Please join us on Wednesday, July 13, from 5:30-7:30 pm EDT, for the Creative Science Shop at the engAGE Living Lab at Cavendish Mall (5800 Cavendish Blvd, Côte Saint-Luc, Quebec – QC H4W 2T5).
This workshop begins with a dance/body activity facilitated by Déborah Maia de Lima, who facilitated a movement hive in the pandemic. We will experiment with body movements it involves, gestures, the sensation of music, and the movements it involves for us. You will be invited to move according to your own movement and no special abilities will be required. Come with clothes that allow your body to move freely and join us!
Afterwards, a round table will allow us to share our experiences and expertise on the subject. What have we learned about this type of activity for our social connections and collective health in a shopping mall?
Déborah Maia de Lima is a member of the International Dance Council, UNESCO. She is a post-doctoral fellow at McGill and holds doctorates in Studies and Practice of the Arts and in Performing Arts. Her practice focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to Embodiment and Somatic practices, Artistic performances, and Creativity, and Innovation in formal and informal Education Systems.
The Creative Science Shop is a semi-monthly studio meet-up, both online and in-person at the Cavendish Mall. It is an exchange of ideas, innovations, scientific and artistic projects. This intergenerational group brings together passion in the arts and sciences from older adults, students, and researchers.
Join us for the Creative Science Shop on Thursday, June 23 from 3:30-5:00 pm on Zoom!
Meeting My Community at the Mall: How could the mall become a third space to gather a strong community? How could we expand its role in the neighbourhood?
Janis Timm-Bottos and Yafa Goawily will share two different initiatives of building communities in malls, and will accompany us in a discussion around the potential of this type of space. Come join us to hear their stories and to tell us your thoughts, and your ideas, and your relationship with the mall spaces.
Yafa Goawily has a degree in Fine Arts and a Filmmaking Diploma from Alexandria University, Egypt and feels that art is now an indispensable part of her identity. She experimented with different types of art, from performing arts to fine arts and she started an art hive in Cornwall Mall and other public spaces.
Janis Timm-Bottos is an art therapist and professor at Concordia and Bishop Universities. She is the creator of the art hive movement and the principal investigator of “Meet me at the Mall” project, hosted in Cavendish Mall.
The Creative Science Shop is a semi-monthly meet-up, an exchange of ideas, innovations, scientific and artistic projects. This intergenerational group brings together passion in the arts and sciences from older adults, students, and researchers.
Join us on Thursday, May 26th, 2022 from 3:30-5:00 pm EDT via Zoom for the Creative Science Shop on Learning through Music: The “Dialogic” Approach.
Come to this online workshop on music and dialogue as forms of learning and happiness for all ages. Our two guests will speak, respectively, about the mutual enthusiasm of an authentic, personal musical performance that tells a story, and then about a model of education that moves beyond conventional venues and is based on creativity and dialogue.
Originally from New York State and living in Montreal, Matt Herskowitz is a virtuoso pianist whose compositions combine classical, jazz, pop and world music. After more than 20 years of classical concert, he trained in jazz at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, then took a detour into pop music. His music reaches an older audience as well as the new generation of musicians: “they love it because it’s real, I’m sharing with them who I am as an artist”.
A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, religious studies scholar, Prof. Norman Cornett created the “dialogic” approach to education 35 years ago. It is now a subject of study in France, Germany, the United States, Canada, and Quebec where he lives. His presentation will focus on “the interstices of learning, beyond the traditional spaces and sources of education in order to perceive the human condition as a continuous cognitive and creative process”.
So come join us, to learn and celebrate through the sharing of experiences, knowledge and expertise: yours and the group’s!
The Creative Science Shop is a semi-monthly meet-up, an exchange of ideas, innovations, scientific and artistic projects. This intergenerational group brings together passion in the arts and sciences from older adults, students, and researchers.
Since May 2020, we hosted 26 gatherings around knowledge, creativity, and solidarity. In this one, we will put in common our experiences and create a collective vision for the future.
What did we enjoy?
what should we change?
which topics matter to the group?
who should we include in the discussions?
how to better bridge studio activities, research, and play?
