MakingArtMakingChange

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 Mission

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.

2018 Making Voice. Women's Creative Narratives

Using tools and materials of domesticity to assert and subvert women’s work participants used text and mixed media to create an artist’s book illustrating individual experiences and identities that also tie into larger global and social issues. Each artwork served as a metaphor for the secret lives of women, who may have been deliberately silenced or purposely unheard.

Between the covers, are the intersectional and interdependent issues that comprise these women’s experiences.

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

MAMC at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery

MAMC's Collaboration With The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery May 2019

The Winter Exhibition at The Power Plant became the catalyst for MAMC’s newest venture.

In Alicia Henry, Omar Bâ, and Shuvenai Ashoona’s work, three common themes emerged for us:

the tension between the physical, psychological and social self
the notion of duality
the order and safe predictability of life undermined by the intrusion of new and unfamiliar forces.

We saw great potential for a dynamic partnership between The Power Plant, MAMC, Wexford Collegiate School of the Arts and Ursula Franklin Academy, where a conversation between the issues generated in the Winter Exhibit mirrored the social and cultural challenges youth encounter and the discomfort many Canadians feel when told that we are all treaty people.

Alicia Henry’s Witnessing depicts notions of gender and family as physical layers suggesting multiple and unfixed identities; Omar Bâ’s Same Dream questions about immigration, post colonial relations and our changing relationship to the natural world; and Shuvenai Ashoona’s Mapping Worlds her highly personal and imaginative iconography imply a sense of disruption in the life of the Inuit people. These provocations provided rich themes for the students to explore and as they navigate their homes, identities and memories.

Teachers Lynda Hattin, (Wexford) and Yolanda Mak Ursula Franklin) facilitated the creative responses shown at the gallery during the month of May. The students visited the gallery and enjoyed seeing their work exhibited alongside the artists from whom they had drawn inspiration.

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

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