Artist Connie Michele Morey is in residence at the Comox Valley Art Gallery November 27–December 11 to conduct site specific research for Project Homesick and Roof (Over My Head). The artist will be on-site in GATHER:PLACE and on the gallery plaza as well as other locations in the community and surrounding valley.
RESEARCH / RESIDENCY IN GATHER:PLACE / COURTENAY:
THURSDAY–SATURDAY NOV 28th–30th / TUESDAY–FRIDAY DEC 3–6 / TUESDAY–WEDNESDAY DEC 10–11
OFF-SITE FIELDWORK in rural locations around the Comox Valley:
SUNDAY DEC 1 / MONDAY DEC 2 / SATURDAY DEC 7
Project Homesick / Roof (Over My Head) – CVAG facebook Album
Project Homesick / Roof (Over My Head)
I have been travelling to ‘abandoned’ village sites on the east and west coasts of Canada to document myself with a portable collapsible Roof(OvermyHead). Many of these sites include displaced working – class towns, union towns and resettlement projects that are being returned to the earth due to primary resource mismanagement, where human labour itself has been an exploited primary resource. Carrying a Roof (Over my Head) and on my shoulders, into past fishing, coal mining and milling villages has been a way for me to acknowledge the lived weight of exploitation, while holding space for conversations about the interdependence of resource management, labour and housing. Roof(OverMyHead) is part of a larger series of performative sculptures made primarily of reclaimed wood and repurposed wool blankets for Canada Council funded Project Homesick, which explores what it means to be ecologically displaced from the self-community-earth as home.
Connie Michele Morey / is an artist whose studio practice explores the experience of home as ecological interdependence. Through performative sculptures made primarily of reclaimed wood and repurposed wool blankets, her recent work Project Homesick and Roof (Over My Head) questions the relationships between displacement, primary resource mis/management, labour and housing. Her work is influenced by childhood experiences living rurally off the land, while being surrounded by family traditions of masonry, construction and textiles. She holds a BFA in Visual Arts from the University of Lethbridge, an M.Ed. in Community-Based Art Education and a Studio-Based PhD from the University of Victoria. She teaches at the University of Victoria and Camosun College and facilitates an artist mentorship program in collaboration with arc.hive gallery and Errant artSpace. She has exhibited and performed across Canada, Europe and Southeast Asia.