Announcing Our 2026 Production Fund Recipients

Left: Jan Martin, Photo by Evan Pearney. Right: Rachel Thornton, courtesy of the artist

Struts Gallery is happy to announce the recipients of the 2026 Media Arts Production Fund and the 2026 Members Production Fund. Congratulations to:

• Jan Martin (McKees Mills, NB) – our Media Arts Production Fund Recipient, and;

• Rachel Thornton (Sackville, NB) – our Members Production Fund Recipient.

Jan Martin is a genre-defiant Mi'kmaw sorcerer whose songs are spells cast to protect the earth from the billionaires who seek to destroy it. Their dark magic will captivate and enthrall your spirit, empowering it to face the realities of life under post-capitalist technofeudalism.

Nature Mechanical is an experimental film and sound art project that will compare the landscape of Mi'kma'ki from pre-Colonial times to today. Expanding on concepts and techniques explored and developed during their last two residencies with AAAPNB and RE:FLUX, Jan will combine a love of film and sound in new ways with local audio/video recordings of natural areas of coastline, wetlands, and forest, and layer those with sights/sounds of urban, industrial, and agricultural areas. Audio and video will slowly morph to reveal more and more of the modern areas, eventually leaving nothing but. It will build up slowly to communicate the change from serene to liminal, peaceful to chaotic, comfortable to hostile.

Rachel Thornton (they/she) is an artist and arts worker living in Sackville, NB, within Mi’kma’ki. In their practice, Rachel explores connections between the body, astronomy, speculative fiction and the philosophy of science through collage, zines and digital projects. In 2015 they founded the Teeny Tiny Zine Library at Mount Allison University and continue to be a part of its collecting and programming.

Rachel holds a MA Fine Arts with distinction (2020) from the Open College of the Arts, Barnsley, UK and a BFA with distinction (2015) from Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB.

Intertwining mythology, ecological studies, and digital experimentation, theriomancy envisions metamorphosis as a metaphor for humanity’s urgent need to adapt amidst climate collapse. This body of work extends their earlier explorations into the combination of analog collage, video, and augmented reality around themes of cosmology, deconstructing hierarchies of information, and the fragility of our environment.

Congratulations to Rachel and Jan – we look forward to seeing their projects progress over the coming year.