FLEET Mobile Art Studio

FLEET is a multi-year project that is planning, designing, and building moveable studios for working artists. Responding to the loss of arts and culture spaces in Vancouver, this project will place studios on a temporary basis throughout the Lower Mainland and manage their ongoing use. The studios are designed to fill a range of arts and culture uses and needs. A robust program of activity will be developed in collaboration with artists, organizations and the local communities they are located within.

For the inaugural year of operations for the first two FLEET Studios, one will be activating the Chain and Forge Triangle on Granville Island from mid-June 2024 until early spring 2025. Activities at this studio will include artist residencies, project rentals, open house days, special events in partnerships with local Granville Island artists and festivals, workshops, talks, listening sessions, and more.

The second studio will be headed to Edmonds Park in Burnaby, where Other Sights and FLEET have partnered with City of Burnaby Public Art to program the studio with residencies, talks, open house events, and multiple exciting community events and activities from mid-June 2024 until September 2025.

FLEET construction was supported by British Columbia Arts Council, Canadian Heritage, CMHC-Granville Island, The City of Burnaby, The City of Vancouver and the Canada Council for the Arts. Construction was also supported by generous donations from multiple organizations, for a complete donor list visit www.fleetstudios.org. FLEET programming is supported by the City of Burnaby, CHMC-Granville Island, and Canada Council for the Arts.

Bringing together individuals with expertise in the curation, management, presentation, delivery and promotion of art in public spaces, Other Sights’ mandate is to create a presence for art in spaces and sites that are accessible to a broad public, such as the built environment, communications technologies, the media, and the street. Other Sights is dedicated to challenging perceptions, encouraging discourse and promoting individual perspectives about shared social spaces.

Over the past 6 years Other Sights has been collaborating on and researching the critical need for artists to have access to space for independent creative practice. Other Sights has been a founding partner who has supported and steered the Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency since 2016. Other Sights recently became one of the Blue Cabin Cooperative Founding Members in 2024. FLEET: Mobile Artist Studios has been a project of Other Sights in collaboration with a team of artists, planners and architects since 2019, the first two Mobile Studios are ready for occupancy in the summer of 2024. In addition to Other Sights’ involvement in these long-term projects, the Producer team are also collaborating on an Alberta and British Columbia Artist Residency Network Project, an initiative that brings together artists who are developing non-institutional models of artist support in non-urban locales.

Mohamed Assani is a sitarist and composer who will work on a new composition for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. During his stay in the studio, he will offer a 3-person performance event and host 2 workshops using South Asian instruments and geared to musicians of all ages. 

• November 16 at 1 pm: Half-day workshop - Passport to South Asian Music  
• November 17 at 4 pm: Performance featuring Mohamed Assani Trio
• December 7 at 11 am: Full-day workshop -  Demystifying South Asian Music

Sidi Chen is a diasporic queer artist living in Edmonds. Sidi is a graduate of the MFA program at Emily Carr University, and is currently studying art and community integration. Sidi’s project at FLEET has 2 parts; in the winter he will invite the public to contribute rain vessels for a sound walk and recording project, and in the spring he will hold workshops creating home-made chalk using eggshells for a community mapping project.   

Kay Slater is a queer, multidisciplinary artist with over 15 years of experience exploring digital media and accessibility in exhibition design. Kay’s work aims to create inclusive and immersive spaces that engage diverse audiences, particularly those who are deaf, hard of hearing or disabled. Kay will explore accessibility and digital innovation through virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. Kay will remain silent and practice non-verbal communication throughout their residency.

Bahar Vaghari Moghaddam and Eilidh Keegan-Henry will research the role of public transportation in shaping the Edmonds neighbourhood. Their creative work hopes to uncover parallels between the social and economic impacts of the development of Burnaby’s historical electric tramway system (the Interurban Railway) and the modern Skytrain network.

Sophia Zarders is a mixed race Black femme visual artist, illustrator and educator from the unceded, ancestral land of the Tongva and Gabrielino peoples (Long Beach, California). Zarders will use the studio to continue exploring their interdisciplinary approach to clothing and figurative painting. 

Kevin Orlosky is a North Burnaby artist whose work involves community participation. He is a recent MFA graduate of Emily Carr University of Art & Design. During his residency he will invite park visitors to participate in creating large, full-body cyanotype portraits.

Stephanie will use FLEET: Edmonds as a meeting place for outdoor activities as part of their project: A Field School of Mapping and Walking. The events, called WalkingLab, draw on feminist-queer, anti-racist, anti-ableist and anti-colonial thought and practice to question who gets to walk where, how we walk, and under whose terms. Neighbours and community are encouraged to join and participate to share their perspectives. 

Sena Cleave, Tristan Sober-Blodgett, Ysabel Gana, Toni-Leah C. Yake, Anju Singh, Julia Ulehla and Barbara Adler will hold a group residency to explore how handmade textile environments can set the stage for climate care, and heighten relationships between people and place. The group will take a variety of approaches to offering workshops and events over the course of their stay, and hope to encourage community connection across many media. 

Bianca Del Rio Kodato hosts a 3-part workshop series that invites people to reconnect to the food they eat by coming together to share stories while making bags using textile techniques from their own lives, heritages and cultures. These food bags will become carriers of stories (as well as memories, traditions and dreams) of both the bags and the people weaving them together.

• November 30 at 1 pm: Workshop 1
• January 18 at 1 pm: Workshop 2
• January 19 at 1 pm: Workshop 3

Adhoc plots collective, a collective including Pippa Lattey, Erin Sauha Lee and Jenn Pearson will gather together intermittently at FLEET: Edmonds over the winter and spring to work on a large basket sculpture that incorporates woven patchwork pieces made from locally sourced plant waste and found materials. They will host walking, gleaning and weaving workshops open to the community.

• February 2 at noon: Walking and Gleaning Workshop
• February 9 at noon: Weaving Workshop
• March 9 at noon: Weaving Workshop
• March 20 at noon: Weaving Workshop 

Alegria Soy, a grass-roots non-profit organization in Burnaby-Edmonds, will undertake a youth-led design project to create a neighbourhood community garden. The garden will be installed over the course of the FLEET residency and remain in Edmonds Park after the conclusion of the program.

The Pacific Spirit Quilters’ Guild is a small group of people who meet at the Burnaby Village Museum to learn and pursue their love of quilting. They have been sharing quilting for 32 years through quilt shows and exhibitions, and by offering workshops on quilting to the wider Burnaby community. They will hold a pop-up exhibition of quilts and a workshop on quilt making.

• March 15-16, 2025: Pop up quilt show
• April 15, 2025: Workshop

A Coast Salish Artist working in digital and handmade forms, Eliot White-Hill used FLEET: Edmonds to consider “the commute” and as a space to prepare for his upcoming show at the Nanaimo Art Gallery, in his home territory of Snuneymuxw. 

Edmonds-based artist Michelle Sound celebrated the recent publication of the Kindred Tracings catalogue featuring her work, gave an artist talk in dialogue with Eliot White-Hill and will host an Indigenous-creatives-centered drum-making workshop in dialogue with Burnaby Art Gallery Assistant Curator Emily Dundas Oke.

• September 14, 2024 at 4 pm: Artist talk: Michelle Sound and Eliot White-Hill
• October 17, 2024 at 6 pm: Book launch and reading, Kindred Tracings with Dallas Hunt, Minahil Bukhari and Wildfires Bookshop