April 4, 2025
Illustrator Morgan Kagesheongai has gone to the moon and back in creating the 2025 River & Sky design. It’s a hopeful design that reminds us of our connection to the land and life-giving water. We love how it pulls you close in the darkness of night, and whispers of magic with its glowing fireflies and the moon’s reflection. You’ll be seeing more of their work as our line-up unfolds, culminating in our 2025 poster.
Morgan is an Anishinaabe Ojibwe Two-Spirit from Whitefish River First Nation living and working as an illustrator in the city of Toronto. They are a multidisciplinary artist and instructor with over a decade of experience in the field with a penchant for the old, the retro and the anachronistic. You can often find them in little nooks and crannies dusting off paperback sci-fi books, discarded art supplies, and vintage anime VHS tapes.
River & Sky takes place on a beautiful bend of the Sturgeon River, whose waters also connect with the Temagami River and Lake Nipissing, on land that is the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg people and part of the Robinson Huron Treaty area.
Energy transforms in this year’s design by rounding a gentle path from one plane of being to the next. Little lights and secret creatures are illuminating our journey towards tomorrow’s self. As we intertwine the roots of our perennial experience, life blossoms with renewal. The moon accompanies us this year as it resets its cycle, and together we become beings of reciprocity.
For me the biggest take away in my experience with River and Sky was the opportunity given to connect to the land. Water is our most valuable and important resource, and our celebration and connection to it at this event reminds us of water’s constant ability to give us life. Even the rain uplifts us. When I was asked to design this year’s poster, I knew I wanted to center my design on the relationship that water creates between physical elements.
The original prompt for the work was “Roots, Revival, Reset,” and none of these things happen without water. I designed the background to frame the reflection of the moon in the water, which acts as the transforming body in bringing light into the root structure of the design.
It was also important to create a design that represents the historical context of the festival in addition to its future. I settled on a symbiotic relationship between something old and something new in the root structure.
The smooth rose, native to this area, represents the end of our festival’s life-cycle. Blossoms are the fruit of living’s labor, and the last celebration of its life before it winters. It acknowledges that we must say goodbye to the friends and connections we’ve made, that we must be gracious for the beauty of those endings, and that we will bloom again next summer.
The water runs swiftly, but when we connect to it, we are connected to all things together, always moving, always changing, always renewing. That has been my takeaway from my experience with last year’s journey, and I’m looking forward very much to doing it again this year.
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