Dawn Matheson is a multimedia artist and writer living in Guelph, Ontario. She is currently the video-artist-in-residence for University of Guelph’s Improvisation Community and Social Practice office creating videos on saxophonist Jane Bunnett’s improv workshops with special needs community groups. http://www.improvcommunity.ca/
She’s an alumni of the University of Toronto School of English and of the UC Drama Program. Matheson has worked for CBC Radio and Television, produced video profiles for the Stratford Festival and written for numerous national publications. She is a writer for Up!, West Jet’s inflight magazine with an interest in community-based tourism. She’s also written for the Globe and Mail, Dogs In Canada magazine, Ignite Travel, Guelph Mercury, KW Record, Ottawa Citizen, Outpost and Canadian Living magazine.
Matheson programmed the Festival of Moving Media for a number of years http://festivalofmovingmedia.ca/, co-edited Guelph’s multi-authored history book, “Perspectives on a Century of Change,” made videos for Guelph International Resource Centre’s Social History Project, and contributed to several group shows with Ed Video Media Arts and Macdonald Stewart Art Centre and to three Nuit Blanche events.
Matheson’s artistic practice seeks to interrupt civic and social spaces with unexpected moments of beauty, curiosity and joy. Her relational performances and interventions offer moments of exuberance and liberation from everyday suffering. Matheson attempts to dismantle the barriers between individuals.
Matheson creates site-specific sound, video and performance pieces that have been installed in galleries and public spaces across the country. She solicited private recordings of people singing in the shower for broadcast in a public fountain in Guelph’s St. George’s Square. She staged a silent community sit entitled “Stare” for Nuit Blanche. She videotaped isolated old-timers navigating a bank machine, then overlaid a soundtrack of their memories of kinship survival. She created a Confession Alley for local residents to give voice to experience otherwise unshared. She collaborated with adult literacy learners from Action Read Guelph in an adaptation and performance of Shakespearean monologues, then broadcast the recordings from trees for a Shakespeare festival at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre. http://www.uoguelph.ca/shakespeare/multimedia/audio/a_tongues_in_trees.cfm She assembled a guerilla team to build snowmen on the front lawns of household residents, with the hopes of providing a little joy just outside their windows.
Recently she worked with Musagete’s Foundation’s 1mile2. You can find her blog posts here. http://www.1mile2.com/category/d-matheson
As the sole Guelph artist for this international project, Matheson collaborated with a Guelph resident living with disability to conceive, develop and produce a short documentary video to be screened at a community literacy lie down cinema and ‘slumber party’. She hopes that these documentaries will offer fresh and intimate perspectives on shared pursuits of happiness by underrepresented members of the Guelph community. The stories of these individuals – so often identified solely by disability or addiction – will reveal their pathways to joy, love and beauty.