The 2022 edition of Saltbox featured the work of leading contemporary performance artists from across the country including Rémi Belliveau, Onya Hogan-Finlay, Faune Ybarra, Jamie Ross, as well as visiting curator Elise Anne LaPlante. This iteration of Saltbox landed in a time of precarity— precarity of environment, of safety, of self. Hogan-Finlay, Ybarra, Ross, and Belliveau turned to the past, the future, and within, to address bodily displacement in those times, while also offering morsels of optimism through gestures of care, preparations, play, and love.
Saltbox returned to offer insight into how the critical concerns of nationally and internationally engaged contemporary artists resonate with the specificities of our community in western Newfoundland. The 2022 line-up offered an array of programming, that included the always epic open-mic performance event Biscuit Box Cabaret.
Co-curated by festival founder D’Arcy Wilson and Matthew Hills, Saltbox drew on regional cultural traditions of Newfoundland such as folk music, storytelling, and theatrical rituals including mummering, to mine the experimental and speculative potential of performance and contemporary art in a context specific to rural Newfoundland. The festival’s name, Saltbox, references a form of vernacular architecture commonly associated with Newfoundland, reflecting the festival’s intention to resonate with specificities of place.
7 - 9 pm: BYO UFO with Onya Hogan-Finlay.
Location: Main Gallery, Grenfell Art Gallery
Drop in event at the Gallery that occurred between 7 and 9 pm. The opening night of Saltbox festivities where participants could engage in relaxed making with Nova Scotia-based artist Onya Hogan-Finlay.
Thursday 17 Nov
12 pm: Saltbox artist panel moderated by D'Arcy Wilson with Onya Hogan-Finlay, Remi Belliveau, and Faune Ybarra
Location: FA224, Fine Arts Building to panel entry, followed by coffee and snacks!
2 - 5 pm: "Go Bag" with Onya Hogan-FinlAy drop-ins
Location: Community Project Gallery, Grenfell Art Gallery
Have you ever packed sentimental belongings and essential items for survival into a go-bag in preparation for an emergency evacuation or to escape a dangerous situation?
Artist Onya Hogan-Finlay invited guests to contribute to Go Bag, a new body of work that she launched at Saltbox 2022. Participants were able to meet the artist one-on-one to share a description of the items in their actual or imaginary go-bag and sit while Onya captured a quick life-sized shadow portrait silhouette sketch on paper of their head and neck. Their silhouette portrait and the list of contents in their personalized go-bag provided the basis for a series of original drawings that Onya will create in 2023. This work will interpret and depict stories of courage, loss and change in the wake of climate emergency, disaster, forced displacement and other events that prompt sudden moves.
7:30 pm - 8:30: Biscuit Box Cabaret of Saltbox 2022
Our bi-annual performance-art-open-mic event, Biscuit Box, transcending the thresholds of biscuit boxes everywhere!
Biscuit Box is an open mic for performance and experimental artists to share what they have been working on with a live audience. Anyone is welcome to participate, but performances are limited to approximately 5 minutes in length.
Please note that it is not a paid professional event, but rather a platform for play, testing, and to connect with a wider audience.
8:30 pm: "Dad Can Dance" screening Jamie Ross followed
Documentary / Québec, Canada / 2022 / colour/ 28 minutes
Location: Fine Arts Rehearsal Hall, FA134 by Q and A with the Filmmaker
David was a ballet dancer, and for 45 years, almost nobody in the world knew. His queer son discovers long-buried family secrets about their shared love for movement in this self-affirming story that explores the joy of being an artist.
Friday 18 Nov
Saturday nov 19
5-6:30 pm: Performance by Faune Ybarra
Location: Main Gallery, Grenfell Art Gallery
6:30 pm: Grand Finale closing Talk and dinner with display of Acadian cultural artifacts hosted by Rémi Belliveau
Location: Atrium and Main Gallery, Grenfell Art Gallery
MEET THE ARTISTS
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Onya Hogan-Finlay
Onya Hogan-Finlay (born 1977, Fredericton, NB) is an interdisciplinary artist of white settler ancestry. Her research-based practice incorporates drawing, printmaking, video, performance, mobile exhibits, and interactive sculpture. Onya applies a queer feminist lens to create site-responsive interventions and installations that illuminate the hidden histories of everyday objects and artifacts held in public collections. She lives and works in the LaHave Islands, Nova Scotia as an uninvited guest in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq under the Peace and Friendship treaties.
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Rémi Belliveau
Rémi Belliveau is an Acadian trans non-binary interdisciplinary artist and musician hailing from Memramcook, New Brunswick, a village located in Mi’kma’ki, the traditional unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people.
Their work attempts to deconstruct and reprogram the foundational, structural, and imaginary principles of the Acadian culture to which they belong in the hopes of cultivating capacities for (self)analysis and critical thinking.
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Faune Ybarra
Currently dwelling in Vancouver, Faune Ybarra is a diasporic artist originally from Oaxaca and Mexico City. Due to the experience of constantly moving and adapting, Ybarra conceives of her body as a site of translation from whence she attempts to communicate with the other- than-human. Her iterative practice rejects the (art)object as a given outcome and instead speculates on how nomadic creative methodologies converge to document motion. Past repositories of her work have taken the shape of performance, photo-based objects, and diasporic gestures.
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Jamie Ross
Jamie Ross (1987, Canada) is a visual artist, filmmaker, city gardener, and educator. In recent films, Radical Faerie elders help young people memorize the chants sung in 20th-century Queer street battles with the police; Pagan men incarcerated in Canadian federal prisons regale their chaplain with stories of intimate encounters with the divine, and in another, the portrait of a sheep farm run by witches on a remote hill in the Appalachians is centered on the flow of autumnal viscera and liquids.
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Elise Anne LaPlante (Visiting Curator)
Elise Anne LaPlante is an independent curator, writer and cultural worker. She is interested in artistic practices that claim the imaginary and sensitive as a form of dehierarchization of knowledge.