Meet the 2023 Pierre Lassonde Artist-in-Residence Ana Rewakowicz
The Pierre Lassonde School of Fine Arts at Mount Allison is pleased to announce that Ana Rewakowicz is the 2023 Pierre Lassonde Artist-in-Residence. The Montreal, QC-based artist was selected from nearly 60 applicants. Rewakowicz is developing a project on the Mount Allison campus over a six-month period from January to June.
Rewakowicz is an interdisciplinary Polish-born artist, researcher, and mentor of Ukrainian origin based in Montreal, whose artistic practice concentrates on the creation of different patterns of engagement, employing imagination, poetics, technology, and participation to develop a more sensitive and visceral relation with materiality and meaning by creating installations in which viewers/participants are provoked to new points of view through emotional entanglements. Her objective is to make the ineffable and abstract (concepts, ideas, emotions) more affective to serve as a conduit motivating people to active responses.
“The focus of my residency is water and climate change in the context of interdisciplinary collaborations,” says Rewakowicz. “Engaging with students and faculty from different departments, as well as local communities, my objective is to use creative approaches to develop a more embodied awareness of water through presentations, workshops, and my own artistic production to create various platforms of interdisciplinary interactions that allow us to think imaginatively with water.”
Rewakowicz is a strong believer in art’s power of imagination and building interdisciplinary bridges.
“Art can help us to ask different questions and learn how to envision and create different kinds of relationships with our surroundings. To face such complex problems as water pollution and climate change, we need to develop more-than-rational ways of thinking and acting and learn how to co-operate and collaborate in new ways and on multiple levels. By creating emotional entanglements, art may be able to bring us closer to narrowing the gap between what we know and what we do,” says Rewakowicz.
The Pierre Lassonde Artist-in-Residence Program was created in 2021. This annual, non-recurring residency supports the research, development, and creation of a project proposed by a successful professional visual artist. Working in the context of an undergraduate Fine Arts program, the artist-in-residence engages with students, faculty, and the greater university community as they develop their research. The artist-in-residence will work primarily on campus to develop their proposed project. They will employ student intern(s) to assist in the development of their project, present public talks, exhibitions, or other events, participate in departmental activities during the winter semester, and will be available to meet with students.
