Grant Proposal - Not Selected
This is a grant proposal that I submitted for the consideration of the Canada Council for the Arts in December 2025. The category was “Artist Creation Grant”. My application included my CV, which you can find here, with all activities up to the end of 2025 included. The images interspersed usually all go together at the end. My application was not selected for funding, and that’s okay! I’ll adjust it and try again after my solo show in May (when I have bandwidth). The concept has evolved, and juries are always different!
“Spymaster”
linocut print and typeset poem (referenced in application) 5x7” double-sided 2024
artistic experimentation
artistic research
artists and community collaboration
creation of artistic work
1 sentence project description:
A printmaker will conduct research via community conversations and aesthetic experiments (linocut prints) to create a body of work that celebrates a dog walking community in North Central Edmonton using the visual language of old computer games (1-year).
“It’s in my nature to need space”
linocut print (demonstration of printing on coloured paper) 16x12” 2023
Activity Description
There is something special about the people who walk their dogs in my neighbourhood (Whikwentowin, Edmonton). I’m extroverted by most people’s standards but I have never known my neighbours the way I do now, after living here for 4 years (what my friends and I have called our “sitcom era”). I strongly believe that a big part of that is the dogs and their people, and I’m not the only one who feels this way. I will conduct semi-formal interviews (consentually recorded casual conversations) with my neighbours and let those interviews inspire my visual art practice for a year.
My first interview subjects will include:
E, a poodle parent, mentioned to me that the dog walking community makes them feel safer, as a trans person, to engage with strangers during a time when their rights are being actively stripped by the provincial government.
C, who lives a few blocks away, has a dog named Blake, and is incredibly social with the dog people. She probably knows twice as many people as I do.
A (in my building), whose dog Nuge passed away this Fall, and whose perspective on the community has likely shifted.
The mom and two young daughters (I don’t know their names, they live somewhere NW of me) who love my dog, and with whom I chat regularly because of him.
Someone whose dog isn’t friendly to strange dogs (do they get any social benefit?)
My hypothesis is that in my (lack of) backyard, I have a template for an in-person social network that promotes interconnected care, and feels good and easy to participate in. This is rare and important. Edmonton is not considered a walkable city, but this area and the people who choose to live here have carved out walkability for ourselves. My art will be countercultural to the isolation and independence of the American Dream and will offer a bridge of understanding to folks who struggle to understand (or even feel threatened by) walkable neighbourhoods.
“Frog Kisser Wallpaper”
linocut print (single tile of a repeating pattern) 9x12” 2025
My core interest here is in in-person community, and the dog walkers are my entry point into this research. Should this year of research and creation go well, I hope to branch out into other specific communities. Throughout this theme, I will be using the visual language of Y2K computer games (choose-your-own-adventure and worldbuilding) to illustrate my findings. I will not be making any digital art; rather, I will continue to make linocut prints and installations with this visual style. For example:
Linocut prints on coloured paper (occasionally with pasted-on colour blocking) that evoke pixellated Y2K computer games with carved hatching.
Linocut pattern collages based on an isometric perspective that can be installed in different compositions. What’s interesting about this one is that modular “patches” are used to help a computer game load more quickly and to use each asset multiple times, and the same logic applies to printmaking multiples. I have been thinking about modular printmaking for at least a decade, and this may finally be the way it clicks.
Large print collages of small paper squares to represent pixels more literally
Prints with text components: game questions with limited responses, in which the viewer has to make a choice in order to (hypothetically) proceed. Apathy goes nowhere. All of these artworks (at least at first) won’t be physically interactive, only mentally. The viewer should naturally try to imagine the game context in which this still image might come up, and what might happen if they chose either response.
I haven’t played very many computer games since 2010, when I quit The Sims cold turkey, but I find old computer games compelling in their simplicity. Like books, they require players/readers to use their imagination to render whole universes from pixellated isometry and a few words. My art will focus on human connection while taking the form of an outdated computer interface. This will contrast on both fronts the inhuman, highly realistic output of generative AI and draw attention to its bleaching effect on visual culture.
With interview-based art, I have to trust people to engage with me authentically and thoughtfully. I have to trust myself to take in that input and create an artwork (and to wait for the input before I start ideating). Every time I have used this creative structure in the past, it has been rewarding and surprising. In this instance, I am not keen to do pet portraits (lol), but I don’t know what the subject matter will be. I trust that my interviews and style ideas will spark the right visual subjects.
In this research & creation period, I will engage with my neighbours, my fellow dog walkers, my art/printmaking community, and my wider audience through email, flyers, word of mouth, zines, and studio/gallery interactions. This is consistent with my existing practice (only the flyers are new). This project will forge connections not just between me and my audience, but between everyone involved and each other.
