Current Residents

Macaulay House Studio Residency

Pahre & Springgay at Macaulay House

This March we are glad to welcome residents Pahre & Springgay to the Macaulay House!

Responding to global climate crises through a practice of walking as resilience, remediation, and response, their residency will engage with the convergence of the four elements (fire, water, air, earth) through a place-based approach to Dawson City and the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in territory. Both artists, Jay Pahre and Stephanie Springgay, incorporate walking into their artistic practices informed by complex ecologies of place including extractivism, climate change, settler colonial uses of national parks and trails, weather, and more-than-human relations. For the KIAC residency they will use walking as ‘convergence’ (Klondike and Yukon rivers; the 4 elements) as a guide to more just and radical responses to ‘disaster preparedness.’
Disaster resilience practices are often informed by municipal, regional, or territorial guidelines that are compounded by settler colonialism and extractivist policies. Their project will engage with counter and creative responses to disaster preparedness and consider resilience through a wider and more ecologically-just lens. 

Stephanie Springgay is an artist and curator who lives and works in Tkaronto (Toronto) and a Professor of the School of the Arts at McMaster University. Their community and socially- engaged practice and scholarship includes collaborating with students and teachers in K-12 public schools on issues related to social justice, place-based learning, and contemporary art as pedagogy (www.thepedagogicalimpulse.com). She is also the director of the research-creation collaboratory WalkingLab. WalkingLab studies and advances the theory and practice of critical walking methodologies through interdisciplinary arts practices and public walking events including walking tours and field schools. She is interested in engaging different publics through the arts to address issues related to climate change, food security, LGBTQ+ activism, migration and extractivism. She has published widely on contemporary art, radical pedagogies, and affective learning and her most recent book Feltness: Research-Creation, Socially-Engaged Art and Affective Pedagogies (Duke, 2022) won the University Art Associations book award in 2023.

Jay Pahre is a queer and trans settler artist, writer, and cultural worker. He currently resides on Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories, on the land governed with the Dish with One Spoon Wampum agreement (Hamilton, ON). His work investigates trans and queer ecologies, interspecies collaboration, and complex relationships with place. His body of work Flipping the Island queried relationships between ideas of wildlife management, ecological relationships, resource extraction, and settler notions of place in the context of ongoing climate change. Flipping the Island asks what becomes possible when the idea of being able to shift radically becomes the way by which ecologies (human, more-than-human, and otherwise) relate to each other.
Work in Flipping the Island includes sculpture, writing, drawing, and durational public walks. His work The Weather Report emerged through this walking practice, and is an online series of writings that are broadcast and tuned to weather formations across Gitchi-gami (Lake Superior) and Minong (Isle Royale). Gathered sound is combined with spoken writing; what is heard and how it is heard changes according to the weather at specific points on the island. As the weather changes, and how weather is documented changes through climate change, how the piece sounds will change in turn.

ARTIST IN RESIDENCE EVENTS

Wednesday, March 18th – 6:30pm to 9:00pm
Open Studio at Macaulay House

Join Pahre and Springgay at the Macaulay House on Wednesday March 18th from 6:30 to 9 for tea, treats, tarot readings and zine making.