The Project
From June through September 2025, a cohort of eight artists/artist collectives will explore the role of public art in advancing climate justice as part of our Public Art for Sustainable Futures Residency. This new residency program was developed to support artists in researching, experimenting and engaging with community around pressing environmental issues.
The four-month residency provides time, resources and mentorship to help participants develop ideas and practices that respond to the climate crisis. Each artist/artist collective receives $25,000 and is encouraged to explore without the pressure of producing a final project. Instead, the focus is on experimentation, research, and process-based work. The participants were selected through an application and assessment process.
Mentors Api’soomaahka, Charlene K. Lau and Christina Battle will lead studio visits, field trips, workshops and presentations that highlight how public art can be a tool for meaningful dialogue and action. At the end of the residency, artists will come together for a group presentation to share reflections on their experience and the impact of the residency on their work.
Learn more about the participating artists and mentors below.
ARTISTS + COLLECTIVES
Apiow Akwai is a South Sudanese visual artist based in Calgary. Her artistic journey began at age six in Sudan, where art served as a creative and emotional outlet. This early passion evolved into a profound respect for the arts, especially after attending a Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada. Caravaggio’s raw, emotional style had a lasting impact on Apiow’s approach to art.
Akwai’s work primarily explores portraits, landscapes and human figures, using oils and acrylics on canvas. Through deliberate compositions and symbolism, she delves into the complexities of emotions, capturing both their darkness and beauty. Art therapy and self-discovery play a key role in her creative process, continuously inspiring new bodies of work.
She studied Visual & Creative Arts at Sheridan College, and Psychology at St. Mary’s University, with aspirations to build a career in the visual arts. Akwai has worked with several non-profit organizations, including the Centre for Newcomers, Boys and Girls Clubs of Ottawa/Canada and the Women’s Centre of Calgary. Her art-based initiatives have inspired at-risk youth, offering creative outlets and mentorship over her 10-plus+ years in educational programming. In 2022, Akwai curated her first solo exhibition, Delirious Soul, supported by Calgary Arts Development. She also exhibited at the Arts Commons Window Galleries. That same year, she was selected for the Artist as Changemaker Residency in partnership with Trico Changemakers Studio and Mount Royal University, developing the art program Let’s Paint for immigrant and refugee youth.
Akwai’s public art installation, A Seat at the Table, was commissioned by the City of Calgary as part of the Northeast Public Art Initiative in 2022. The piece, which celebrates inclusivity and diversity, was installed in Laycock Park in December 2024. Through her work, Akwai remains committed to social change, fostering community engagement and amplifying the voices of underserved groups.
Bomi Yook is a media artist based in Calgary, working with immersive media, experimental animation and video performance. Her work explores hybridity within identity, cultural landscapes and knowledge systems, often drawing on the collective memory of the Korean diaspora, with its complex ties to immigration and colonization.
Navigating the nuances of belonging to multiple cultural frameworks, Yook’s practice reflects on the paradoxical nature of identity, emphasizing its incompleteness, incongruity and intersubjectivity. Drawing together conflicting ideologies, symbolic and material practice, her work depicts a divided yet intra-related world of meaning that is ripe with tension, contradiction and contention over the position of dominant narrativization.
Exploring the Ecologies of Trace — of the Other and Otherness within the self — her works reveal identity and ideologies as inter-constitutive, seeing the world as a paradoxical blend of contexts rather than distinct, isolated definitions. Through her experimental, interdisciplinary and process-based approaches to cultural and historical inquiries, Yook’s projects explore the complexities of shared existence while confronting the violence and paradox inherent within identity formation and its never-ending pursuit for self-certainty.
Yook holds an MFA from UCLA and a BFA from Alberta University of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally — including Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles, Seoul, Kefalonia and Calgary. She is the 2023 winner of the Emerging Digital Artist Award in Toronto, Elaine Klown Klein Fellowship in Los Angeles and a Beyond Future Art Award Finalist. Her projects have been supported by Canada Council for the Arts and Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Commissioned by the City of West Hollywood, her video art was showcased at MIMA (Moving Image Media Art), a Netflix owned public art screen on Los Angeles’s iconic Sunset Boulevard.
