Background and Lead Artists

Beginning in January 2022, the project’s two lead artists Alana Moore and Amber Phelps Bondaroff worked with local artist participants through a one-year creation period leading to a gallery exhibition and community presentation tour.

Belong Where You Find Yourself followed principles of community-engaged practice, including input from all participants and evolving our process through this feedback and learning at every stage. The result is an organic and meaningful engagement that brought people together, brought families together, created new friendships and support networks, and captured moments of beauty, clarity, and connection.
Interactive art station from the Belong Where You Find Yourself Project Showcase on display at GDAG April 23 to May 21, 2022. The showcase offered the public a chance to learn more about the project and to experiment with some of the same artistic prompts and ideas from Lead Artists Alana Moore and Amber Phelps Bondaroff.
Artistic prompts created by Alana Moore and Amber Phelps Bondaroff,
shared with participating artists in Belong Where You Find Yourself.

Lead Artists

Alana Moore is a white settler-Saskatoon based visual artist and facilitator. Drawing from her personal experiences with addiction, mental illness, and chronic pain, Alana’s work investigates vulnerability and how to create shared meaning with participatory projects using dialogue, process, photography, design, and often non-object based outcomes. Alana works as an artist at Sherbrooke Community Centre, is a youth mentor with Future Artistic Minds (FAM), and a volunteer member with Bridges Art Movement (BAM).
Image: In the Hole (2017) was a short-term residency located in an earthen hole on Treaty 6 territory in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. The residency coincided with an exhibition at PAVED Arts Saskatoon. Live video and audio streaming from the hole were presented in the gallery for the duration of each residency day.
​Amber Phelps Bondaroff is an interdisciplinary visual artist, performer and arts organizer, living on Treaty 4 Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada. She crafts situations that encourage people to make and be together.  Through these spaces, her work strives to soften the rigidities of conventional social interaction. Amber works across many mediums, including; soft sculpture, costume, drawing,  printmaking, music and film. There is a strong focus on reuse and re-imagining of materials throughout her work.
Image: Mountain Movers – still from performance for video (2017). Mountain Movers considers the influence of surrounding landscapes on the body’s physical movements through space. A playful reflection on the phrase ‘to move a mountain,’ a wearable mountain acts as visual representation of the accumulating burden of lived experience on the body.