Season One: Contours of Identity
When we started working on this project, one of the characteristics we kept emphasizing was that of place—be it the city, region, or biome that we are from. In many of our conversations, “Prairies” became the word—the catchall—for the complexity of the place we were trying to encapsulate. As the project progressed, we started to wonder what exactly we meant when we said “making art in the Prairies,” or, “in the West.” With that question in mind, we decided to focus our first season on the Contours of Identity—in this case Prairie identity, and all the other ways of describing the land west of Ontario and east of the Rocky Mountains. Over the next few months we will have conversations, produce writing, and think about how we begin to answer this question.
The Public Studio – An interview with Jessica Fern Facette
As COI prepares for the end of our first season, I wanted to speak again with Jessica Fern Facette, the first artist interviewed in Season One. Fern’s practice extends into her working life through her studio and store, Fern’s School of Textile Craft, and I wanted to know more about how she approaches blending her personal textile practice with a role that is so public-facing. I spend a lot of time thinking about public art in our communities—especially art that extends beyond the monumental and focuses instead on developing engaged and relational interactions with the public. I am interested in how artists blur our understanding of the distinctions between collaboration, community-building, and art when engaging broader audiences through public work. Public studio spaces are critical to enhancing collective creativity. Read More
