CAAF Artist Residencies
CAAF offers studio residencies with the aim to support emerging artists to reach their full potential. By providing space and funding, the CAAF Studio Residency enables emerging artists to further explore their creative practice and take advantage of opportunities that CAAF can provide. Artists are also encouraged to share their process and engage with the community during their residencies.
THE CAAF STUDIOS
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APPLY TO THE CAAF STUDIO RESIDENCIES
Our next call for Artists coming in late 2025, please stay tuned!
CAAF’s cSPACE Studio
Suite #435, 1721 – 29th Avenue SW, Calgary, AB
The studio is located on the fourth floor of cSPACE Marda Loop, a multi-disciplinary creative hub and arts incubator.
280 square feet
Natural light (with room darkening blinds) and adjustable LED lighting
High speed Wifi and fibre connectivity
Elevator
Fully accessibleCAAF’s 500 Collective Studio
#500 – 321 50the Avenue SE , Calgary, ABThe studio is located at 500 Collective, a collective of working spaces for creatives.
85 square feet
Natural light
Wifi
Fully accessible -
APPLY TO THE COMMUNITY MENTORSHIP & STUDIO RESIDENCY
Our next call for Artists coming in late 2025, stay tuned!
The Aspen Art Studio
610 – 8th Avenue SE, Calgary, AB
The studio is located in Cary’s community hub, Village Commons in Calgary’s east Village. Village Commons is a multigenerational space that offers a diversity of opportunities, including free and fun recreational based programming and community engagement across the lifespan.
600 square feet
6 tables that can seat up to 14 people for workshops
Wifi in commons areas
Fully accessible
Studio time must be booked in advance
Current Resident - cSPACE Studio
Jennifer Ilanes - January to March 2025
In 2015, I developed a technique using fabric and interfacing that mimics the look of plate armour, and since then, I’ve used this method to create a variety of sculptures and wearable art. These pieces are made using silk-screened and repurposed fabrics, tartan, leather, found objects, interfacing, and hardware.
Most recently, this style of work was featured in my solo show Pilgrimage of Stories and Stones which was funded by Calgary Arts Development. This collection was begun as a response to my 2022 research trip to Scotland where I delved into the lives of the ancient Celts and the colonization of my ancestors by the Catholic church. The artifacts that I researched have inspired my work through the use of historical imagery and mediums.
The concepts that I investigate in my work include witchcraft, classism, religious trauma, and emotional healing found by analyzing the lives of long-past people. My practice explores the spirituality of my ancestors through my perspective of being raised in a high-demand Christian religion, and the work I've done to leave that behind me.
During this residency, I will expand this side of my practice by creating one wearable art piece in the form of a suit of armour, 3 wall pieces, and 1 stand-alone sculpture. While I make these, the residency space will be open for visitors to ask questions about the techniques and concepts employed. I am also happy to run a workshop or demonstration if the Calgary Allied Arts Foundation is interested. http://jenniferillanes.ca
Current Resident - 500 Collective Studio
Ryan Danny Owen - January to March 2025
My name is Ryan Danny Owen (they, him, her) and I am a non-binary visual artist, queer historian, and author. My interdisciplinary practice explores memory, sexuality, loss, and gender through text, archival practices, and destruction. My exhibition, DIRTY PICTURE (2024), featured the installation, Fantasy Sequence (Blue fantasy motel) imagined as the motel room set of a fictionalized gay porno film and a pavilion to a constructed fantasy exploring a mythology of an impossible history of queerness.
During the studio art CAAF residency, I will develop new work exploring themes of science fiction to explore queer longing, gender, alienness, time, and speculative future. Over the three months, I will construct a space suit costume based on various pulp science fiction novels and media, fetish costumes, and low-budget films and create a series of experimental video pieces recontextualizing queer longing, love, otherness, fantasy, and trans identity into a fictionalized lost sci-fi fantasy epic.
I am interested in using science fiction as a way of exploring aspects of queer identity, desire, and otherness using concepts of the genre such as time travel, speculative futures, space exploration, and extraterrestrial life. Taking inspiration from pulpy sci-fi paperbacks, gay erotica, science fiction media, comics, and low-budget filmmaking to create these constructed fantasies and lost fables of queer utopias, love stories, dystopias, and cautionary tales. http://www.ryandannyowen.com
Current Resident -The Aspen Art Studio (carya residency)
Haniyyah Khan - January to March 2025
Finding Space is a series of four works that examine my personal experiences of displacement and migration through the lens of a child. It was one of my first works that centered on my personal experience.
This series project, "Finding Space," explores the shifts in migration through my personal experience. Using images from my childhood, I reflect on the emotions and changes that have resulted in my resilience today.
Selling all of our belongings and wrapping up our lives in a single van, my parents moved from San Diego to Calgary as our last resort. With the heightened anxiety of 9/11 and the lack of PR approval granted to Muslim immigrants, this was the only way to find some stability after years of struggling. I remember my parents slowly selling our things as I ate a slice of plastic cheese on the kitchen floor on our last day home. I was thrilled about the big road trip ahead but upset that I had to leave the treats my teacher used to give us in class.
As I explore these ideas of change, using printmaking in this work has allowed me to shift and change things as I create. Sometimes, things don't go how I want them to, but I can rely on my skills to make something out of nothing. Through this process, I have welcomed change in my work and the struggle for consistency. Experiencing a lack of control in my childhood, I use print to create numerous editions and pathways of artistic exploration, as I know I'm always learning. Being able to bounce back in this work was essential to me as it also explores the resilience I have garnered through my experience of migrating to Canada during my early childhood.
We acknowledge the generous support of Calgary Arts Development, the Province of Alberta through Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and our endowment funds at the Calgary Foundation: the Marion and Jim Nicoll Bequest, Douglass Motter Fund, Wesley Irwin Fund and H.B. Hill Trust.
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