Connexion Exchange Artist Talk: Emily Kennedy and Lou Sheppard 🎤

Join us on Friday, October 28, 2022, at 7pm for our next Connexion Exchange artist talk! This is the 7th of 9 artist talks featuring mentees and their mentors from the Connexion Exchange mentorship program. Enjoy an hour long presentation and Q&A with Emily Kennedy + Lou Sheppard, answering questions about their artist talk, discussing their studio practice and chatting all about their 3-month mentorship.

Emily Kennedy is a cellist and composer based in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Often seen collaborating with electronic musicians, dancers, visual artists, and songwriting projects, her personal practice is an opportunity to synthesize her classical training with her interests in improvisation, minimalism, field recordings, and pop music. She mulls over translation, repetition, self reflection, and time in her work, using loop and effect pedals to expand the possibilities of her instrument.

She is a graduate of the performance program at the University of Ottawa and Wilfrid Laurier University. Her interest in performing and writing new music has brought her to Banff’s Concert in the 21st Century residency, the Britten-Pears: CAPPA program in Aldeburgh, UK, Montreal Contemporary Music Lab, RE:FLUX Festival in Moncton, NB with improv trio Terre Wa, and suddenlyLISTEN in Halifax, NS. She frequently performs with the Elm City String Quartet, and writes and sings for the duo Pallmer.

Lou Sheppard works in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation based practice. His work is often responsive, investigating the material and discursive contexts of a site and how and their affect on bodies and environments. His research is often evidenced through graphic notations, scripts and scores which are then performed in collaboration with other artists and in community gatherings. Lou’s recent projects include Phase Variations, an exploration of queer archives, The Exquisite Corpse, a meditation on post human worlding, and I Want To Be a Seashell…, responding to the Dalhousie Arts Centre with collaborator Will Robinson. Lou’s exhibition Rights of Passage will open this September 2022 at the Art Gallery of York University.

Lou has presented work and participated in residencies across Canada, in the US and Europe, including at the International Studio Curatorial Program in New York, and La Cité des Arts in Paris, and as faculty at The Banff Centre in Banff, AB. Lou has been long listed for the Sobey Award in 2018, 2020 and 2021, and was the recipient of the Emerging Atlantic Artist Award in 2017. He has participated in the Toronto Biennial, the Antarctic Biennial, and is currently completing a public art commission for the Broadway Subway Project in Vancouver, BC.

Of Irish, English and Scottish descent Lou is a settler on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq in Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia.