July 13, 2025 |
River & Sky Arts in the Woods is our organization’s name. So it’s little wonder that visual arts installations are an integral part of River & Sky.
We’re so fortunate to have so many diverse artists transforming stages and spaces, bringing their vision to the land.
River and Sky Music will host a powerful new community mural project that will unfold live during this year’s festival, honouring Indigenous art, design, and storytelling through collaborative creation.
This mural will not only be a beautiful outdoor piece of art, but also a living story inviting people to come together and learn from one another. Festival-goers will be invited to contribute to the mural throughout the weekend, working alongside local Indigenous artists to bring the design to life. The artwork will reflect local stories and symbolism in celebration.
Community voices will be collected throughout the process, so the River & Sky community can share their story through this community mural as co-creators of learning and arts. The mural will be overseen by Amanda Mathias, a local artist and educator residing in North Bay who is from Temagami First Nation. Amanda is deeply involved in community, arts, education, and social justice initiatives. She hopes this project will amplify the importance of protection for lands and waters.
Studio Nude Beach is back, transforming the Dance Portal and Beach Stage into vibrant alien spaces. Look for their massive Beastie Bones, which made its inaugural appearance at Ice Follies in North Bay this year. The project invites an intermingling of fantasy and local ecologies, beckoning to the weird and alien within ourselves – a magical ecological space.
Studio Nude Beach is a mixed media arts collective based in North Bay. The collective’s work has been featured at festivals and galleries alike – such as River & Sky, Kennedy Gallery, and Up Here. Their large scale installations have become a recognizable part of the arts and festival scene in Northeastern Ontario.
David Chops’ immersive art installation requires interaction to be fully appreciated. In The Joy Within, David explores colourful expression and the “internal kaleidoscope of colour that makes us what we are.”
The piece also explores decommodification: “The profit over people world is happy to rob us of our joy, remake it ‘Now with 10% more colours!’ and sell it back to us hollowed out and empty. This art installation is a celebration of the rainbow of love in our hearts, the cultures we keep from being commodified, and reminds us that expressions of sadness and joy are not always what they seem. The spectrum of colour inside of us makes the human experience a beautiful thing.”
David is a self-taught artist based in the Boreal Forest of North-East Ontario. A survivor of poverty, child abuse, drug addiction, and homelessness, David found solace in underground social movements and a DIY ethos. His creative practice blends urban and rural influences. As a climate change migrant, David has honed his skills and expanded his art, creating ambitious projects using non-traditional mediums. Learn more about him at purpleravenfarm.com
Last year Allison Roberts, an emerging multidisciplinary artist based in North Bay, conceived of and launched into existence: “The Threshold Is The Portal,” an immersive alternate realm and experiment in the spell of collective experience. She is returning to bring back key elements of the Threshold experiment. Allison’s work explores themes of alternate realities, connection, alchemy of space and distraction/focus pendulums. She is influenced by the lore and animism of the surrounding natural world.
Lysergic darlings, The Oscillitarium, have been transmuting spaces into spectacles for nearly a decennium. Flailing about in their live lightship, their performances are conjured in real time, utilizing slide film, painted glass, video feedback, VCR tragedies, and liquid manipulation through a cascading array of analog and digital projectors, culminating in mixed media buffets. Possessed by ancient psychedelic mystery cults and powered by the Scarborough Bluffs, The Oscillitarium’s surreal estate agents vow to drench your optics. Walk towards the light.
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