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Spring 2020

Outdoor Art Program

Holly Schmidt: Nomadic Structures

  • Holly Schmidt

    Artist

    Holly Schmidt (Canadian, b. 1976) is an artist, curator and educator engaging in embodied research, collaboration and informal pedagogy. She creates site-specific public projects that lead to experiments with materials in her studio. As the core of her work, Schmidt explores the multiplicity of human relations with the natural world. During her residency with the Belkin’s Outdoor Art Program, Schmidt has utilized spaces between campus buildings through a process of collective knowledge production. These artistic and ecological interventions foster relationships with plants in a manner that is both distinct from the formal, university landscape design as well as from standard notions of gallery space. Schmidt has been involved in exhibitions, projects and residencies at the Belkin Outdoor Art Program; the Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver; AKA Gallery, Saskatoon; Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver; the Santa Fe Art Institute; Burnaby Art Gallery; and Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, Vancouver.

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As part of her Vegetal Encounters residency, Holly Schmidt collaborated with Bill Pechet and Mari Fujita and their students from UBC’s Environmental Design (ENDS) program in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture to explore the potential for a mobile structure to support residency programming on campus.

For this Spring 2020 project, ENDS 401 students were asked to consider Schmidt’s focus on human relationships with plant life and her embodied approach to engaging deeply with the natural world in the design of a mobile structure. Parameters around ease of transportation and installation, sustainable materials and comfortable spaces for gathering helped shape their proposals. Students were eager for an opportunity to create designs in response to an artist’s vision and to see those design realized in some way on campus; because of COVID-19 constraints, these proposals have not yet been constructed.

For more about the project, read Laura Beshears’s “Experience and the Object: Experiments in Relational Art & Architecture” in Peripheral Review (27 May 2021).

IMAGEs (From Above) Carmen Kam, Nazanin Seifi Hessar, Tiff Nguyen, Pa-Leaf-Ion, 2020; Claudio Cabana, Tyler Harvey, Percival Ren, Portable Gallery, 2020; Megan Berry, Narita Ico, Robert Ferguson, Oasis, 2020; Carmen Kam, Nazanin Seifi Hessar, Tiff Nguyen, Pa-Leaf-Ion, 2020. All Courtesy of the artists.

 

  • Holly Schmidt

    Artist

    Holly Schmidt (Canadian, b. 1976) is an artist, curator and educator engaging in embodied research, collaboration and informal pedagogy. She creates site-specific public projects that lead to experiments with materials in her studio. As the core of her work, Schmidt explores the multiplicity of human relations with the natural world. During her residency with the Belkin’s Outdoor Art Program, Schmidt has utilized spaces between campus buildings through a process of collective knowledge production. These artistic and ecological interventions foster relationships with plants in a manner that is both distinct from the formal, university landscape design as well as from standard notions of gallery space. Schmidt has been involved in exhibitions, projects and residencies at the Belkin Outdoor Art Program; the Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver; AKA Gallery, Saskatoon; Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver; the Santa Fe Art Institute; Burnaby Art Gallery; and Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, Vancouver.

    Read More

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