Kelly Zantingh graduated with a B.A.H in Studio Art from the University of Guelph, ON in April 2016. Later that year she co-founded the Carrying Root Collective with Allison Henry. Her practice is currently based in many places, and she has recently participated in artist residencies in Porto, Portugal and the traditional Mi’kmaw territory on Turtle Island (Nova Scotia, Canada).
Kelly Zantingh’s work explores the passage of time and its inevitable association with loss. She examines the fragile and complex structures of natural ecosystems, as well as how they are instrumentalized by humans. Using stop-motion animation, photography and books, she documents and investigates the myriad ways humans are entangled with our surroundings. Her work is situated on the edge between a fascination with the natural world, and the acknowledgement of our current role on the changing earth within the Anthropocene.
While in residence at KIAC, Kelly will continue a body of work that spans across mediums including animation, photography, collage, and book-making. The project is an examination of change within a natural environment combined with human intervention in an environment, with an emphasis on a rapid and altered progression of time. She will record the motions of water, plants, rocks, and earth, with interruptions by her own actions and movements throughout the landscape.
Whess Harman (Carrier Wit’at Nation)
Whess Harman is mixed race, trans/non-binary/2SQ artist from the Carrier Wit’at Nation and a graduate of the Emily Carr University’s bachelor of fine arts program. They are currently based out of the ancestral territories of the Musquem, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations in the Skwachays Lodge artist residency program.
During their residency at KIAC they will be working with their on-going project, “Potlatch Punk”; a collection of thrifted and modified jackets that blend traditional materials with punk and DIY approaches to discuss urban Indigenous identity, understandings of wealth, and inherited memory and history. They will also be working on assembling a small chap book of poems created through their text-based projects. This work aims to explore their compounded and intermingling identities and the way it affects their relationships with settlers and their governments and the fractures of language that come in trying to communicate across those distances.