The Renfrew Ravine Moon Festival is designed to create a beautiful, inspiring, and accessible series of events that connects people to the environment, arts, and one another. This year’s Moon Festival features over 80 artists and performers, as we aim to foster creativity and collaboration amongst local artists, create opportunities for youth to develop artistic skills, and provide a public platform that promotes and honours the local arts community. For 20 years, we’ve featured both professional and emerging artists – showcasing diverse cultural traditions and art forms. Festival organizer, Still Moon Arts Society, is committed to prioritizing artists from diverse and barriered communities in addition to artists living within Renfrew Collingwood Neighborhood.
Andrew Kim (formerly of Delhi 2 Dublin) is a Korean multi-instrumentalist who has studied music from around the world. He is also the recipient of the prestigious Shastri Arts scholarship to study music in India. Andrew has collaborated with many prominent artists, including Bif Naked, Michael Franti and Spearhead, Raffi, the Chinese superstar Dadawa, Delhi 2 Dublin, and Dharmakasa (opening for Anoushka Shankar). He has also performed internationally in Thailand, Bhutan, India, China, Dubai, Germany, Bali, and Taiwan.
He performs on numerous incredibly unique instruments of his own invention including the Persian Tennis Racquet and the Indian banjo that are inspired by traditional instruments from around the world. With these instruments, he has been featured on 3 CBC documentaries.
Calpulli Cemanahuac Aztec Dance (Culture & Therapeutic Group) is a closely woven group of people that are devoted to preserving the traditions and rituals of pre-Hispanic culture. We approach this traditions not only as invaluable cultural heritage, but as a representation of the eternal, and universal, quest for cosmic harmony and for the integration of body-mind-spirit.
In their therapeutic aspect, these traditions and rituals, enhance emotional, cognitive and physical well-being. These dances are accompaniment by ancient drum rhythms, high-energy foot work and are highlighted by the chatter of ankle rattles.
Our name “Calpulli Cemanahuac” originates from Nahuatl, an indigenous language from Mexico.
Calpulli = group or clan, Cemanahuac = universe.
Coastal Wolfpack (Tsatsu Staqayu) is a young group of Coast Salish people coming from across the Coast and throughout the Fraser Valley, they have members in their group from Musqueam, Nanaimo, Kuper Island, Cowichan, Tsartlip, Skway, just to name a few. They all come from different homes but they all come from one creator, who is the creator of all good things. Which brings them all together to sing and dance as one. The only goal in this group is to reunite their people and show the world who they are and where they come from. Performing for the people brings happiness and joy to their hearts as they sing dance and pray for each and every one of us that are here today.
Healthy Friendly We perform morning exercise daily from 8:00 am to 9:30 am under the covered area in Slocan Park. We are very much thankful to the Vancouver Park Board and Slocan Park Management for providing our group a quiet, clean and safe place to perform daily exercise, nice social time of chatting and sharing; the most important to keep us healthy, physically and emotionally. We have monthly birthday dim sum gatherings after morning exercise, this enhances our social wellness. Our group would like to wish you, everybody and loved ones always healthy and happy.
Joshua Ralph (Workshop Facilitator) is a digital compositor and 2D animator by trade, with films having competed in Ottawa International Animation festival and Innsbruck Nature Film Festival. In his personal practice, he intersects art-making and ecology. Throughout the Sumer and Fall of 2022, Joshua has been engaging in series of public workshops within Southwest BC, rendering invasive plant material from local restoration sites to art supplies, aiming to provide sustainable and accessible drawing material to youth + community members. He can often be spotted biking around Richmond and looking at Birds.”
Lori Snyder is an Indigenous Metis herbalist and educator with a deep knowledge of wild, medicinal and edible plants that grow in everyday spaces. Through Lori’s eyes, our immediate surroundings take on a new life and offer a wealth of untapped nutritional and ecological resources. Through Indigenous ways of knowing and pedagogies, Lori leads people of diverse backgrounds in reconnecting to the Earth’s wisdom. Lori’s vision is to continually co-create insightful dialogues, to remediate and reconcile with our Indigenous plants as we reintroduce them into our urban landscapes. By sharing and growing these practices, communities can access our true local foods and medicines, which support collective resilience and deep ecological healing for all species.