Join us so that we can hear diverse perspectives!
The Creative Science Shop is a semi-monthly meet-up, an exchange of ideas, innovations, scientific and artistic projects. This intergenerational group brings together passion in the arts and sciences from older adults, students, and researchers.
Music is dynamic and has the unique ability to bring people together and establish community. Music also works deeply in the body to rehabilitate and restore functioning. Finally, music acts as a medium of creative, emotional and spiritual expression.
Nicholas Scott is a Certified Music Therapist and holds qualifications in Neurologic Music Therapy. Music has always been an important part of Nicholas’ life from a young age. He enjoys intuitively expressing and exploring music, using his voice and other instruments. Nicholas will explore the topic of Community Music Therapy (CoMT) and how it can be applied in clinical and communal settings, including Rural and Senior populations who may experience isolation due to environmental and social factors.
Freda Segal, Noriko Iwamoto, and Abby Rosenblatt are members of the singing group called The Ukuladies. Music has been an integral part in their life, and now reaching out to the larger community. Each of the Ukuladies will sing a song in their own individual style and tell of her stories with the instrument. They will also share how the learning experience of trying something “new” has proved to be a great tool for psychological survival during challenging times.
The Creative Science Shop is a semi-monthly meet-up, an exchange of ideas, innovations, scientific and artistic projects. This intergenerational group brings together passion in the arts and sciences from older adults, students, and researchers.
It is a Tuesday afternoon at the Hive Café in Concordia University’s Hall building. The atmosphere is suffused with the murmuring of visitors, golden light spilling through the windows and the sweet scent of coffee brewing.
It is a pleasant scene from first glance, but what catches the eye almost immediately is the displayed collection of art pieces that adorn the blank walls like jewels. This is the art exhibition titled “HOME-MADE-STUDIO: A WINDOW INTO OUR CREATIVE SPACES THROUGH TIMES OF ISOLATION”. The exhibition was organized by Concordia’s Art Hive in partnership with its Creative engAGE Living Lab and the Hive Café. Composed of multiple artists’ work, from both Concordia students and the Living Lab’s members, the collection is thematically tied by one prompt: create a piece that portrays your creative space of the last two years.
(One wall of the art exhibition “HOME-MADE-STUDIO: A WINDOW INTO OUR CREATIVE SPACES THROUGH TIMES OF ISOLATION” that is on display at the Hive Café until April 22nd / Maiya Butcher, Concordia News)
The idea was first conceived in mid-February. Monica Escobedo, Art Hive facilitator and an organizer of the exhibition, came across a painting on Facebook of a home art hive that inspired her to post it on the Hive’s Facebook.
“I asked if people would care to portray their own space and share it, and they immediately rose to the challenge,” Escobedo says over a Zoom interview.
The Hive Café soon after reached out to her colleague Rachel Chainey in want of art to showcase in their space. Chainey decided to revisit this idea of a “home-made studio” as the theme of the exhibition, to make the transition between creative spaces at home to those that artists inhabited before the pandemic.
“Now that we’re ready to go back to the outside spaces, I think it’s important to acknowledge the spaces where we have created for the past two years. They held us and helped us survive,” Escobedo says affectionately.
Escobedo’s idea ties into a broader theme of artmaking during the pandemic. A study from the project Art & Well-Being reported that around 85 per cent of the population was consuming different types of art as a coping mechanism during the pandemic, with 69 per cent doing creative activities daily or two to three times a week.
Art in the virtual realm
The home-made studios exhibition is not the first time the Art Hive was uniting artists in these times of isolation. It began conducting Zoom art meetings during the pandemic for students and seniors from the Creative engAGE Living Lab.
Natali Ortiz, a graduate from Concordia in Art Therapy, has been facilitating these online gatherings for the past year. She had not met most of the participants until the exhibition.
“Most of the people who participated were also meeting each other for the first time, so it was really special to get the chance to meet people you had been seeing online for so long,” Ortiz says, seated in the cozy Art Hive office downtown.
“It was like an ‘Oh, you’re real!’ kind of moment,” she adds with a smile.
