On Sound Speakers /Artists/ Presenters

We are pleased to announce Curtis Running Rabbit-Lefthand as our guest curator and Indigenous liaison for the On Sound Conference in Nanton. Curtis is an Indigenous multimedia creative producer, musician, spoken word artist and scholar. He is the founder and Executive Director of Indigenous Resilience in Music – an Indigenous-led organization creating insight into the lives of Indigenous musicians and empowering Indigenous youth in reclaiming their identity in music and the arts. He is also a first year law student at the University of Calgary where he does research in creating Indigenous language and cultural preservation methodologies specific to Blackfoot ways of knowing. As an artist and musician, he performs as the front person for the aggressive hardcore punk band Treaty People and performs under his solo singer songwriter works outside of his band. Curtis is a proud member of the Blackfoot Confederacy and comes from the Amskaapipikuni, Siksika and Stoney Nakoda nations. 

Friday June 7
Niitsitapa’pii Ohtako (Sound as Culture)
Iitaakoowaa (it made a sound)

ARTICLE 11 is an Indigenous arts activist creation and production company founded in 2013 by Tara Beagan (Ntlaka’pamux) and Andy Moro (Omuskego Cree.) It is named for the eleventh article in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which states Indigenous peoples have a right to practice our arts and culture and have the resources to do so.

A11 have brought Indigenous performing artworks to Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, an altar in Edinburgh, fly-in community Kingcome Inlet, Calgary’s City Hall atrium and most recently January 2019 marked A11’s Sydney Festival and Australian debut.

Thursday June 6
Hotel Room

Friday June 7
Hotel Room
Amplitude!

Richelle Bear Hat is a Calgary based Blackfoot/Dane-Zaa Cree artist and she graduated from the Alberta College of Art + Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing in 2011. Bear Hat’s artistic practice investigates ideas surrounding family relationships and the types of knowledge that are capable of being passed through them. Explored through the use of photography, transfers, video, and paper based works, her use of materials and means of production support transferences of memory and provide a platform for storytelling.

Friday June 7

Artist Talk
Amplitude! 

Raylene Campbell is a sound artist who embraces various creative practices including improvisation, composition, performance art, sound and image, and public intervention, and is a certified Deep Listening instructor. The focus of Raylene’s creative process involves explorations of acoustic ecology, psychogeography, computer interactive technology, and audience interactivity in both performance and installation environments.

Saturday June 8
Timber Times Three
Hertz So Good

Matthew Cardinal might be known to you as a member of nêhiyawak, but that will do little to prepare you for the avant-garde improvisational work he does under his own name. This is meditative music caught on the interplay of freeform guitar and synth.

Friday June 7
Iitaakoowaa (it made a sound)

The music of Ghostkeeper is a continually-evolving organism; the defining aspect of all their music to date, coursing through each of their evolutionary stages, is that the band truly sounds like no one else. The current iteration of the band – uniting core members/vocalists Shane Ghostkeeper and Sarah Houle with drummer Eric Hamelin (Chad VanGaalen, Nomoreshapes) and bassist Ryan Bourne (Sleepkit, Devonian Gardens, Chad VanGaalen) – has carved out Ghostkeeper’s most unique sound world to date. Their songs incorporate elements of 60s girl-group melodies, dashes of country royalty- Lynn, Wynette, and Cline -, and a profound melodic sense drawn equally from ‘90s indie rock, African pop, and traditional Aboriginal pow wow music. And the results are as catchy as they are singular. 

Saturday June 8
Ghostkeeper with Joe Kelly

Kristen Hutchinson is an art historian, visual artist, curator, writer, editor, and art consultant. She is the co-founder of fast & dirty, an Edmonton based rotating collective of artists and curators that creates exhibitions and art events for short durations in unusual environments and projects that challenge curatorial methods. Kristen is also the editor-in-chief of Luma Quarterly, an online, open access journal about film and media art, with a focus of Western Canada. She is currently writing a creative non-fiction book about supernatural creatures in contemporary art, film, and television. www.kh1art.ca

Saturday June 8
Contemporary Canadian Video Art & Identity

Gary James Joynes is a Canadian sound and visual artist who performs Live Cinema Audio-Visual works at international music events around the world as Clinker. He blends the beauty and physicality of sounds auditory and visual elements live in performance and in rigorous and emotional photo and video installation works.

Saturday June 8
Binaural
Timber Times Three

Joe Kelly is a media artist working in Calgary. He studied film and video at the Quickdraw Animation Society and the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers. Joe was Artist in Residence at the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers attended two thematic residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Joe has made a number of films that have been screened and awarded internationally. He works primarily with film and video, and has completed and screened many films on super 8, 16 and 35mm formats. Shot and edited a doc series in conjunction with the Calgary Drop in Centre.

Saturday June 8
Ghostkeeper with Joe Kelly

Alex Moon is a media artist from Canada with a BFA from The Alberta College of Art + Design. Stemming from his technical work at ACAD, Moon has also consulted for many artists and has directed photography on several films; notably for Tamara Lee-Anne Cardinal, Rita McKeough and Sahar Te. His exhibition record has taken his work to Struts Gallery, Galerie Sans Nom, The Works Festival Edmonton, Red Deer Museum, and University of Lethbridge.

Friday June 7
Amplitude!
Granular: A Sonic Analog of the Grain

Saturday June 8
Granular: A Sonic Analog of the Grain

Shawn Pinchbeck is an Alberta, Canada based electroacoustic music composer, new media artist, performer, installation artist, lecturer, curator, and sound engineer. His award winning performance works and installations have been presented widely at numerous festivals and exhibits across Canada and Europe. He collaborates extensively, creating interdisciplinary works with artists of all backgrounds.

www.spinchbeck.com

Saturday June 8
Binaural
Timbre Times Three

Janet Rogers is from the Mohawk/Tuscarora nations of Six Nations. She is the current University of Alberta Writer in Residence 2018/19. Her sixth poetry collection, As Long As the Sun Shines – Bookland Press 2018 and the Mohawk Language edition –  Bookland Press 2019 has a campanion poetry album on the Reverbnation site. Janet works in sound art, video poetry and performance art with poetry. She is one of the two member media team, 2Ro Media with Mohawk artist Jackson Twobears.

Friday June 7
Glimmering James

Heather Kai Smith is a visual artist who currently lives and works in the unceded Coast Salish Territory known as Vancouver, BC. Her current practice explores the potential embedded within archival images of protest, collectivity and intentional communities activated through drawing, observation and iteration. Rooted in the practice of drawing, her work has lent itself to projects in animation, printmaking and installation.

Rachel Soong is a freelance sound designer and film composer based out of Calgary, AB. Her focus on post-production sound has led her to work on numerous short and feature films, commercials, and web series. Coming from a vast musical background, Rachel prides herself in telling story through sound, and loves experimenting with new ways to captivate the audience.

www.rachelsoong.com.

Saturday June 8
Hertz So Good

Lindsay Sorell is a Métis artist, writer, and MA student in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, and holds a BFA in Drawing from Alberta University of the Arts. She researches decolonizing political theory and cultural criticism, Métis history, identity, and material culture, and Indigenous practices of sovereignty and resistance. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, written for such publications as Canadian Art, Akimbo, and the Independent Media Arts Alliance, and participated in various visual art and writing residencies. She was the founding Editor of media art and film publication Luma Quarterly where essays she edited won Canadian Art Writing Prizes twice, and currently volunteers with the Digital Feminist Collective, the Rupertsland Centre for Métis Research, and works as Research Assistant for Dr. Laura Beard at University of Alberta mapping Indigenous storyworlds in fiction.

Sunday June 9
Last Notes