MONTRÉAL, SEPTEMBER 14, 2026 — Fonderie Darling is pleased to announce the eight artists of the new 2026-2029 Montreal Studios cohort: asinnajaq, Kyle Alden Martens, Stina Baudin, Mara Eagle, Alegría Gobeil, Tegan Moore, Jackson Slattery, and Santiago Tamayo Soler. Bringing together practices as diverse as sculpture, painting, installation, video, textiles, performance, and digital art, this new cohort explores themes central to creative practice, including hybrid and liberated bodies, dystopian worlds and ecological awareness, cultural and familial transmission, and self-reflection and critical thinking. The interconnection between these approaches fosters dialogue and new affinities.
For more than 20 years, the Montreal Studios have offered Montreal artists a rare opportunity to establish a long-term presence within an environment of creation, production, and exchange. Unique in Canada for the length of its residency and the scope of its support, the program offers eight artists a studio for three years, with access to the production studios at Fonderie Darling and a range of opportunities for professional development, networking, and engagement with the public.
An Essential Space for Montreal's Creative Scene
Fonderie Darling extends its warmest gratitude to everyone who submitted an application. The quality and quantity of the proposals received—more than 170 applications were shortlisted for this jury—attest to the exceptional vitality of Montreal’s art scene and the need to sustain studios that allow artists to develop their practice over the long term. As affordable and sustainable workspaces become increasingly scarce in downtown Montreal, preserving artists’ studios and providing conditions conducive to creativity are essential to the future of our arts scene.
“We are particularly proud to welcome this new cohort, which brings together a wide variety of artistic practices and demonstrates the strength of Montreal’s current creative scene. The Montreal Studios has always aimed to provide artists with the time, space, and conditions necessary to develop their practice and make a name for themselves on the local and international scenes. Seeing these eight artists join Fonderie Darling’s community for the next three years is a great source of excitement for our entire team.” – Milly A. Dery, Executive and Artistic Director of Fonderie Darling
About the recipients
asinnajaq (they) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is grounded in observation, attentiveness, and the transmission of knowledge across generations. Guided by family lineages of curiosity, ingenuity, and playfulness, their current work explores relationships to material culture and the ways contemporary artistic practice can contribute to existing knowledge systems. A graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in film (2016), asinnajaq has been awarded the Pierre-Ayot Award (2025) and the National Gallery of Canada’s New Generation Photography Award (2025), and was one of the recipients of the Sobey Art Award (2020).
Kyle Alden Martens (they/them/he/him) works across sculpture, installation, performance, and video. Working towards material states of both ease and undoneness, their work aims to sculpturally represent conditions of finality and process, becoming and unbecoming. Clothing serves as an allusion, throughout Martens’ practice, to fitting and fitting in. In some cases, objects nest perfectly into places designed to accommodate them. In others, fitting is more theoretical, calling into question how queer bodies take up space. Martens holds an MFA in Sculpture from Concordia University and a BFA in Intermedia from NSCAD University. Recent residencies include Est-Nord-Est (2026), Doris McCarthy (2025), ACRE (2024), and Brucebo Fine Arts (2022).
Working through abstraction, Stina Baudin (she) uses mixed-media processes that intertwine data, sound, text, archival materials, and oral histories to articulate Black life and its contested histories. Her practice draws on traditional African and Haitian textile techniques, interlaced with systemic strategies and literary references, to evoke past realities, real or imagined, silenced by the archives. Baudin is a 2025 MFA graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art, a recipient of the Gilbert Foundation Scholarship (2023/2024) and the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation Materials Award (2025).
Mara Eagle (she) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans video installation, sound art, digital mural-making, and sculpture. Working across traditional and digital media, she explores the unstable boundaries between nature and technology, myth and science. She often uses collage and glitch techniques to create unexpected outcomes and disrupt conventional narratives. Gardens, origin stories, music, and hybrid bodies are recurrent themes throughout Eagle's work. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Marlboro College (Vermont) and a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University. Eagle was nominated for the Pierre-Ayot Award (2023) while completing her tenure as Concordia’s 2020 Bronfman Fellow. Pangée Gallery represents her.
Alegría Gobeil (A) works with behaviours deemed self-destructive, pathological, contagious and collective, investigating how they are produced, regulated, and made legible through institutional structures. Working across installation, intervention, and performance/protocols, Gobeil transforms exhibition spaces into sites of interrogation that alter the discourses inherent in institutional structures. Their contextual and indisciplinary practice investigates how these discourses shape lives, render them legible, and determine the conditions of their emergence. A hold a Bachelor and a Master in Visual and Media Arts, with honours, from Université du Québec à Montréal – UQAM (2019 and 2022).
Filtered through a practice of material recuperation, Tegan Moore’s (she) sculptures and installations examine underlying complexities in the built environment. By means of granular, intuitive, and research-based investigations, her work intricately centres peripheral matter. As a member of the Collective Synthetic, she participates in researching plastics pollution. Their work focuses on some of the less visible aspects of plastic becoming waste. Moore holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Western Ontario.
Jackson Slattery (he) is an artist whose practice centres on realist oil painting and text-based works. Drawing from personal, often diaristic source material, his work explores the intersection of intimate experience, art history, and conceptual inquiry. Through a sustained engagement with realism, Slattery investigates painting’s capacity for sincerity, doubt, and self-reflection in an era defined by image saturation. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts, with a major in Drawing, from RMIT, Melbourne (2005), as well as a Master’s of Fine Arts from Concordia University (2021). Slattery’s work is in private, public and institutional collections, both locally and overseas, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
Santiago Tamayo Soler’s (he) practice is grounded in world-building, imagining speculative futures for Latin America -- with a particular focus on Colombia – through diasporic and queer perspectives. Using digital tools, he constructs environments from archival materials, video, photography, and found imagery, weaving together personal and collective memory. These virtual spaces explore national identity through layered visual languages drawn from popular media, digital culture, cinematic forms, and vernacular image traditions. Tamayo Soler holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in visual arts from Concordia University (2019). He is a recipient of the 2023 EDAA Emerging Digital Artists Award, presented by EQ Bank and Trinity Square Video, and a laureate of the 2025 MNBAQ Contemporary Art Award.
The selection was made by a jury consisting of Jonathan Shaughnessy (Director of Curatorial Initiatives and Acting Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Canada), Audrey Genois (Senior Director, Artistic Mission, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal), Didier Morelli (independent curator), Michaëlle Sergile (artist from the 2023–2026 cohort), and Fonderie Darling’s programming team.
About the Montreal Studios
The Montreal Studios is Fonderie Darling's long-term residency program for visual artists in Montreal. Unique in Canada for its three-year duration and the extent of the support provided, the program offers eight artists a studio at Fonderie Darling and access to its production facilities, including woodworking, metalworking, ceramics, and CNC machining. It also fosters professional networking, public events, and participation in the center’s community life.
Since 2006, the Sponsors’ Circle program has also made it possible—depending on the funding secured—to cover artists’ studio costs and provide them a production grant. This philanthropic model helps maintain affordable working conditions and provides tangible support for artists’ career development.
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