Short and sweet. Shorties is a contemporary folk trio inspired by influences in singer-songwriter, jazz, and R&B genres. Shorties are grateful to make music on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ / sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. Cindy, Kaya and Sydney met while studying Jazz at Capilano University and quickly bonded over jam sessions, heart-to-hearts, and love of cheese (brie to be exact). Together they weave colourful harmonies with honest lyrics that are authentic to their experiences with anxiety, friendship, grief, and hope. Shorties songs feel like a warm hug, togetherness, and tender commiseration.
Tonye Aganaba is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and performer residing on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam & Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. They were born in London, England to parents of Nigerian and Zimbabwean descent.
Tonye’s style, like their gender, is fluid (or at the very least non-binary) – but can be described as Soul/Neo-Folk/R&B.
They strive to connect with audiences on a deeper level through intentional work, and to use their presence to foster meaningful dialogue within communities. They are not only interested in taking music and art to traditional venues but also into schools, community centres, hospitals, prisons, and boardrooms. Places where art can heal, start conversation, and maybe even…. make change.
Harvest Fair | Sat. Sept. 10th, 4:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Amy (Yun Ru) Bao is a multidisciplinary designer with a background in visual arts and architecture. Her creative process incorporates traditional art, digital design, and fabrication. She explores the spectrum between architecture and art, with projects spanning paintings, kinetic sculptures, installation art, pavilions, and buildings. She is especially passionate about accessible, interactive, and playful public art. This stems from her love for outdoor artwork, the overlap with her interdisciplinary experience, and her belief that art should be for everyone. She aims to create fun and lively projects for communities to enjoy using the full range of her design background.
Ari Lazer is a geometer, designer and interdisciplinary artist based in Salt Spring Island, BC. His work explores the interaction of geometry, the patterns of nature, and the narratives they weave – through creating interactive spaces, art objects, and stories.
His unique artworks and functional art objects utilize traditional woodworking techniques and a CNC laser to create compelling symmetries, that echo the natural world. Lazer weaves these patterns, creating contemplative spaces, artworks, and contemporary design to foster mindfulness in the modern world.
His company Sacred Light Design Co. specializes in custom installations for homes and businesses looking to create a mindful atmosphere, and a unique contemporary aesthetic. You can find his work at www.sacredlight.ca.
Streamside Artwork: Kinetica – Two large, geometric lanterns are set on bearings, to turn and twirl, casting moving patterns on the ground and tree-cover above, as visitors spin them to their heart’s content.
Caty Janze is an emerging artist exploring various mediums, including character design, painting, and animation. They have participated in various community gardening initiatives, are currently working with the Environmental Youth Alliance on rewilding the ravine, and are excited to see how everyone’s passions for nature and art can collide.
Clara Johnson is a queer interdisciplinary artist with a primary focus on illustration and painting, who lives most of their life right around the Ravine. They enjoy exploring the spectrum of interactive and accessible art, and are also looking forward to the lantern installations.
Caty & Clara both live on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nations, otherwise known as Vancouver, BC.
Rea Saxena (she/they) is a video artist from New Delhi, India. Her practice engages with analogue practices, documentary, and narrative filmmaking. Meshing analogue and digital practices, she weaves the personal and public politic into her storytelling.
Serisa Fitz-James (they/them) is a Filipino-Canadian multi disciplinary artist who makes whimsical artworks that often explores themes to heal, uplift and educate people through decolonial lenses.
Brittney Appleby (she/they) is a queer interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker with a primary focus is in experimental analogue filmmaking and photography. They are most inspired by the materiality of analogue practices and incorporate their background in painting, drawing and printmaking into experimental filmmaking.
