FARM AIR - Call for Artist Applications

[Sean Smith]

FARM AIR

CrookedFarmz@Downsview

Arts-Based Research Residency · Summer 2026

Crooked Farmz is an urban microfarm operating within the Many Hands Urban Farm Collective at Downsview Park. This summer, we're opening up a "plein air" shared outdoor studio space on the farm to a student/emerging artist for the growing season to pursue an independent research project.

The space is located within a working farm — vegetables, compost, soil, weeds — and it changes week to week. We'd like an artist to be present in this context, doing their own work alongside it, for a negotiated term of 3-4 months.

We're looking for people somewhere in the middle of a research process. A project that benefits from time spent outside, close to a piece of land, at an interesting nexus between rural and urban, but without a fixed destination yet. Multidisciplinary process-based and movement-oriented practices are especially welcome, but we're open to what you bring as an artist.


What We Offer

• an outdoor studio space on the farm, free of charge for 3-4 months
• a weekly vegetable CSA share from the farm
• potential for additional paid work on the microfarm
• potential for planting seeds/plants as part of the creative project
• some storage space on-site for project materials
• opportunity for paid career experience, supporting a MOCA project (see below)
• opportunity for project critique from a former OCADU sculpture professor

What We Ask

• 1 hour of care work per week in the permaculture space, the central focus of the plein air studio
• an open, creative spirit that integrates artistic work into everyday farm life
• regular presence in the space (not full-time work, but not an occasional drop-in either)
• consideration for offering a (paid) creative workshop to the public as part of your residency

The MOCA Connection

Crooked Farmz will be growing grains at Many Hands Farm as part of a commission for Delcy Morelos, whose major site-specific installation opens at MOCA Toronto in October. Morelos is a Bogotá-based Colombian artist whose practice is rooted in Andean cosmovision — earth, soil, and natural materials as living carriers of body, memory, and place. Her immersive installations have been exhibited internationally. The FARM AIR resident will have the opportunity to contribute to growing this crop for the Morelos project.

Your Creative Project

Each resident works on a self-directed project of their own proposing. It doesn't need to be finished by the end of the residency — it needs to become alive. We're interested in work that connects in some way to the site, the season, and the ecologies of the farm, but we're not prescriptive about what that looks like.

Creative projects might include land art, sculpture, performance, dance, eco-diagramming, solargraphy, poetics, experimental writing, walking studies, new cartographies, music, pedagogy, hybrid practices, and much more. Analog and site-specific work is what we're most drawn to, but the form is less important than the connection to place.

A Note on Flexibility

Whatever you propose, expect it to shift once you're here. The farm is a dynamic space and proposals tend to get productively complicated by contact with the actual site. That's a feature, not a problem. The proposal opens a process — it doesn't close one.

Ethics of Place

We are visitors to all spaces. Project proposals should reflect an artistic practice that is thoughtful about place, ecology, history, and the human and more-than-human beings with whom we're sharing the land. Crooked Farmz and Many Hands operates on the Dish With One Spoon treaty territory — land shared and cared for by the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Wendat peoples. This wampum agreement calls on all who live and work here to share the territory and protect the land and water together.

Curator

Sean Smith is the owner of Crooked Farmz, a small-batch compost tea brewery and experimental market garden farm in Toronto. His interest in developing a local CSA for composting and compost tea brewing emerges from deeper underlying concerns about soil health, microbial life, climate change, and our relationships with land and water. Before launching Crooked Farmz he taught extensively at the postsecondary level, including 6 years at OCADU in Wearable Art and Site-Specific Installation.

His prior curatorial projects include Channel Surf (with Department of Biological Flow) in 2015, a durational arts-research project featuring a two-week, 200km paddling and camping caravan along the Rideau Canal from Kingston to Ottawa, with the canal acting as an information channel and participants acting as "data packets" floating and creating along the journey; and Murmur Land Studios (with Barbara Fornssler and April Vannini), an experimental "post-anthropocene" field school initiative held in 4 provinces across Canada during 2017-18, exploring the varied human and more-than-human relations weaving through four thematic concerns: architecture, storytelling, science, and politics.

How to Apply

This is a quick turnaround, and the application is quite simple. Send us a one-page PDF proposal describing a project or practice you'd like to bring to the farm this summer. Tell us where you are in your research and how it connects — loosely or directly — to soil, ecology, season, or place. We're not looking for a polished pitch; we're looking for a genuine direction.

In your one page please include a rationale for how your proposed project fits within the residency theme and briefly describe your creative practice or what motivates your work. Finally, please include a sample of your creative work  — this might include photo images or documentation of a prior project, a sample of creative writing or poetry, etc.

Email to in...@crookedfarmz.net with the subject line "FARM AIR Application".

Deadline: June 1, 11:59pm.

We will be accepting 1-2 residents to share our plein air studio space this summer. The specific start time will be negotiated with each artist, but we are hoping for a mid-June welcome.

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 Crooked Farmz

 Brewing fresh compost teas and extracts for microbial health
 in agriculture, horticulture and arboriculture.

 crookedfarmz.net // @crookedfarmz // 416.669.1997

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 We Must Heal The Soil. It's That Simple.

 Crooked Farmz is a Certified Compost Facility Operator

 with the Compost Council of Canada.