We are excited to welcome Newfoundland-based artist Daze Jefferies
as our next Ease On Down The Road residency participant from August 16th – 26th.
Daze Jefferies (she/her) is a sixth-generation white settler artist, writer, and researcher born and raised in the Bay of Exploits on the northeast coast of rural Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). Working with archives, oral histories, found beach materials, sound, poetry, sculpture, theory, performance, and illustration, her research-based creative practice engages with the ocean to form washy, wayward, and withheld counter-narratives of trans and sex worker histories at the water’s edge. What emerges from this precarious assemblage is a story of time, drift, and transition that finds hope in the changing North Atlantic. Her research-creation and multidisciplinary projects have been exhibited at Eastern Edge, The Rooms, Unscripted Twillingate, Inverness County Centre for the Arts, and Cape Breton University Art Gallery, as well as performed widely at festivals, theatres, and house shows in St. John’s – including HOLD FAST, Lawnya Vawnya, FemFest, and Out of Earshot. Co-author of Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water’s Edge: Unsettled Islands (2018), she has recent publications in Riddle Fence, QWERTY, HELD, Arc, The Dalhousie Review, and Feral Feminisms.
Daze’s Ease On Down The Road residency will explore echoes, silences, and hopeful utterances from waves of trans history in Atlantic Canada – specifically, a network of digital communications at the close of the 20th century. By storying a fictionalized correspondence between two trans women in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, Jefferies contextualizes life-affirming possibilities for transfeminine community-building across Atlantic Canada at a time of new beginnings and precarious survival. Blending historical matters with imagined pasts, the attending sonic narrative will ask others to think more deeply about intergenerational knowledge exchanges, and in so doing, this work will embody the critical potential of listening and longing to enact solidarity through heartful encounters and historical reverberations.