 (including Strangely Ordinary This Devotion, Come Coyote, and Future From Inside) combines documentary footage from their lives, re-enactments and fantasy sequences for queer feminist imagining of past, present, and future. They live in Columbus, United States with their two daughters and are committed to the domestic as a place of unruly possibility—a portal for emotional logic, fragmentation, and new narratives that allows the quotidian to inform the sublime. Dani is Associate Professor at Ohio State University. Sheilah is Associate Professor at Denison University.

Nina Davies stands in theatrical space. She looks directly at the camera with her hair down and hands placed behind her back. She wears black tracksuit pants and a bright lime coloured sports top.

While in residence, Nina Davies will create her first digital novel. Taking the debate over whether “Death by GPS” should be recognized as an official cause of death as its starting point, the project imagines a world where navigation and location are generated. In this world, human agents use their bodies to blur the boundaries between real and fictional environments. Conceived as a digital novel, the work will also extend into a moving image work and installation.

Nina Davies is a Canadian-British artist who considers the present moment by observing dance in popular culture and how it is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed. Working primarily with video, performance, writing, and installation, her work considers current dance phenomena in relation to the wider socio-technical environments from which it emerges. This includes research into the recent commodification of the dancing body on digital platforms, and rethinking dances of today as traditional dances of the future. Oscillating between the use of fiction and non-fiction, her work helps build new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices.

Susie Ibarra plays a drum set from an overhead perspective. She is dressed in a black blazer, red top, and plaid pants, holding drumsticks mid-motion. The drum kit includes multiple cymbals, toms, and a snare, all arranged on a dark stage background.

While in residence, Susie Ibarra will lead The New Improvisers Studio, a week-long educational initiative for 10 young musicians aged 17 to 24 from any musical background who are interested in building their improvisation skills. The New Improvisers Studio supports collective explorations in musical improvisation through the mentorship of a world leading improviser and invited guests from the Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

Susie Ibarra is a Filipinx-American composer, percussionist, and sound artist from New York, United States and based in Berlin, Germany. Her work encompasses performance, mobile sound-mapping applications, multichannel audio installations, recording, and production. Across her interdisciplinary practice, many of Ibarra’s projects are based in cultural and environmental preservation. Her sound research focuses on the stewardship of glaciers and freshwaters, and she has published writing on the ecology of rhythm in the environment. Ibarra has also worked to support Indigenous and traditional music cultures from the North and South Philippine islands, and collaborates with The Joudour Sahara Music Program in Morocco on initiatives that preserve sound-based heritage and support the participation of women and girls in traditional music communities. Ibarra leads several ensembles including Talking Gong Trio, is the founder of Susie Ibarra Studios, and a co-founder of the label and publisher Habitat Sounds.

Presented in partnership by Coastal Jazz and Western Front.