Justin Seiji Waddell is an artist and Associate Professor in the School of Visual Art at the Alberta University of the Arts in Mohkinsstsis/Calgary. He is currently the Vice President of CARFAC National and sits on the board of Peripheral Review, C the Visual Art Foundation (C Magazine), BlackFlash Magazine, the New Media Caucus (NMC), the Immigrant Council for Arts Innovation (ICAI), and the Arts, Culture, and Education Committee (ACE) of the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC). He has worked in various capacities at several artist-run centres, festivals, galleries, and magazines in Canada, including Prefix Photo, Trinity Square Video, Lola Magazine, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the New Gallery, Emmedia and Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival. He has served as Director at YYZ Artists’ Outlet and the of the Stride Art Gallery Association, and was a founding member of Local Library, an all-ages art and music venue in Calgary. In Fall 2024, he was an artist in residence with the Past Wrongs, Future Choices as part of the Japanese Canadian Legacies Project, the Centre for Global Studies, and the Centre for Asia Pacific Initiatives at the University of Victoria. In early 2025, he will return to Japan as an artist in residence with Studio Kura in Itoshima, Fukuoka Prefecture, where he will research the measurement of time and the history of bronze mirrors, create kinetic solar sculptures and make audio recordings from the Sea of Japan.
Kelly Andres is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and researcher based in a rural area northeast of Calgary/Mohkinsstsis. Her work explores interspecies communication, acoustic and olfactory ecologies, bioremediation and the expansion of human perception through public and socially engaged art. For over 15 years, she has created participatory installations, community-led processes and multi-sensory experiences that cultivate ecological awareness and connection.
Working across sound, sculpture, technology, and organic materials, Andres’s projects often take place outside traditional galleries — on bicycles, in gardens, urban sites and rural ecosystems. Recent works include Planting a Promise, a public engagement project featuring a geodesic dome and sunflower exchange (The Works Festival, Edmonton), and Soundstrata, a collaborative acoustic ecology initiative with O2 Planning + Design in Calgary. Past exhibitions include Particle + Wave, (Calgary), Les yeux dans l’eau at the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop University (Sherbrooke), Sandstone City at the Lougheed House (Calgary), The Garden of Speculations at articule (Montréal), le Centre des arts actuels Skol (Montréal), La Maison des arts de Laval (Laval).
She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia University in Montréal, and her research-creation practice is grounded in posthumanist theory, ecological ethics and experimental media. Kelly has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally, and has participated in residencies at the Banff Centre, Medialab-Prado (Madrid) and Plexus Projects (New York), among others. Alongside her artistic practice, she has led municipal public art programs since 2017, supporting artists and communities in co-creating meaningful cultural experiences. Andres’s past work has been generously supported by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Mao (Kun) Chen and Chris Savage, collectively known as Mao and Chris, are artists based in Calgary. Their collaborative work spans ceramics, paintings and public art. Mao and Chris delve into themes of identity, diversity and societal change, bridging cultural gaps through their art. They merge traditional and pop culture elements to explore personal and cultural narratives, fostering cross-cultural communication and offering rich, layered interpretations that resonate across a wide audience.
Recognized with several grants and awards from prestigious bodies such as the Canada Council for the Arts and Calgary Arts Development, Mao and Chris have been lauded for their contributions to advancing contemporary ceramic art and fostering meaningful dialogues within the art world. Additionally, both artists have expanded their perspectives and enriched their practice through various international residencies and exchanges, including the Deer Lake Artist Residency in Burnaby, B.C. and the Royal College of Art Exchange in London, U.K. Their work is held in private and public collections across Canada, the U.S. and Asia.
We are Mia Rushton and Eric Moschopedis, a neurodiverse, interdisciplinary artist team from Calgary. Over the past 17 years we — Mia + Eric — have produced a significant and diverse body of work including public interventions, social engagement, exhibitions, installations, workshops, public art, artist talks, lectures, residencies and publications. Together we combine elements of craft, performance, cultural geography and multi-species ethnography to create site-specific and socially engaged works. Thematically, our practice deals with interspecies relationships, biodiversity and place-based knowledge production in cities, small towns, and rural spaces. The form and scale of our work changes in response to the context in which we are working, which means no two projects are alike. We have worked with police and adult women to learn to skateboard, posted over 100 billboards in downtown Toronto with re-written bylaws to advertise new ‘rules’ for a future city, choreographed dances with foresters for a 9-channel video installation, took up residence at a marine biology station, gave a lecture to art school students in a garage in London, UK, and created a performance with goats. Since 2008, we have created nearly 40 individual projects, participated in 24 residencies, toured to over 30 cities, presented 32 talks or lectures, and made over a dozen publications. We often work in contemporary performance, theatre and visual art contexts and with formal and DIY galleries, festivals, residencies, conferences, and post-secondary institutions. Although we are independent artists that work project to project, we function like an organization, juggling multiple projects across different locations each year.