Rea, Serisa and Brittney all currently reside on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nations, otherwise known as Vancouver, BC.
Catherine Shapiro is a Vancouver-based multimedia artist with a lifelong passion for women’s contributions to the development of horticulture. During her two years at San Francisco Art Institute in the 1960s, Catherine researched organic gardening and the back-to-the-land movement, discovering her love for amaranth, an ancient and beautiful food staple she has studied and illustrated ever since. She and husband Dave immigrated to Canada in 1970, first to the Cariboo where they established a printmaking studio and Catherine’s first garden, and then to Vancouver in 1974. Since then, Catherine continues to grow her garden and make environmental pieces from plant materials, including nettle, hemp, cedar, wisteria, artichoke, mallow, flax, abaca, indigo and bamboo. With botanical resources as her source inspiration, Catherine weaves family and historic narratives into these works, storytelling how forces of climate, colonization, war, love, and loss impact ourselves and our ecology across generations.
Eileen and Clover are The Infinite Whatnots, two friends who met as students at Windermere high school in 2002. They are both Canadian-born Chinese, and they hold an appreciation for the art found in everyday life. Although they immediately connected over being first generation children of immigrants and admired each other’s creative spirits, this is their first artistic collaboration. Eileen makes zany costumes with clay and paper mache, serene paintings, and she decorates cookies so intricately that you can’t bear to eat them. Clover loves making tiny things, sewing her own clothes, and building furniture for her little rabbit warren of a home. They hope that their art will spark connection and conversation in their audience.
Born in Quebec, raised in Ontario, and currently living in British Columbia, Diane Blunt is an artist of mixed descent – Anishnawbe (Ojibway) and German. She is a member of the Kawartha Nishnawbe Nation. Currently completing her BFA in Visual Arts at Emily Carr University, the nature of her work explores the life, history, and bark of the birch tree through drawing, painting, and material practices.
Blunt’s work has been exhibited in festivals, galleries, and marketing campaigns. In addition to her participation and curation in several shows in British Columbia, Blunt has been the recipient of multiple funding awards including the CIBC Foundation Award, the Brissenden Scholarship, the Ian Gillespie Aboriginal Scholarship, and the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Scholarship.
Chitha Manoranjan and Henry Lau are emerging artists situated in the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam Nations. Having spent most of their lives in the vibrant Renfrew-Collingwood neighbourhood and wandering through Renfrew Ravine, they have a deep appreciation of the power of art to move and mobilize people. Their various roles held at Still Moon Arts Society over the years has instilled a mindset to honour the natural spaces around us while pulling inspiration from the chaotic and unknown. These teachings feed into their whimsical wonders that offer different perspectives on the life that flows through the Ravine.
Isaac Rufus – My studies and explorations of music, sculpture, theatre and dance have led me back to my lifelong fascination with sound. Specifically how sound vibrations can completely consume and surround one’s body and fill one’s mind. I use amplification as a wonderful microscope of sound, which lets your ears be brought into these quiet worlds that are full of sonic characters. From these characters, I am able to craft a myriad of sonic worlds to be explored. My artistic work revolves around magnifying these subtle worlds and inviting people to share, explore and play with the physicality of sound.
Kathryn Wadel is second-generation Filipinx-Canadian settler living on the unceded and traditional territories of the Katzie First Nation and the Kwantlen First Nation. She has an interdisciplinary mixed media art practice and graduated with a BFA degree from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Kathryn explores environmental, cultural and social practices that connect communities across disciplines. She combines traditional with digital media in her exhibiting art practice and fosters community engagement to explore the human condition as it exists within the Anthropocene. In her light-based installations she utilizes light as a sculptural medium by experimenting with its plasticity and interactions with objects and environment.
Lam Wong is a Canadian visual artist and curator who immigrated from Hong Kong. He has recently exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Centre A, Canton-Sardine, Griffin Art Projects and the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden where he has recently finished a two-year artist residency and produced five major exhibitions. His recent collaborators include artists Angela George, Laiwan, Glenn Lewis, Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov, Cease Wyss, Xwalacktun and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. He currently serves as Board Vice President at Centre A.
Wong works with painting, installation and performance often in the form of tea ceremony to engage with themes such as the perception of reality, the role of art and the relationship between time, memory and space. Wong’s creative approach is often concerned with blending Eastern philosophies, challenging the notion of painting, and use tea as a medium to achieve creative or spiritual communion.
Websites: www.lamwong.com / www.teaart.ca
Laurel Scott (she/her/hers) was born and raised as a settler in Mohkinstsis on Treaty 7 lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts with great distinction majoring in Art Studio at the University of Lethbridge in Sikokotoki. During her Bachelor’s Degree, her artistic practice focused on responding to issues of feminism, environmentalism, and ways of healing. Laurel is currently living as a visitor within the Xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaʔt Nations, having recently completed the Documentary Filmmaking program at Capilano University, and is working as the video content producer for Royal Columbian Hospital Foundation. As a multidisciplinary artist, Laurel continues to explore old/new ways of storytelling, while staying deeply rooted in her passion for growing, rebuilding, and maintaining connections with the land and its beings.
Mengya Zhao is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Her initial interest is to use her imagination to reshape everyday objects and create works with a touch of nature.
Nickie Lewis is an artist residing on the unceded lands of the Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam first nations people, also known as Burnaby B.C. She specializes in eco-friendly art created entirely out of natural organic materials such as cedar sticks, moss, jute twine, and yard waste. She endeavors to spread joy through her magical, whimsical sculptures, while inviting viewers to get outside and admire the art of nature, and to engage with the world around them. Her works can be found in, city parks, businesses, galleries, private residences, and schools. Her most recent project includes a 32 Sculpture project for the City of Chilliwack, and 6 large scaled sculptures for the City of New Westminster found in front of the Queensbourgh Community Center, and Hidden in Hume Park, and most recently a 13 sculpture exhibit for the Burnaby Blooms festival.
Orb Weavers Collective is a collaboration between designers, woodworkers, and engineers inspired by patterns and relationships found in the natural world. Our work focuses on relationships that invite participants to explore the environment around them through curiosity-driven engagement. The members of Orb Weavers Collective have built pieces for the Vancouver Art Gallery, as well as stages and installations for art and music festivals throughout BC. Our team currently resides and works on the traditional, unceded territories of the Coast Salish Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish, and Duwamish peoples.
Sarah Ronald is a Canadian artist living in Port Coquitlam BC, Canada. Ronald’s diverse upbringing in the rural Okanagan shaped her future as a conservation- minded animal artist and aspiring creative writer. After graduating from the Okanagan University College with her BFA, Ronald relocated to the lower mainland of BC, eventually settling in Port Coquitlam where she now creates out of her home studio. Always pushing her practice to new levels, in 2020 Ronald started creating hand-drawn animations of wildlife, and in 2021 she began projecting her animations in outdoor spaces as way to encounter her animated animals ‘in the wild’. A drawer at heart, Ronald has recently started to include site-specific installation art in her practice. Ronald sees installation art and projected animation becoming a significant aspect of her practice, as her aim is to present wildlife and climate concerns beyond traditional art spaces.
Willoughby Arevalo is an interdisciplinary artist, mycologist and educator working on community-engaged projects that build relationships between humans, fungi and other members of our interspecies community.
He has worked with Still Moon Arts Society since 2013, as a lead artist in community-engaged public eco-art works (We All Belong, 2020; Fruiting Bodies, 2019; Mycelial Connections, 2018; Reimagining into Reality: Collingwood’s Lost Beaver Lake, 2016; and Beaver Pond(er)ing Lodging, current), and as a contributing artist, mycologist and educator in many of their other projects.