“Labelled: Aquarius”
multimedia artwork with linocut print at centre (my first foray into this theatre-frame format) 14x20” 2024
I wrote a poem for my last body of work with a line that says “none of us know what’s coming next but don’t let that stop you from dreaming up gorgeous futures”. This is the core of my upcoming work. There is a post attributed to Aaron Bushnell that reads,
“I’ve realized that a lot of the difference between me and my less radical friends is that they are less capable of imagining a better world than I am. I follow YouTubers like Andrewisms that fill my head with concrete images of free, post-scarcity communities, and it makes me so much more prepared to reject things about the current world, because I’ve imagined how things could be and that helps me see how extremely bullshit things are right now.”
Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in 2024 to protest the genocide in Gaza.
As a person who cares deeply about the world and everyone in it, I feel that my artistic calling is to create those hopeful “concrete images” of how things could be, so that viewers of my work have something to work towards while they’re fighting against global apathy. The beauty of my dog walking community is just that.
“You don't have to tell me if you don't want to”
artist book with linocut and letterpress printing (each consecutive page has one fewer layers of the linocut reduction, flattening and reducing detail in the people depicted. The poem on the final page expands on the meaning of the title.) 7x10.5” 2023
What is your capacity and experience to carry out the activities?
This will be my fourth time beginning a project that I anticipate spending at least one year on. In the last five years, I have devoted myself to specific themes, one at a time, with excellent results.
My most relevant experience is my work on The Comfort House Project. From May 2021 to April 2023 I conducted 11 interviews and carved and printed 11 linocut artworks based on those interviews. I took care to synthesize the input from my community members with sensitivity and consideration. My final presentation was an ambitious, editioned artwork that exists in 4 private collections in Canada and the US, and has been exhibited in Ontario and Alberta.
My proposed body of work will similarly involve interviews. I will be speaking with individuals about how they fit into and perceive the community of Whikwentowin, especially as connected through dog people. I am hopeful about engaging participants for a few reasons. One, my art is both beautiful and optimistic. This means people like to be included in it and know that I will focus on the inherent beauty of their contribution. Two, I am a good listener, and I’ve learned to ask questions in a way that ensures interviewees do not feel judged. Three, every time I have invited people into my practice in this way, I have had more volunteers than I can take on. I think people like to feel part of something cool.
While the Comfort House Project was entirely self-funded, some of my more recent work has been funded via a major project grant from the Edmonton Arts Council.
In terms of exploration and experimentation with linocut and letterpress printmaking, I consider myself an expert and innovator in this medium.
“You’re Doing Fine”
linocut print on handmade paper (embodies a lot of the video-game aesthetics I’m planning to use: coloured background, Ghibli vibes, a small text element) 6x8” 2022
What is your project timeline? Provide important milestones.
First 6 months:
Document my personal experience of finding community via dog ownership in a backyard-less, walkable neighbourhood. Reach out to the interview shortlist to see who would be interested in participating. Start with people who are already familiar with my practice, interview them, make some prints based on those conversations, and then show those prints to people who are more like strangers to give them a proof of concept and make them feel comfortable participating (at least 6 conversations and 6 artworks).
Make audio recordings of conversations with anyone who consents, and save them for an unknown something. Mini-podcast series? The conversations felt so central in the comfort house project, although I never recorded them. I would like to have the option to pursue something in an audio medium, but only if the interviewees are comfortable with that.
Tell people (friends, family, neighbours, creative coworkers, mailing list subscribers) about this new idea and invite them to share their observations regarding communities they belong to that have the special sauce.
Second 6 months:
Synthesize some of the ideas from the first interviews and artworks. What common threads are coming up? Identify gaps in participant diversity and try to engage people of different genders, ages, races, sexualities, etc. (acknowledging that a neighbourhood will have demographic trends). Consider making artworks that draw from multiple interviews (all of them?). Consider how seasonal changes (such as Edmonton's winter) affect the community. Adjust course if need be.
Interview at least 6 more people. Let the work go where it needs to go, and don’t be afraid to be ambitious.
“Crushing Softly”
linocut print (there is no hand-colouring in this, just 4 layers of reduction carving and printing from a single block. It demonstrates my current mastery of this medium, though there is always more to learn.) 12x16” 2024
Is there other information that will help us understand your application?
This project will be based on responses from members of my broader dog-walking community, not exclusively on my personal life, the way my last project was. However, it is deeply informed by my personal life. I anticipate moving away from my neighbourhood as early as late Spring 2026 so that my partner and I can cohabitate in a home that suits us both. This means that I will be making this art as an outsider who used to be an insider. I have loved living in my current home, mostly because of the neighbourhood. I am paying special attention to my existing community dynamics in a kind of pre-grieving, and strategizing how to forge strong bonds in my future neighbourhood.
This feels very specific to my life, as well as highly relatable in a society where we move homes frequently and are told that we can just maintain our connections online. But. There’s nothing like the magic of walking one block to go and make dinner with your best friend.
“Love you, bye”
linocut print, 5x7” 2023
