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 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 oil 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 art 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