GREATNESS THE GREAT LAKES PROJECT - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Creative Director, Great Art for Great Lakes
Christopher McLeod has been exhibiting nationally since 1998 and has a BA in Studio Art from McMaster University and an MFA from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, BC. He has curatorial consulted for the Ontario Science Centre and was the Project Lead for the Great Art for Great Lakes project 2017. He has taught at the Dundas Valley School of Art and McMaster Universities School of the Arts. Christopher McLeod was Artist in Residence 2 years running at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, and his work has been featured at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Propeller Gallery, in BlackFlash, and at Supercrawl 2018 with an up coming exhibition at the Science Gallery in Detroit for 2019. His practice explores social engagement and interaction, focusing on ecological and cultural themes, through publicly presented programs.
Contact Chris
ALEXIS MOLINE
Outreach and Engagement Coordinator
Alexis Moline is a curator, writer and researcher who has worked in Vancouver, Toronto and Hamilton. She has a BA Hons from McMaster University, and a Master of Museum Studies in collaboration with Sexual Diversity Studies from the University of Toronto. Throughout her work, she focuses on social engagement, education, and promoting positive connections between audiences and their wider worlds. She is currently the Curator for the Building Cultural Legacies project with the Hamilton Arts Council. Alexis is excited to be part of the GAGL 2020 team as the Outreach and Engagement Coordinator.
Doug Wright's career spans forty years in sustainable development and environmental policy and management. He's worked internationally and domestically in the public and private sectors, interacting with diverse stakeholders in government, academia, business and NGOs. All these experiences, mixed with his lifelong passion for Georgian Bay, led him to founding GREATNESS The Great Lakes Project as a way to share and expand appreciation for the wondrous Great Lakes.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Philosophy at the University
Karen Houle is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph. Houle is the author of more than forty refereed articles published in international scholarly journals and anthologies, and, most recently, The Grand River Watershed: A Folk Ecology (2019), one of five finalists that year for the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. Houle lives in the Grand River watershed.
Karen Kun co-founded Waterlution thirteen years ago with the purpose of facilitating cross-sector dialogue around complex water issues. From 2005-2012, Karen was publisher of Corporate Knights magazine. Born and raised in Toronto, yet having lived many years overseas, which formed the building blocks of Waterlution. This international experience included work in Bolivia, Colombia and Costa Rica, developing finance and marketing strategies with indigenous communities.
Paul Chartrand is a visual artist who engages with environmental issues through the construction of sculptural life support apparatuses populated with living plants. He repurposes objects and cultural signifiers like language to act as habitats and conceptual support systems. Doing this subverts and re-contextualizes them as players in functioning ecosystems. Currently he is focused on living text installations, hydroponic assemblages and interdisciplinary drawing practices. The plants and other natural elements that Paul involves all have agency of their own; manifested through their power to change the appearance and effect of the work. Often the projects are dispersed through viewer participation that includes planting, conserving, reading and physical consumption. By working with plants, it is Paul's intention to meaningfully engage with their agency as well as their relationships with humans past, present and future.
For his GAGL 2020 project, Paul seeks to use traditional and scientific methodologies to develop a humble monument to water purification and remediation. Using hundreds of cardboard tubes designed by public participants, each tube will be filled with layers of filtering substrates, a purifying mound will be constructed and subsequently planted with willow and other plants to assist in purifying runoff water before it reaches the River. A repurposed aluminum boat will act as a site marker and locus of knowledge containing information about the plants and techniques used to cleanse the water.
Our first in-person, social distancing Canada Day hike with artist Paul Chartrand and poet Karen Houle as they discuss the history of the Grand River as an ecological treasure in the process of creating the new public art piece, ‘The Grand Remediator'.
Artist Paul Chartrand will introduced the "Grand Remediator" project and explained why he asked participants to save toilet paper and paper towel rolls. Discover Paul's thought-mapping processes and find out why he's filling an old boat with plants anyway.