The gift of time and space: SPAO Artist Residency for Photographers and Photo-Based Artists
- JOHANNA MIZGALA
- 23 hours ago
- 4 min read
ARTIST RESIDENCIES are critical opportunities to step outside the pressures of daily ongoing demands and competing expectations to allow for focused attention to a specific project or to percolate on new ideas and experiments.
The SPAO Artist Residency for Photographers and Photo-Based Artists offers a transformative opportunity: an environment that supports experimentation and engagement, and also provides necessary room for deeper reflections. This residency nurtures artistic practice, while allowing for an artist to delve into their own preoccupations with complex personal, collective, and historical narratives. At its core, a residency experience is the gift of time and space: rare commodities for artists whose practices need protection from the encroachment of commercial pressures.
Memory, as a thematic, is inherently tied to the question of identity. At SPAO, photographers such as Stéphane Alexis have developed their practice to explore the complexities of personal and collective memory. Stéphane’s series Chains and Crowns is rooted in his exploration of community care and diasporic identity, themes deeply tied to memory and the passing on of ways of knowing. His photographs blend portraiture with rich narrative layers, questioning the ways in which memory shapes both the subject and the viewer. Stéphane expands on this engagement with memory, not just as an archive of the past, but as the conduit to a dynamic, shared, and lived experience. Memory operates as an active participant in the photographic process — one that is shaped by both the artist’s gaze and the viewer’s interpretations.
For Joi Arcand, a nehiyaw (Cree) artist whose work confronts the erasure of Indigenous languages and their centrality to shared cultural practices, SPAO offered a pivotal space to interrogate the tensions between historical memory and contemporary experiences. Joi’s work, which integrates Cree language as neon signage, operates as both a reclamation of Indigenous presence and a reimagining of the urban landscape. Her engagement with memory — both individual and cultural — explores how the photographic image can mediate between past and present, between the visible and the invisible.
In addition to the space for individual reflection, SPAO fosters an environment of community where artists can share, critique, and build on one another’s practices. This communal exchange becomes essential for photographers whose work navigates themes of memory, particularly as they pertain to collective histories and cultural identity.
For Neeko Paluzzi, whose work often grapples with themes of narration, identity, and memory, the residency was an opportunity to refine his practice through dialogue. Neeko’s work explores the shifting meanings of memory, both personal and shared, through works that translate visual and textual elements into new forms. Throughout his practice, the act of telling itself becomes a form of remembering; memory is never fixed, but always in flux, constantly being reinterpreted and reconstituted through the lens.
The residency experience at SPAO also serves as a critical platform for photographers such as Victoria Laube, whose practice addresses environmental memory and the human impact on the landscape. Victoria’s work, which explores the intersection of ecological preservation and photographic representation, draws heavily on the concept of memory as a record of the shifts in the landscape. Her images — often haunting in their quietude — serve as a form of ecological memory, documenting spaces that are threatened or erased by human activity. Through her time at this residency, Victoria was able to engage more deeply with how the camera can function as both a witness and a recorder of these disappearing landscapes. The program provided her with the space to reflect on how memory is embedded in the natural world, how the land itself remembers the people who inhabit it, and how photography can preserve — or forget — these fragile histories.
The act of remembering is, in many ways, an act of reconfiguring the past. Artists in residence at SPAO have engaged with the complexities of historical memory, examining the tensions between collective and individual memory, and between the factual and the constructed.
Whether it is Joi confronting the erasure of Indigenous languages, Stéphane exploring nurturing and community care, Neeko translating fragmented memories and confronting narration as storytelling, or Victoria documenting ecological memory, the SPAO Artist Residency functions as a crucial site for grappling with the ways in which memory functions within the photographic image.
By creating dedicated time and space for reflection, community, and critical dialogue, SPAO offers emerging and mid-career artists a place to explore the themes that shape their practice and their understanding of the world. Memory, in its complex and fluid nature, has been a fertile landscape for the interrogation of the past, engagement with the present, and the imagining of new futures. Photographers need the freedom to experiment and explore, to contribute to an ongoing dialogue about identity, culture, and history within the broader field of contemporary practice.
Find out more about the SPAO Artist Residency for Photographers and Photo-Based Artists at:
Johanna Mizgala is the Chief Curator of the House of Commons and a leader in the field of museums and material culture. She has an extensive background in arts, heritage, and culture advocacy and has taught and published extensively on architecture, archives, contemporary art, and photography.
