Arts Council Wood Buffalo invites you to join us as we celebrate the work created by our 2024 Artist in Residence, Michelle Wilson, and Suncor Indigenous Artist in Residence, Dan Cardinal McCartney.
Join us Thursday, May 16 from 6:00pm-8:00pm in the art gallery at the Keyano Theatre and Art Centre and see the works created by our two resident artists, alongside contributions from Wood Buffalo community members. The showcase will feature live music, light refreshments, and is free to attend.
About the Program
Arts Council Wood Buffalo's Artist in Residence Program follows a traditional residency model, in which professional artists spend time creating work inspired by the environment, culture, and people of Wood Buffalo. The Suncor Indigenous Artist Program endeavours to make the program more equitable and accessible to Indigenous artists. Both streams run concurrently, offering opportunities for collaboration and broader learning. This year, both Resident Artists spent time in Fort McMurray and Fort Chipewyan, running workshops in both communities and creating art inspired by their experiences.
About Michelle Wilson
Michelle Wilson (she/her) is a neurodivergent artist, researcher and mother who currently lives in London, Ontario. She is of settler descent and her intermedia practice focuses on confronting colonial knowledge systems and conservation regimes with criticality and care. She is an organizing and founding member of the Unsettling Conservation Collective, the Coves Collective, and the (Re)mediating Soils Collective. She recently completed her SSHRC-funded doctorate from the University of Western Ontario. Currently, Michelle is an instructor in the Faculty of Design at OCADU and a postdoctoral scholar working with the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership at the University of Guelph.
About Dan Cardinal McCartney
Dan Cardinal McCartney is an interdisciplinary artist and emerging curator who holds a degree from AUArts (2016) in Drawing. Dan’s focus is on mixed media collage, painting, moving images, and performance. He is of Athabasca Chipewyan, Mikisew Cree, Métis, and settler family lines. Dan’s maternal family is from Fort Chipewyan and the surrounding Treaty 8 region, and he is a foster care survivor raised in the northern region of Fort McMurray, Alberta.
As a Two-Spirit, transgender artist, Dan sifts through patterns of intergenerational trauma, and troubles the colonial narrative of hyper individuality. He relates his personal, ongoing reconnection of his family to his yearning for gender euphoria through storytelling. Dan’s interest primarily lies in the contemporary Indigenous horror genre.
His work has since been featured in Fix your hearts or die at the Alberta Gallery of Art; let’s talk about sex, bb at Agnes Etherington Arts Centre, and Off-Centre: Queer Contemporary Art in the Prairies at the Dunlop in Regina. Dan is the 2021 winner of the William & Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Canadian Artists from The Hnatyshyn Foundation, alongside being awarded the Emerging Arts Management Award by the Rozsa Foundation in 2022.
Dan is currently the Co-Artistic Director at Stride Gallery in Calgary, AB, a Core Member of Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre, and a collective curatorial member of Window Winnipeg at Arts Space in Manitoba.
