Dreaming the Asklepion

Performance by Zoe Kreye, Lisa Prentice & Alexa Solveig Mardon, Richmond Art Gallery, curated by Zoe Chan, 2024.

Dreaming the Asklepion is a collaboration by visual artist Zoë, dancer/choreographer Alexa, and visual artist/craniosacral therapist Lisa who together are developing rituals for transmuting embodied and spiritual experiences into the creation of sculpture, painting, and movement. Participants were invited for a 20-minute individual session to experience a unique healing ritual created in response to and for each participant.

Collaborators:

Lisa Prentice is an artist, writer and bodyworker living on Musqueam/Squamish/Tsleil-Waututh territories, colonially known as Vancouver BC. A graduate of Emily Carr College of Art and Design, Lisa was for many years exclusively a visual artist, sitting on the board of the OR Gallery Society and actively participating in the Vancouver art community. She works as a Craniosacral therapist and somatic practitioner and in that role has designed and led community wellness projects for the Purple Thistle project and Gallery Gachet. Lisa also writes on art and somatic topics, most recently for Black/Flash magazine in 2021, as well as a catalogue essay for the Richmond Art Gallery in 2023.

Alexa Solveig Mardon is a dancer, performance maker and facilitator co-creating and seeking spaces for imperfect ritual, queer fantastical myth-making, and multi-sensorial solidarity across difference. Alexa is a first generation settler of Finnish and British Isles descent living as an uninvited guest on the illegally occupied, unceded Coast Salish territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples. Alexa’s work takes forms including stage performance, poetry, movement workshops for frontline support workers, dreamwork + prophecy practices, and teaching professional and non-professional level dance classes. Studying inherited and learned practices of divination through carromancy, dousing, and dream opening, Alexa practices listening and receiving with the other side. Alexa holds a B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from Simon Fraser University, and and MA in Choreography from DAS Choreography, University of the Arts Amsterdam, where their research focused on dreaming, writing + movement practices that seek anti-colonial mythical, queer + speculative relations with ancestors of all species. Alexa’s work has been presented by Western Front, The Dance Centre, OFFTA (Montreal,) Boombox Vancouver, PS: We are All Here (Toronto), Kinetic Studios (Halifax), Surrey Art Gallery, and VIVO Media Arts Centre.