Neutral Ground 2025 Membership Residency
Members in Residence:
Elke Richter & Chantel Schultz
June 14 – August 23 | 2025
Elke Richter
Elke Richter is an artist based in Oskana, Treaty 4 Territory, Saskatchewan, Canada. She earned an MFA in Print Media from the University of Regina in 2017, and was the Director of the Art Gallery of Regina from 2019 – 2022. She maintains a diverse practice with an emphasis on intuitive printmaking practices, painting, performance, site-specific installation, contemporary folk practices, paper-cutting, film, and sculpture with unconventional materials. Her syncretic practice explores German-Canadian post-war identity, religion, witchcraft, the occult, folk ritual, and diaspora.
She is a witch | hexe of geographically muddled heritage, and is a part of the post-war east German diaspora.
My artistic practice is interwoven with that of my practice as a witch, and presents reimaginings of history, religion, culture, and boundaries through highly ritualized imagery. Calling on wolves, witches, and walkers, I lean on stereotypes of women across the centuries and use these tropes as an accepted device to explore the complicated histories of German-Canadian women and the increasing complexities of English-Canadian women navigating post-war Saskatchewan culture.
Using divination, oracle-work, and mediumship, I look to the spirit world to dream of alternative worlds in the past, present, and future. Through these practices, I explore intergenerational trauma, land access, agriculture, home, relationship to land, migration, and cultural identity in my identity as being part of a long line of displaced persons, peasants, and farmers.
Chantel Schultz
Schultz is an artist from the Canadian prairies currently based in Regina, Saskatchewan on Treaty 4 territory. She graduated from the University of Alberta in 2020 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art and Design. She also holds a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Visual Communications from the Medicine Hat College (2017).
Recently, her drawings were on tour with TREX in an exhibit called Strange and Known Places (2021-2025). In 2021, she was selected for a long-term creative project with the Art Gallery of Regina to make work under the mentorship and in collaboration with Aganetha Dyck, selected beekeepers, and selected artists from Saskatchewan.
My studio practice revolves around an interest in an ostensible nature-culture divide, mainly described through sculpture and drawing. Where does one body end and another begin? I aim to highlight an environment that extends beyond our traditional conceptions of the body as a bound and stable entity. I am largely inspired by this ecological understanding of interconnectedness; that all living beings are a part of a larger network where every action can influence the whole system. This filters into my practice as I call into question the myriad ways we are interconnected to the biotic and abiotic world around us through forms and materials that form human and non-human assemblages and to draw the viewer into these enmeshed worlds.
In my drawing practice, I create highly detailed images of overlapping and entangled masses of organic matter. I engage in a process of looking closely, developing an intimacy with these micro-worlds which in turn, expands their depth and immensity. I must focus on building up the image milimeter by milimeter. This act alone feels like a liberating escape from the demands of the attention economy which we are so susceptible to. The knotted forms themselves are of no one particular object. I draw them with the intention to feel as though they are simply alive and undergoing a transformation, perhaps something deriving from the human form or that of another species entirely. These forms mingle with prairie grasses to remind us all of our common ground. I invite the viewer to pause, slow down, and to engage in the process of looking closely so they too might consider the immensity of worlds unseen.
In my sculptural works and installations, I work with forms and materials that undergo transformations or appear to, that are permeable and porous, or are at once biological and geological to challenge the barriers that keep the respective binaries in their place. As forms defy their bodily containers by leaking, decomposing, spilling, evaporating, teeming with growth, and fermenting, it is my hope, we might consider what quiet moments of transformation are currently happening within and around us. My work with generative materials such as SCOBY and agar confront the senses and hint at a much broader ecosystem that we call the human body. We might even begin to consider, where does one body begin and end? Does it really matter?
