Word on the Street
Word on the Street was a unique outdoor exhibition that shared the creative works of artists and poets through a traffic control message board. This large LED display is user-programmed and fully mobile. Ten individual artists, a combination of local, national established and emerging, were been commissioned to create a pictogram or text work for the display matrix. The project moved through a total of ten sites over the duration of the project.
Word on the Street was made possible with the support of Memorial University’s Office of Public Engagement.
Featuring Works by…
Anie Toole is a second year Master of Fine Arts Student at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She received a Fine Craft diploma in Constructed textiles from La Maison des métiers d’art de Québec and a B.Sc. Honors in Mathematics from the University of Ottawa She is the recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Surface Design Association. Toole exhibits artworks in Canada, the United States and France and was awarded artist residencies at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina and La Bande Vidéo in Quebec. Her work explores materialization as a way of knowing translanguaging. It asks how do you write cloth in many languages at once? And looks for answers through a transdisciplinary studio art practice of weaving, printmaking, digital arts, and natural dye.
Ashley Hemmings is a visual artist and gallery worker currently based in St. John’s, NL. She completed her BFA in Visual Art at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2018, and will complete her MFA with the University of Windsor by distance in the Spring of 2021. Her practice asks questions about the relationship between humans and the natural world, and draws attention to the exponentially bizarre ways that land and public space are regulated but not protected. Using play and humor, Ashley’s practice combines locally rooted craft processes with other media such as video, installation, digital drawing, bioart, and collecting. Ashley has worked at a number of art galleries across Newfoundland including Eastern Edge Gallery, The Grenfell Art Gallery, and The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery. Currently she works as a Research Assistant to Dr. Jennifer Willet and INCUBATOR Art Lab at the University of Windsor.
Chris Turnbull is the author of Continua (Chaudiere Books 2015; Invisible Press 2019) and [ untitled ] in o w n (CUE Books 2014). Recent chapbooks include contrite (above/ground 2019), Undertones, in collaboration with text/artist Bruno Neiva (Low Frequency Press 2019), notes from recently (Trainwreck Press 2020), and, with artist Dominique Cameron, a visual and poetic exchange, Converse Walking (stickywilly press, 2020). Other work can be found online, in print, or within landscapes as poems, installations, and videopoems. She curates a footpress, rout/e, whereby poems by various poets are planted on trails: www.etuor.wordpress.com. @ChrisCturnbul
Emily Hayes is an interdisciplinary artist from Goulds, Newfoundland. She has a BFA in Visual Arts from Memorial University and is pursuing her Masters in Printmaking at the University of Alberta. Emily’s practice is heavily based in photomechanical printmaking, sculpture, and video installation. Her practice deals with themes of home, memory, and transgenerational trauma, investigating societal tropes of normalcy and depictions of the nuclear family. Emily has been the recipient of SSHRC Grant, the Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship, and The Ellen Rusted Award in Print Media. Her work has been in group exhibitions across North America and in the United Kingdom. Including exhibitions at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, and The Brooklyn Art Library.
Jerry Ropson is an artist, writer, and arts organizer, raised in the rural Ktaqmkuk community of Pollards Point. In acknowledging the settler and indigenous history of his community, he combines image, object, text, and narrative, to focus an artistic practice around site-specific installation and performative storytelling. Having exhibited widely, he makes class-conscious work often seeking non-traditional sites and outcomes. Ropson holds a BFA (2001) from Memorial University: Grenfell Campus, and an MFA (2009) in Studio Arts: Fibres and Material Practices, from Concordia University. Ropson divides his time between communities in Newfoundland, and Sackville, New Brunswick, (Mi'kma'ki) where he teaches in the Department of Fine Arts at Mount Allison University.
José Andrés Mora is a Venezuelan-born artist living in Canada. Mora graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Arts and Design (2013, BFA in Interdisciplinary Arts) and the University of Guelph (2020, MFA in Studio Arts). Mora’s work elicits a sense of disconnect deeply tied to his experience as a member of the Venezuelan diaspora. Mora excises written narrative fragments from personal experience, grafting the textual content to digital and physical surfaces and disconnecting the fragment's narrative voice from context. He describes this untethered state of his written language as one analogous to his relationship to home and culture. He has exhibited across Canada since 2013 in notable galleries and festivals such as the Dalhousie Art Gallery, Birch Contemporary, Trinity Square Video, Videographe, Whippersnapper Gallery, Nocturne Art at Night, Struts Gallery, The Khyber Centre for the Arts, and Eyelevel Gallery.
Kevin Melanson was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia and has spent the majority of his life moving from place to place in the Maritime provinces. He completed High School in Moncton, New Brunswick (in a now-abandoned building), and later completed the Fine Arts program at Mount Allison University in nearby Sackville. Since finishing his Bachelor’s Degree he has moved to St. John’s, Newfoundland, where he is working toward a diploma in Creative Writing.
Lorna Conquergood is a second year Master of Fine Arts student at MUN from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and a Bachelor of Education degree both from the University of Saskatchewan. She is the recipient of the Paul J. O’Neill Scholarship, the Saskatchewan Association of Broadcasters Award in Fine Arts, and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) – Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and was a Kingston Portrait Prize finalist in 2019. Whether a piece is about rural living or a relationship, Conquergood’s work embodies a wordless communication that expresses traces of lived experiences.
Micah Lexier is a Toronto-based artist whose activities include making, collecting and organizing. He has a deep interest in measurement, increment, found imagery and display structures. He has presented over 100 solo exhibitions, participated in more than 200 group exhibitions and has produced a dozen permanent public commissions. In 2015 Lexier was honoured with a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. Lexier’s work is in numerous public and corporate collections including The British Museum (London, England), the Contemporary Art Gallery (Sydney, Australia), The Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa). Micah Lexier is represented by Birch Contemporary, Toronto.
Born and raised in Jamaica, Xaiver Campbell has considered Newfoundland and Labrador home for over a decade. These islands are quite different, but Xaiver feels that living in Jamaica prepared him for life on the Rock, minus the snow, sleet and lack of sun – the people are equally warm and friendly. Xaiver reflects this love of his past and present life in his writing. When not writing, doing childcare, baking, playing or watching basketball, Xaiver loves the outdoors and can be seen swimming in all the ponds across the island in the summer, camping in the woods and hiking the East Coast Trail. His work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Riddlefence and Us, Now by Breakwater Books.
