Evan Furness (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist and arts worker from rural Epekwitk/Prince Edward Island. His practice uses drawing, painting, and bookmaking, as well as audio, video and performance to explore connections between the everyday, his rural experience and popular culture. His work has been shown across Canada and he is one of the co-founders of the Charlottetown Zine Fest. Furness completed his BFA from Mount Allison University in 2018 and has worked for artist-run-centres and art institutions such as Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre, This Town Is Small, and Confederation Centre Art Gallery. He spends way too much time reading Wikipedia and has been Season Producer for River Clyde Arts since 2023. For this project, Evan will be developing a new performance based installation that expands on a series of sound collages he made in 2024.
From Atlantic Canadian folk songs to CBC broadcasts and government PSAs, Furness samples the sounds of his upbringing to compose new narratives that merge the drama of film scores with noisy genres including industrial, punk, drone, and power electronics. The project reflects on the mechanization and cooptation of island industries and culture, and the dichotomies between its bucolic tourism images and the realities of living and working here rurally year round.
Noah Defreyne is an artist working with film photography and collage. By assembling reconstructed photos he explores primordial qualities and unexpected harmonies in search of connectivity. Through their Test Press project using a collage process that Noah calls the “Infinite Puzzle”, he will experiment with 3D photo sculptures. Through the process of cutting photographic prints and assembling the pieces by searching for unexpected harmonies in their recombination, his approach moves between observation and reconstruction, seeking moments of clarity that reveal something hidden within the world around us. He explores qualities of photographs like motion blur and multiple exposures that expose layers and structures that are not immediately visible, and treats the photographic process as a form of devotion to the natural world.