About

The White Rabbit Art Project  invites emerging and established artists to spend five days installing site specific works in a stunning setting on Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy. The project encourages skill sharing between artists and offers a liberating space for participants to push the boundaries of their practice.

Details

White Rabbit will balance several structured workshops with time for independent and collaborative work. Over the duration of the White Rabbit project,  the artists in residence will facilitate group  projects and interdisciplinary activity. Artists are encouraged to find an interplay with the landscape and their particular media. Media may include site material such as wood, stone and clay found on location, or fabricated from local material and/or will include audio, video and other media types designed to interact with the landscape. Artists will be unconstrained as to their media except that it should interact with the landscape and be conceptually linked to that particular space.

Sustainability of the site will be a key principle and all project proposals will be assessed to ensure they conform to environmentally sound practices (use site materials where possible and otherwise leaving no trace of contamination). Artists will be strongly encouraged to have a sustainable approach with their projects, materials and process. The Upper Economy property is an unspoiled landscape of meadows and streams, with clean water supply and its gardens are organic.

The final outcome will be an exhibition of landscape inspired installations, open for a 24-hour period to the wider community, allowing artists to use the cycle of night and day, high and low tide to interact with their work.

Location

The coastal landscape of the Bay of Fundy offers a striking diversity of land and sea, an area where time and tides have a transformative effect. British landscape installation artist Andy Goldsworthy used the Bay of Fundy landscape as the background for work that later became the introduction and setting for Thomas Reidelshiemer’s award winning film, Rivers and Tides. Similarly, we see the Bay of Fundy as a venue for nurturing the evolution of installation art in natural environment and exploring concepts of time and space.

Structure

The project will run for 6 days with participants arriving on  Sunday, August 9th and the week culminating in a 24-hour exhibit/performance on the final day . During the first few days of White Rabbit, the focus will be on presentations and workshops meant to encourage collaboration and stimulate participants’ ideas. As well, guided trips to visually / sonically significant local sites will be an option each day. From day three to five, the week will be structured towards either independent time so that artists may focus on their installations or group work. Our hope is that artists will benefit from the process as much as the final product and that the week will leave artists with a renewed energy and new directions for their practice.