The Hive also allowed artists to submit their work digitally, providing a hybrid model for those not comfortable returning to in-person yet. Even now that the university has opened in-person again, Ortiz continues to facilitate the Hive online once a week. She says it is their way of honouring the transition the world is still experiencing.
Finding introspection
An article from Science Direct about art and psychotherapy showed that art was made for various reasons during the pandemic. The four main categories that were found were artmaking for self-regulation, artmaking as embodying mental states and emotional expression, art as enabling creativity, imagination, experimentation and play and artmaking as related to time.
For two student artists involved the exhibition, sharing their artwork and seeing others’ work was an opportunity for self-reflection, similar to the second category of this study.
Carly McAskill, PhD student in Communication Studies and research assistant with the Lab, submitted a poem written pre-COVID that epitomized the theme of the exhibition for her.
(McAskill’s multi-media piece titled “Morning Pause” that introduces the online format of the exhibition / Carly McAskill)
She sees a creative space being more than just one with an easel and art materials.
“I think my creativity throughout the pandemic was embodied in these quiet moments, when you wake up and are present in that moment. I was also thinking about what other peoples’ experiences were like, having to spend a lot more time in your space, and how to honour, witness and embrace that space,” McAskill explains in an online interview.
Moh Abdolreza is an interdisciplinary Concordia student and also a research assistant at the Lab, who became interested in the exhibition based on the idea of the home versus public space.
(Abdolreza’s piece titled “Where is my body?”, which focuses on the idea of absence and presence of body / Maiya Butcher, Concordia News
“During the crisis, we were mostly working online and talking to each other’s images, not bodies. We were also working in a way in which our bodies were not connected. I started seeing my body as a fragmented thing beside technology, and how technology could both enable and disempower me,” Abdolreza says over Zoom.
Micheline Desmarteaux and Lisa Potter are members of Concordia’s Creative engAGE Living Lab who also found a sense of grounding in being a part of the Hive’s activities. They were interviewed together over a group Zoom meeting.
“Art was the link between everything. It was very important to me during the pandemic because everything stopped at once, but the Hive came to us at home,” Desmarteaux says.
(Desmarteaux’s pastel drawings that bring the theme of love / Maiya Butcher, Concordia News)
“I feel really involved and bonded by sharing my art, and it puts a smile on people’s faces,” Potter says.
For Gertrud Antoine Barwick, another senior who became involved with the exhibition through a neighbour at the Lab, art is her outlet for emotions.
“In sadness and happiness, in normal life and in pandemic, art is a wonderful thing,” she remarks over a phone call.
(Barwick’s two mixed-media pieces titled “A Jungian Kaleidoscope”, which explored the idea of the unconscious versus conscious mind / Maiya Butcher, Concordia News)
This pandemic is not the first time people have turned to art as a coping method in crisis.
An interview with Columbia University professors Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester from Columbia College Today discusses the role of arts in the context of pandemics of old, such as the bubonic plague. The plague occurred frequently in 18th-century Europe, during which time artmaking was always present.
“In times of crisis, people like to see their experience mirrored through another medium […] which is visually striking, which moves to the heart. Art in times of social disaster represents reality and helps people understand that reality,” Mormando says in the article.
Times of crisis as opportunities for connection
For the artists and organizers of “Home-Made Studios”, the gallery served as this means of mirroring their shared reality. It brought them together in a singular way.
“When we go through personal crisis, it feels like we’re alone in it. This crisis was different; we were all hit differently depending where we were in the world, but we all went through the same thing. I hope everyone will share the art they made during this time,” Monica Escobedo says.
“In this exhibition we have different people with different backgrounds, but they can still gather together and express their ideas through art,” Moh Abdolreza observes. “I think one side of art is transforming our collective experience to our collective consciousness,” he adds.
“Everybody intentionally put their art in this exhibition, wanted to come together and share in this theme […] and I think that’s the thread that links us all together,” Carly McAskill says.
“Art doesn’t have to be beautiful or realistic…it’s more about the power of doing art together in a group context. In the online group, I didn’t meet these people but I still felt that we created a community,” Natali Ortiz shares.