Mia completed her BFA Printmaking at the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) in 2003. Eric received a BFA Performance from University of Calgary in 2002 and an MFA Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies from University of British Columbia: Okanagan in 2008.
Photo: Elyse Bouvier
Morgan Possberg is a transgender sculptor, ceramicist and curator, who makes work focused on connecting links between queer histories, colonialism, activism, environmentalism, and present-day politics through a storytelling lens; placing these histories and truths into personal and digestible realities in conversation with each other. They completed their BFA at NSCAD University in Halifax, are currently pursuing their Master of Fine Arts at University of Guelph in Ontario and split their time between Calgary and Guelph. They are the current curatorial resident at Truck Contemporary Art in Calgary.
Photo: Elyse Bouvier
Saeid Asgarian is a professional theatre director and playwright with over a decade of experience in performing arts. He earned his master’s in theatre studies from the University of Calgary (2024) and theatre directing from the University of Tehran (2021). He has directed, written, dramaturged and stage-designed dozens of professional productions, including Home (2024), Artist (2024), Empty Room (2024), Thirteen (2023), Absence (2023), Green Key (2023), Room No. 3 (2022), Life (2021), Historicity (short movie, 2020), A Memory of Two Mondays (2019), etc. His current artistic approach uses participatory and laboratory theatre to develop his shows and explore how His current artistic practice incorporates participatory and laboratory theatre to develop his shows and explore how the performing arts can impact society and affect audiences. These days, Asgarian is the artistic director of Roommate Art Company and continues his research and creative works there.
MENTORS
Api’soomaahka (Running Coyote) – William Singer III is a member of the Kainai Nation of the Blackfoot Confederacy.
His main profession is as an artist and illustrator with over 40 years of experience. He devotes a lot of time as an educator, an entrepreneur, and an environmental and political activist, utilizing Blackfoot Ecological Knowledge and protocol.
He currently operates Naapi’s Garden and Katoyiss Seed Bank and teaches at the Opokaa’sin Early Intervention Society, where he has developed a land-based Indigenous plants curriculum with a focus on Niitsitapi horticulture. Other areas of work include food security and sovereignty, Blackfoot science and physics, watershed health and grassland restoration. He is member of the Kainai Ecosystem Protection Association, the Oldman Watershed Council, Indigenous Tourism Alberta and the Southern Alberta Native Seed Collaborative, a board member of the Waterton Biosphere Reserve Association, a volunteer with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and has a partnership agreement with Parks Canada, Waterton Lakes.
Charlene K. Lau is an art historian, critic and Curator of Public Art at Evergreen Brick Works and Nuit Blanche Toronto 2025. Her research interests include art of the global Asian diaspora, the Gesamtkunstwerk in art and fashion, time-based media and transgression. She has held fellowships at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Parsons School of Design, The New School; and Performa Biennial. Lau has also held teaching positions at Parsons School of Design, OCAD University, Toronto Metropolitan University, University of Toronto Scarborough, Western University and York University.
Her scholarly voice and curatorial work have been featured in The Guardian, PAPER, The Goods by Vox, The New Yorker and Studies in Costume & Performance; and her scholarly work has been published in Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, Fashion Theory, Journal of Curatorial Studies, The Routledge Companion to Fashion Studies (2021) and Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices (Routledge, 2018). She has written art criticism for Art in America, Artforum, TheAtlantic.com, The Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, Canadian Art and frieze, among others.
Photo: Steve Unam
Christina Battle is an artist, curator and writer based in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton), within the Aspen Parkland: the transition zone where prairie and forest meet. Her practice focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster: its complexity and the intricacies entwined within it. She looks to disaster as a series of intersecting processes including social, environmental, cultural, political and economic, which are implicated not only in how disaster is caused but also in how it manifests, is responded to and overcome.
Battle’s practice prioritizes collaboration, experimentation and failure; she has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries as both artist and curator.