About Us
Dedicated Educators
- Vanessa Barnett and Elena Soní are educators and creative partners in Making Art Making Change (MAMC). We both immigrated to Canada from South Africa and Venezuela respectively, escaping the climate of oppression and racism in our home countries. MAMC's mandate is to initiate conversations between communities, priority groups and institutions giving voice to the project participants.
- The projects we offer are often sculptural with individual pieces assembled alongside one another in interesting configurations to mirror the authentic voices of the group.
- Experimentation with materials is an element of the art making. MAMC works with mixed media, through the layering of video, sound, performance, textiles, materials and found objects creating installations reflecting the conversation where intersectionality emerges provoking new questions.
- The work engages the larger public to become active participants in a dialogue with context and content so that we better acknowledge and ground the commonality amongst us.
OUR PROCESS
- MAMC believes in the universal power of art as a language for communication
- MAMC intentionally builds relationships with the different community organizations to identify relevant social concerns
- MAMC designs and implements art based projects that highlight existing conversations in communities
- MAMC’s provide a forum for participants self expression
- MAMC’s creates a bridge between participating communities and cultural and civic spaces
- MAMC’s team facilitates the creative process for participants to delve into and analyze the emergent conversations in a safe and stimulating environment
- MAMC seeks partnerships with cultural and civic organizations to exhibit the resulting work where the wider public becomes part of the dialogue
- MAMC honours the fabric of memory, the thread of imagination and the texture of speculation as participants weave their voices together.
About Us
El Anatsui in conversation with student/participants in Walls and Barriers. A Collaborative Project opening
Accordion book creative process. Making Voice. Women's Creative Narratives. Participant D.Gladstone building her story in MAMC's workshops
MAMC's response to the participants of Making Voice. Women's Creative Narratives. As artists our practice reacts to the conversations and interactions with the communities we create. Embroidered portraits and layered text.
FACE UP. Interconnecting Communities. October 2018
Face Up was a remarkable interaction with a group of newly arrived students to Greenwood Secondary School in Toronto. The purpose of this interaction was to creatively integrate the Hungarian Roma students into the wider school population.
MAMC generates excitement with their tailor made projects
Countering disengagement, absenteeism and indifference to formal schooling by offering a project that offered novelty, personal relevance through an interactive, lively social encounter
Total Buy In
Istvan, who was weary of sharing his story made a resounding statement of place and self identity
Wexford Collegiate School of the Arts
Exhibition Statement
My Grade 9 art students at Wexford Collegiate School of the Arts were motivated by the height and Verticality of art works in Alicia Henry: Witnessing at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. The concept of layering appealed to them as they used ideas that reflected their inner voice. Mono printing is a very fluid process and the theme of self identity is expressed through colour and texture. The Colours evoke emotion, joy, angst, passion and fear. The contrast of warm and cool colours was intentional as we explored the conflict of innocence and growth (similar to concepts explored in the exhibition Omar Ba's Same Dream). Thee prints express the teens' unique selves, real world realities and hidden struggles.
Lynda B. Hattin
Assistant Curriculum Leader
Visual Media Arts
Wexford Collegiate School of the Arts
Photo Gallery
Ursula Franklin Academy
Exhibition Statement
Unsettled: An Exploration of Identity In Transition Towards Post-Colonialism is a series of individual cinemagraphs created by the Grade 12 Film and Video students of Ursula Franklin Academy in response to The Power Plant’s 2019 exhibitions of artists Omar Ba: Same Dream, Alicia Henry: Witnessing and Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds .
The cinema graphs consider notions of witnessing, mapping worlds, dreams, duality, disruption of order and imagery located in a place and time relevant to the artists. Elements such as scale, texture, the land and use of the human figure specifically influenced us, and are mirrored in our work.
The students also explored the intersectionality of our own identities through the lens of Settler/ First Nation and Treaty Partner identities. These are identities for all who live on this land at this time.. They found the process unsettling at times, yet also hopeful. A way forward.
The responses to this endeavour are highly personal. Concepts such as ‘disconnection”, ‘shame”, “anonymity”, and “hope” arose, and were foundations for creating these cinemagraphs.
Viewers are invited into the poetic space these works generate and to locate themselves within the unsettling and hopeful narratives.
Yolanda Mak
Visual and Media Arts Instructor
Ursula Franklin /Academy
What happens in a MAMC partnership
- Sense of accomplishment
- Sense of pride
- Community’s name recognition
- Personal interaction with the broader public
- A social gathering and memorable experiences
- A new group of people seeing themselves represented
- A new community