Windermere Leadership Classes – Every year we provide opportunities for local youth and schools to learn how to make lanterns. This year, Windermere Secondary school worked with Still Moon to make water drop lanterns with the leadership classes. You’ll see their works lit up at this year’s Streamside Lantern Installation.
Yoko Tomita has been creating a variety of lanterns for over 20 years in East Vancouver. She is originally from Osaka Japan and has a passion to create a variety of lanterns. Animals, nature lanterns by using the Japanese Washi paper, pressed leaves, cut Origami papers are her signature works. The Moon and the Renfrew Ravine forest is the inspiration for her lantern works.
Artwork name: Nature in Reflections
Streamside Lantern Installation | Sat. Sept. 17th, Sunset (7:20 PM) – 9:30 PM
20th Anniversary Features | Consciousness of Streams
The Still Moon Dyer’s Guild opens up Still Moon’s fieldhouse residency, the Alder Eco-Arts Hub studio, to experienced natural dye artists. Guild members have the opportunity to use the Alder as a space to work, experiment, collaborate, and skill-share with one another. In May 2022, the Guild was invited to showcase their personal and collective work in an exhibition at the Deer Lake Art Gallery. Many of the pieces displayed were dyed with plants grown in Still Moon’s Colour Me Local Dye Garden.
Artists: Bea Miller, Amanda Olson, Carmen Rosen, Sara Irving, Varsha Gill, Julia Zinovjeva, and January Wolodarsky.
In April and June we hosted workshops led by choreographer Isabelle Kirouac for community members to learn body awareness, dance, stilts and embrace their inner performer! There were a total of 16 participants from ages ten to seventy. See them strut their skills in the Consciousness of Streams finale.
Performers: Luke Wozniak, Léonie Roerts, June Roberts, Andy Lewis, Isabelle Russell, Lucy Eves, George Moskowitz, Clae Brown, Teagan Eves, Tracy Tagazzi, Clover Duong.
Zhongxi Wu (吴忠喜) is from the 4th-generation of suona players. He graduated from the Heilongiang Performing Arts University specializing in suona, and has toured in China, Japan, the USA, Europe, and Canada, performing in solo and orchestral works, traditional Chinese opera, experimental theatre, contemporary music, Celtic traditions, and jazz idioms. Recently he recorded with the Vancouver Intercultural Orchestra (VICO) (“In the Key of the World”), as well as with the Jodi Proznick Trio (“Jasmine Jazz”, forthcoming). He has taught students from the UBC Music Department, and is a faculty member at the VSO School of Music.
Isabelle Kirouac is an interdisciplinary choreographer, movement artist, acrobatic stilt-walker and educator born in Quebec, on the unceded territories of the Abenaki nation, and currently living in Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. She uses movement as a tool to investigate the poetics of the senses, and to process questions raised in her everyday life. Informed by her extensive studies in dance improvisation, somatics and contemporary circus, her movement research has most recently been inspired by the relationships between art and ecology through movement practice, immersive performances, and community engaged projects. Isabelle has performed extensively across Canada, the USA, Mexico, Colombia and Europe. She performed in the work of Emmanuel Jouthe/Danse Carpe Diem (Montreal), Emmalena Fredriksson, Arash Khakpour, Julie Lebel/Foolish Operations, Theatre Junction (Calgary), La Pocha Nostra (USA/Mexico), Body Research (USA), The Carpetbag Brigade Physical Theatre (USA), Nemcatacoa Teatro (Colombia), and others. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
On Consciousness of Streams: “I am very inspired by all of the community relationships built through this project, reflecting on the lost streams. What an incredible opportunity to learn from one another through creative and embodied experiences. It’s been a joy to witness some stilt-walker’s first steps, and spontaneous dances emerging like resurfacing streams.”
