The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency gives Manitoban artists time to focus on their work in the beautiful natural setting of Riding Mountain National Park.
The next artist-in-residence for the 2026 season is Oluuji. Ahead of his time in the historic Deep Bay Cabin, Oluuji answered a few of our questions about his work and how he’ll be spending his residency.
MAC: Tell us a little about yourself as an artist and your practice.
Oluuji: I’m a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, photography, installation, and media arts. My practice explores identity and memory, particularly within diasporic experience, and I’m interested in the tension between the desire to belong and the desire to remain connected to one’s cultural origins.
My work draws from both institutional archives and quieter, everyday forms of archiving that exist in objects, garments, photographs, and emerging cloud-based systems of memory. I’m interested in how authorship within archives shapes ideas of identity and history, and how personal or overlooked materials can challenge more official or colonial narratives.
I move between mediums depending on what the work calls for, allowing ideas and materials to shape the process rather than committing to a single approach. I’m especially drawn to experimental image-making and to the ways different materials, technologies, and processes can influence how an image is experienced and understood across painting, photography, and video.
Tell us about your project — what will you be working on in the Deep Bay Cabin?
I’ll be working on a slow image-making project that responds directly to the environment around the Deep Bay cabin and Riding Mountain National Park. I’m interested in allowing the landscape, weather, light, and pace of the residency to shape both the process and the final images.
The work will combine landscape photography, self-portraiture, personal items and found natural and synthetic materials using layered collage-based methods. I’ll be experimenting with analog processes such as cyanotype, chlorophyll printing, and 35mm film photography alongside digital scanning and transparency printing. A large part of the residency will involve walking through the park, observing the unique attributes of the landscape, flora, fauna and atmosphere, collecting visual references, and developing a closer relationship to the environment before producing finished works.
I’m also interested in extending the project into other mediums as it develops, including painting, video, and textile-based experiments such as cyanotype prints on sheer fabric that can be stitched into sculptural forms.
More broadly, the project explores ideas of memory, belonging, and diasporic identity, particularly how unfamiliar environments can reshape the way we relate to land and to ourselves. The residency offers a rare opportunity to slow down my process and let the work emerge through sustained engagement with a specific place.
What is your relationship with the park?
By the time the residency begins, I will have visited Riding Mountain National Park for the first time while presenting work at the Wasagaming Community Arts gallery.
Having never visited Riding Mountain before (presently), I’m really looking forward to exploring the water, the beach, the trails, and the overall terrain of the park, and seeing how that environment shapes what I make. The idea of kayaking, taking long walks, and being surrounded by a scale of nature that feels completely different from my day-to-day life in downtown Winnipeg is really exciting to me. Also subconsciously comparing the experience of being in such an environment in a land so far from home, to my experience in Nigerian parks and beaches.
As an immigrant from Nigeria, I also recognize that the local culture surrounding cabins, lakes, and summer retreats is something relatively unfamiliar to me. I’m grateful for the opportunity to experience that environment through an artistic context.
How do you hope the park will influence or inspire your project or practice?
I hope the park influences the project by slowing down my usual ways of working and making me more responsive to environment, material, and process. Much of my practice already involves layering, experimentation, and attentiveness to context, but I think working within the conditions of Riding Mountain will push that further by allowing the landscape, weather, and pace of daily life to shape creative decisions more directly.
Anything else you’d like to share with readers and the Riding Mountain National Park community?
I’d encourage anyone visiting Riding Mountain to spend time engaging with the local arts community and to check out the exhibitions and programming being organized by the wonderful people at Wasagaming Community Arts. I think spaces like that play an important role in shaping how people experience a place beyond its landscape alone.
I’m also grateful for the opportunity to spend time and make work on land that has been cared for and stewarded by Indigenous communities for generations. As someone visiting the park for the first time, I’m looking forward to approaching the experience with attentiveness, respect, and openness to learning from the environment and the people connected to it.
The Riding Mountain Artists’ Residency is offered in partnership by the Manitoba Arts Council, Wasagaming Community Arts, and Riding Mountain National Park.
Interested in the staying in the Deep Bay cabin? Find out how to apply to the Riding Mountain Artists Residency through the Learn – Residencies grant stream. Apply by January 15, 2027 for a residency in the summer of 2027.
