Photography and Artistic Direction:: Camille Dubuc @camille_dubuc
Audience: Joëlle Villeneuve @joellevillenveuve, Alexia Toman @al.toman , Tomy Jo @tomyjo, Em-P L'Abbée @pas.si.bum.que.ca
Audience: Joëlle Villeneuve @joellevillenveuve, Alexia Toman @al.toman , Tomy Jo @tomyjo, Em-P L'Abbée @pas.si.bum.que.ca
BIOGRAPHY Dana Edmonds is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, printmaking, textiles, upcycling, graphic design, music, and video. Born in Montreal and raised in Nova Scotia, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD), Halifax (1990). She has also studied Graphic Design at Dawson College and Art Education at McGill University. Dana has attended the Banff Emerging BAIR Residency, Alberta (2022), and the Jano Lapin Residency, Montreal (2022). Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Canada and the United States, including I Am NSCAD at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax (2015); Show Your World at Gallery MC, New York (2016); Painting 2017: Juried Exhibition at the John B. Aird Gallery, Toronto (2017); 33rd Chelsea International Fine Art Competition Exhibition at Agora Gallery, New York (2018); Xposed: Humans vs. Planet Earth at Knox Contemporary Gallery of Art, Alberta (2019); Future_Tense with Intervals Collective at Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges, Montreal (2020); Art for Climate Justice with the David Suzuki Foundation (2021); Being Scene at Workman Arts, Toronto (2022); Steal This Poster at Atelier Circulaire, Centre[3], and Martha Street Studio (2023); Zoom Art, Laval (2023); and The Heart and Soul of St. Henri at Pointe-à-Callière, Montréal Archaeology and History Complex (2024). Her circulating solo exhibition Consumed Consequences has been presented at Gallery 101, Ottawa; the Warren G. Flowers Art Gallery at Dawson College, Montreal (2025); and will be presented at Maison de la culture Marie-Uguay in March 2026. Dana Edmonds is a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts (2018, 2019, 2022, 2023), the Conseil des arts de Montréal (2021), and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (2024).
ARTIST STATEMENT My multidisciplinary art spans painting, textiles, installation, video and sound, moving between image, material and rhythm. This work explores personal and collective memory, cultural transmission and resistance through transformation, repetition and remix.
I begin with what already carries a narrative: an image, discarded clothing, textile remnants, found objects, recorded sound. I remix it. Materials retain traces of their previous lives, allowing memory to remain present even as their forms shift. In Consumed Consequences, discarded clothing and textile waste become a means of examining overconsumption, fast fashion and the movement of waste across communities and borders. Rather than treating these materials as disposable, I return them to circulation through painting, sculpture and installation, transforming what has been discarded without erasing what remains embedded within it.
Rhythm structures all of it: a painted composition, a repeated textile pattern, the rotation of an object. Through sound and DJing, rhythm becomes something I perform and respond to in real time. Sampling and mixing extend the same processes of selecting, cutting and layering that happen on the wall.
Rooted in Black diasporic histories of cultural transmission, my work follows how forms travel from origin to adaptation and what they keep, lose or gain along the way. I'm interested in what survives displacement, what gets left behind, and how cultural memory can be recovered, altered and carried forward.
The work sits between inheritance, invention and reinterpretation. Across material, image and sound, I am interested in what happens when something that already carries a history is put back into circulation in another form. Rather than treating transformation as erasure, I use it to keep what is historically embedded in motion. What survives? What changes? And what becomes possible when a familiar form is allowed to become something else?
Acknowledgement of the support of The Canada Council for the Arts, CALQ and Montreal Arts Council