Choreographer
Music Composer
Musician
Workshops
Fabric Installation
20th Anniversary Features | Still Suite by Treesong
Nick Apivor, Greg Farrugia, David Gowman, Brian Harding, Brad Muirhead, Adrian Smith, Gary Wildeman
Music Composition
Instrument Maker / Fuhorn Player
Choerographer
Vocals
Bayleigh Marelj, Maya Graves-Bacchus, Bryony Ollier, Charlotta Prigent, Lynda Sing, Tannaz Dtehrani
TREESONG is literally just that – trees joining together in song. Renowned Vancouver artists Brad Muirhead and David Gowman teamed up in 2018 to create a new musical group featuring Brad’s original contemporary music performed on David’s fantastic hand-crafted musical sculptures, called “Fuhorns” (fu = made by hand). The instruments are unique individual pieces of art, fashioned from the branches of several types of trees (primarily empress) much of which David cultivates himself. Each horn produces it’s own range of notes with a beautiful earthy tone, and can be imagined as something between a didgeridoo and alpenhorn. Brad’s compositions for TREESONG range from groove-based world music to neo-classical rhythmic adventures, beautiful mournful ballads and textural soundscapes. The group is suited to a concert-hall, festival stage, open-air or the group’s specialty: immersive sonic installations in natural forest settings, or even open urban spaces.
Dr. Carolina Bergonzoni (she/her) is a dance artist, a curious human, a somatic educator and practitioner, an overthinker, a coffee drinker, and a dog lover.
Originally from Italy, she has been living as a settler on unceded Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil- Waututh), and xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) territories since 2014. Carolina holds a Ph.D. in Education, a BA and MA in Philosophy, and an MA in Comparative Media Arts. Her work has been published, performed, and presented internationally. She has recently been making dance films.
Carolina practices span between dancing, writing, philosophizing, and teaching from the body. She is challenging the labels of “professional” and “community-engaged” art making and facilitating.
Carolina is Artistic Associate of All Bodies Dance Project, a proud board member of Vines Arts Festival and The Biting School. When she is not making things happen, she can be found hiking or competing in dog sports with her goofy golden retriever, Avon Barksdale.
Carmen Rosen is a visual artist, singer, and interdisciplinary performer. She has a long history of initiating art projects and creative community integrated projects. In 2010 Carmen received the Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award, and in 2012 the Queen’s Jubilee Award for her art with the community. She has an Art History degree from UBC and a diploma from Emily Carr Institute. Carmen is the founder and artistic director of Still Moon Arts Society: inspiring vibrant and connected communities by creating art and nurturing a passion for nature. Through Still Moon and in collaboration with many community partners, she creates the Renfrew Ravine Moon Festival, and other projects and special events shedding light on Renfrew Ravine, Still Creek, salmon in the city, and the community’s creative capacity. She leads art workshops including Colour Me Local natural dye workshops, lantern making workshops, giant puppet and costume workshops, art workshops with schools and community groups such as Sarah Ross House Temporary Modular Housing, and a six year residency with Arts, Health and Seniors.
Previous to Still Moon Arts, Carmen was also the founder and co-artistic director of Mortal Coil Performance Society for 10 years – creating shows, designing costumes and giant puppets, performing, and booking stilt-dance shows all over North America.
As a singer, Carmen performed, recorded and toured with Elektra Women’s Choir, the Slavic Soul ensemble Zeellia for 20+ years, and currently performs with Zlatna Mountain.
In 2016 Carmen created a major public art installation “Still Here” at Skyway Towers Plaza on Kingsway. In 2017 she was an artist in residence at CACIS Centre for Art and Sustainability in Spain. In 2018 she collaborated with artists Paula Jardine, Cathy Stubington (Runaway Moon), and Robi Smith as Birds in Residence and Birds on Parade spending over a year to create a giant bird parade with hundreds of community members in costume performing as birds on stilts for the opening of the International Ornithological Congress and the Vancouver Bird Festival.
Carmen’s visual art can be seen in the stone mosaic pathways around Renfrew Ravine, giant puppets and stilt walking characters at festivals and community parades, giant lantern installations at several lantern festivals, and living mushroom sculptures, Fruiting Bodies, in Renfrew Community Park.
You can see her TEDx talk here.