The Wave Art Collective were the 2020-2021 artists-in-residence at the University of Toronto Scarborough’s Doris McCarthy Gallery through the Equity and Diversity in the Arts (EDA) initiative.
Adapting from a traditional in-person residency to an virtually-produced community engagement project, the Collective worked closely with the Doris McCarthy Gallery to research and produce The Space Between Waves. The project centres around a three-part, sound-based narrative collage that blends music, song demos, candid conversations and field recordings, archival clips that reveal the history, geography, and culture of Scarborough through the interwoven voices of its migrants, politicians, artists, ancestors, and landscapes.
As part of the residency, Sampreeth Rao and Kevin Ramroop also participated as guest lecturers for UTSC’s Virtual Artist Lecture Series (VALS) in June 2021, where they engaged in a conversation around the creation of the first part of The Space Between Waves and how the process is directly related to the subject matter of Scarborough, the Rouge Nation Urban Park, and its migratory history. In October 2021, the Collective led a guided walk through the UTSC’s Highland Creek Valley, which was free and open to students and faculty of UTSC as well as the larger community. The guided tour was anchored by stopping at different points of interest in the valley and taking the time to engage the group in a question or conversation contextualized by a point of interest in a selected part of The Space Between Waves. The walk concluded with a live performance from Kevin Ramroop at the edge of the Rouge River.
