Salmon River Studios

You may know Ashley and I as friends, family, your kid’s art teachers or through our past projects which include Gaff Gallery in Vancouver and Galerie Rye in Montreal. Here’s a quick re-cap to get you caught up with us: After working our tails off trying to make it as independent gallery proprietors and artists, while working day jobs, etc. we decided to teach overseas. We have been teaching art in Qatar (whole story there) for the past four years, saving towards our next project- and this is it! Two years ago we bought a 52 acre farm in Tamworth, Ontario (about a 30min drive north of Kingston). It’s gorgeous— rolling hills right on the Salmon River, 100 year old timber barn, plus a house and smaller second barn. The place is ideal for what we have been wanting to do for some time now: set up studios and get to work making art and continuing the community driven cultural activities that we enjoyed so much at our previous venues. But this time it’s different– we are not in the city and we are not running an exhibition space (although there will be exhibitions surely). With Salmon River Studios we will focus all of our energy into arts production and providing cultural and educational opportunities to our local community with a long term goal of broadening that community nationally and internationally. Over the next several years it is our hope that with a lot of hard work (and your help!) Salmon River Studios will develop into a sustainable, long term enterprise which will transition into a non-profit and seek operational funding through the Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts and other arts and cultural funding sources. Ultimately we hope for Salmon River Studios to offer artist residency programs, host guest artist workshops and lectures, exhibitions, musical/performance/theatrical events and to become a magnet for arts, cultural and educational programming in the area.