“HOME-MADE-STUDIO: A WINDOW INTO OUR CREATIVE SPACES THROUGH TIMES OF ISOLATION” is open to visitors until April 22nd at the Hive Café in Concordia’s Hall Building.
Co-hosted by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC)
Afternoons at the Institute
Apr 6, 2022
4:00 – 5:30 EST
Cynthia Hammond, Professor of Art History, Concordia University: “Restorative Landscapes in an Anthropocentric World.”
David Hornstein, MDCM, FRCP, McGill University Health Centre and McGill University, Internal Medicine and Critical Care: “The Healing Power of Images from a Timeline Lost – Intensive Care Journals During Critical Illness.”
Tamar Tembeck, Artistic Director, Oboro. “Public Art in Healthcare Spaces”.
Janis Timm-Bottos, PhD, ATR-BC, Associate Professor, Creative Arts Therapies, Faculty of Fine Arts; Director, Art Hives Initiative, PI, engAGE Living Lab créatif (FRQS); Co-director, Design, Art, Culture, Community (DACC) Next-Generation Cities Institute, “Art Hives and Creative Living Labs: social infrastructure for wellness.”
Martha Langford, Research Chair and Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art will moderate, and Judy Weiser, Founder and Director of the PhotoTherapy Centre, Vancouver, will join the discussion. Time
Free & Open to the Public – Registration is Required
Cynthia Hammond, Shade and Solace (Garden Party), 2019. Acrylic gouache and pencil on canvas, 91.4 x 121.9 cm. A depiction of the final garden party held in the former healing garden of St Margaret’s Home, a palliative care centre in Montreal, active 1894-1991.
The health and wellbeing benefits of musical engagement are noted often in popular media and scholarly literature, and specifically in relation to older adults.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, various online music/music therapy programs have emerged. However, from a “best practices” perspective we do not know if/how known benefits of music translate in an online format.
Join us at the next Creative Science Shop where Concordia music therapist-researcher Dr. Laurel Young and graduate music therapy student research assistants Ben Magidson and Julia Blundon will discuss an ongoing inquiry that examines older adults’ perspectives on participating in online group music experiences.
Music therapist, Victoria McNeill will share her experience of initiating online music programs as part of her work at Cummings Centre.
During this interactive discussion, attendees will be invited to share perceived benefits/ barriers related to their own musical engagement.
Come to our round table where Alexa Ruel and Sean Devine, PhD students in Psychology at Concordia University and McGill University, will be talking about how cognition change as we age.
Join us to discuss about new findings related to decision making in older adults and how these findings can lead to creating new user-friendly technology. Share your thoughts in a community discussion about decision making, and your experience with digital devices.
Alexa Ruel is a PhD Student in Psychology at Concordia University. She studies how decision-making changes across the lifespan, moving from young to older adulthood.
SeanDevine is a PhD Student in Psychology at McGill University. He studies how seeking out information impacts decision-making, and studies real-world decision-making through the use of big consumer data. Sean worked along side Alexa for his Master’s degree where he examined how cognition changes across the lifespan.
The Creative Science Shop is a semi-monthly studio hybrid, both online and in person at the Cavendish Mall. It is an exchange of ideas, innovations, scientific and artistic projects. This intergenerational group brings together passion in the arts and sciences from older adults, students, and researchers.
Join us on Thursday, January 20th, from 3:30-5:00 pm for the Creative Science Shop on Physical Health: Challenges and Tools.
Join us for an online discussion on the topic of physical health and challenges, introduced by Boutaine Chafi and Debbie Byer.
Boutaina, a 4th year Concordia student in Behavioural Neurosciences, will present a video conceived with her colleagues during Professor Karen Li’s course.
Debbie Byer, engAGE Living Lab community member, will share her perspective on staying active with physical challenges.
We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas, in a community discussion on physical changes and how we can benefit from the tools in our environment to maintain a healthy body.
The Creative Science Shop is a community round table, both online and in-person at the Cavendish Mall. It is an exchange of ideas, innovations, scientific and artistic projects. This intergenerational group brings together passion in the arts and sciences from older adults, students, and researchers.
