July 2025
Alexandra Bischoff (Long-Term Artist in Residence, 2022–current; Onsite Coordinator, 2023–2025; Residency Manager, 2025-current)
Alexandra Bischoff is a prairie-born artist of settler descent. They hold a Fine-Arts Diploma from MacEwan University (2012), a BFA in Visual Arts Studio from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2015), and an MFA from Concordia University in Intermedia (2021). Bischoff’s artworks manifest as multimedia installations, sculptures, and writing; their art-making processes as a whole are based in durational performance. While in residency at SAR, Bischoff has been researching family archives and Canada’s homesteading histories to investigate what it means to be a housing-insecure settler on stolen Indigenous land.
Tara Dougans
Tara Dougans is a Tiohtià:ke / Montreal-based artist whose sculpture and field coherence work explores silent-level sensing through touch. Drawing from both visual and contemplative arts backgrounds, with a strong somatic focus, they are devoted to non-linear pathways into subtle body awareness; as well as improvisatory, playful and emergent processes.
Exploring the relationship between felt-level sensing, contemplative quieting and the animacy of making with (sympoeisis), their work attends to haptic and aural practices of slowing, listening, shaping, and mapping. A commitment to listening invites the cultivation of a responsive body; an orientation of being within which sensation is brought to the forefront and understood as a language. Felt-sense is attuned to and can follow, or lead.
Attending to form through clay and emergent choreographies through direct encounter, Tara's focus on the kinesthetic and interstitial is informed by fifteen years of somatic work with horses. From this orientation, senses and nature are approached as interchangeable and engaged as unfolding, interdependent systems of felt-level curiosity. Vessels are portals offering inroads to intrinsic space, direct non-conceptual cognition, lyrical thought and polyphony.
Ammarah Syed
Ammarah Syed is a calligrapher, a photographer, and performer interested in documenting how various power discourses inform our identities and shape our nervous systems and in the present day. Through a mix of calligraphy, photography, movement, somatic experiencing, and the written word Ammarah strives to decolonize and deconstruct the margins through arts based wellness. Ammarah has spent the past decade working in grassroots, community and the arts from Detroit MI, the U.S. to Toronto, ON CA. Trained in Mindfulness and as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Ammarah has worked across food insecurity with urban gardens, harm reduction, medicine, and arts based facilitation.
Sherry Walchuk lives between Montreal, QC and BC, where she is from. Her drawings and installations have been exhibited at artist run centres across Canada and she has received support from BC Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts. She has participated in many residencies, the most recent being “The System and Other Universes” with Shary Boyle and Howie Tsui at the Banff Centre, and she currently teaches drawing at Concordia University. She holds a BFA and BA from Simon Fraser University and an MFA from Concordia University.