Photo credit: Esperanza Sanchez Espitia
Jeff Morton
Jeff Morton (he/him) is a composer, media artist, and arts worker based in rural southeast Saskatchewan, Treaty 2 territory, land of the Cree, Oji-Cree, Anishinaabeg, Dakota, and Dene Peoples, and homeland of the Métis Nation. As an artist and composer, Jeff’s work integrates music and media art, exploring themes of sound-making, communication, and transcription. Drawing on traditional instruments, found musical objects, natural materials, and technology, his performances and installations have been presented in galleries, festivals, and showcases across Canada and internationally over the past 20 years. Jeff has worked for and with arts organizations, including the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian New Music Network, the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery, Saskatchewan Arts Alliance, CARFAC SASK, SK Arts, the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Dunlop Art Gallery, Neutral Ground Artist Run Centre, Holophon Audio Arts, Open Space, and the University of Victoria, among others. As a self-employed art professional, Jeff takes on roles as project leader, consultant, producer, curator, preparator, technician, editor, writer and designer.
Photo credit: Marigold River, Edith Skeard
Edith Skeard
Edith Skeard (they/them) is a queer artist working in multiple mediums, including sound, drawing, performance, and installation. They have exhibited in Canada, the United States, and Europe.
Edith spent both their childhood and adulthood living between Theodore, Yorkton (where they worked at the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery), and Regina; much of their work explores their relationship to the immensity and the liminal topography of Saskatchewan.
Edith received their BFA in visual art with distinction and BA Hons in philosophy at the University of Regina. Edith currently lives in Saskatoon, located within Treaty 6. They continue to work extensively throughout the province as a freelance art educator, preparator, and assistant curator.
They are also one third of the experimental ambient sound group Bell Dreams, whose members are dispersed throughout Saskatchewan. Bell Dreams explores themes of isolation, embodiment, location, and the sublime by creating immersive soundscapes.
“… commitment to exploration and creation in sound and media art.” - Jeff Morton
Edith Skeard is a prairie-based artist exploring sound and media art in performance and installation. Originally from the small town of Theodore, and having worked in Yorkton at the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery in the past, Edith is among a small number of sound and media artists from the rural south-east corner of the province. Having had formal training in visual arts and early career experience as a curator and arts worker, Edith's developing arts practice has turned toward sound and media art in recent years, with performances and installations at Sounds Like Festival in Saskatoon in 2022 (part of the festival's Future Collective community outreach project) and at the NAC/Curtain Razors production Trespasser's Waltz in 2020 (with the ensemble Bell Dreams).
Through these initial collaborative opportunities, Edith has been refining their skill and artistic voice as a classically trained flautist and clarinettist, augmenting musical skill with digital tools, live sound manipulation, and installation with materials, sculptural elements, and video projection. Edith's commitment to exploration and creation in sound and media art is developing, and as an emerging artist coming from a part of rural Saskatchewan where few supports for this kind of work exist, it is exciting to imagine where their independent practice will go and how they will incorporate their lived experience and relationship to place.