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 has a multidisciplinary practice balanced between painting and graphic + web design. Born in Montreal, where she lives and works, Dana received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Halifax (1990). She has also studied Graphic Design at Dawson College and Art Education at McGill University. Dana has attended BANFF Emerging BAIR Residency, Alberta (2022) and Jano Lapin Residency, Montreal (2022). Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and the US, including "I am NSCAD" Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax (2015), "Show Your World" Gallery MC, New York (2016), "Painting 2017: Juried Exhibition," John B. Aird Gallery, Toronto (2017), 33rd Chelsea International Fine Art Competition Exhibition" Agora Gallery, New York (2018), Xposed: Humans vs. Planet Earth", Knox Contemporary Gallery of Art, Alberta (2019), "Future_Tense," Intervals Collective, Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges, Montreal (2020), “Being Scene" Workman's Art, Toronto (2022), Art for Climate Justice, David Suzuki Foundation (2021) "Steal this Poster" Atelier Circulaire, Centre3, and Martha Street Studio (2023), “Zoom Art”, Laval (2023), “The Heart and Soul of St. Henri” at Musée Pointe-À-Callière, Montreal (2024) and her upcoming Solo Exhibition at Gallery 101 in Ottawa, scheduled for June 27 to July 27, 2024. She is a recipient of grants awarded from the Canada Council for the Arts for 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023, as well as, the Montreal Art Council 2021 and the Conseil des Arts et des lettres du Québec 2024.
ARTIST STATEMENT At the core of my practice is oil painting, where I explore personal and collective memory, grief, and resistance through portraiture and layered symbolism. I also work across textile, print, sound, digital media, and critical writing, weaving these mediums together to examine the emotional and environmental impacts of overconsumption, fast fashion, and waste colonialism. As an African Nova Scotian descendant and Anglophone Quebecois artist, my work is rooted in survival, resilience, and ancestral memory. Upcycling is both a material and ideological part of my practice. I reclaim salvaged fabrics, thrifted clothing, and discarded objects to reframe what has been overlooked: labour, lineage, and land. This process serves as both critique and care, allowing me to tell stories through what others throw away. In my solo exhibition Consumed Consequences, fashion waste became a backdrop for immersive storytelling that combined screenprinting, digital media, sound, video, and painting. My ongoing project, Transactional Empathy, continues this inquiry through fabric installations and printed care-tag interventions that confront the commodification of intimacy and care. My work often merges tactile materials with critical writing to challenge systems of neglect while centering beauty, dignity, and lived experience. I approach art-making as a form of resistance and repair, creating spaces where craft becomes critique, and where care becomes a radical, political act.
Acknowledgement of the support of The Canada Council for the Arts, CALQ and Montreal Arts Council