The Toni Onley Artist Projects (TOAP), which focuses on the exploration and development of visual artists, will have a maximum of 12 spaces available.
This year's mentors are Cindy Mochizuki and Sandeep Johal!
Saturday, July 5th – Sunday, July 13th, 2025 at Wells, BC
Learn more about TOAP and its history - click here!~
Application
Applications with requests for scholarships are due by 23:59 PT on April 1st, 2025.
All applications are due by May 15th, 2025.
Cost
The program cost for 2025 is $750.00 + GST. This fee does not include accommodations, transportation or evening meals. Scholarships and Bursaries to assist with the cost of tuition are available.
PLEASE REACH OUT TO artistproject@IMARTS.COM IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS
About The Mentors
Sandeep Johal, Photo Credit Rachel Pick
Sandeep Johal
Sandeep Johal is a Punjabi Canadian visual artist, advocate, and leader whose practice engages drawing, collage, textiles, and large-scale murals. Through her Indo-folk feminine aesthetic, she confronts themes of bleakness, despair and ugliness with their dissonant opposites: brightness, hope and beauty. Johal’s work typically centers around the stories of women and while she highlights female suffering in its many forms, these are ultimately stories of resistance and resilience.
Johal has worked on a number of notable site-specific commissions including a series of banners on Granville Street in partnership with Downtown Vancouver BIA (2024), a mural for the Vancouver Art Gallery’s inaugural #SpotlightVanArtRental project (2022), a digital projection mapping for Facade Festival produced by Burrard Arts Foundation (2019), and a 4,000 sf collaborative mural project for Vancouver Mural Festival, which centred around the Komagata Maru Episode and involved the de-naming of the federal building it was painted on (2019). Her work was part of the group exhibition In/Visible: Body as Reflective Site through the McClure Gallery and Visual Arts Centre in Montreal in partnership with the IMPACTS Project (2019).
Johal’s clients include Apple, the Vancouver Canucks, Vancouver Whitecaps FC, Estée Lauder Canada, Holt Renfrew, Lululemon, and Earls Restaurant Group as well as the University of British Columbia's Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and Simon Fraser University’s Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue. She has been an artist-in-residence at Burrard Arts Foundation (2021) and Indian Summer Festival (2018) and is the 2019 recipient of the Darpan Magazine Artistic Visionary Award. Johal’s work is held in numerous collections, including the TD Art Collection, the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art, Global Affairs Canada Visual Art Collection Program (Canadian Embassy, San Salvador), and Surrey Art Gallery.
Johal holds a Diploma in Fine Arts (honours) from Langara College (2007) and a Degree in Education from the University of British Columbia (2002). She lives and works in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Cindy Mochizuki
Image of Cindy Mochizuki, submitted by artist
Cindy Mochizuki creates multi-media installation, animation, drawing, audio fiction, performance, public artwork, and community-engaged projects. She has exhibited her work in Canada, US, Australia, and Japan.
Recent exhibitions include the Art Gallery at Evergreen, Kamloops Art Gallery, Prince Takamado Gallery, Nanaimo Art Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Burrard Arts Foundation, Frye Art Museum, and Yonago City Museum.
Her artistic projects integrate archival research, oral histories and memory work and consider methodologies of gathering and re-telling stories that are often invisible, excluded, or undocumented. A large body of her multi-media work explore the experiences of Japanese Canadians who were interned from the west coast of British Columbia during the second world war. Many of her animated films explore the lives of these first and second generations (isei and nisei) and their labour in the natural resource and food industries prior to their internment.
She received the Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award in New Media and Film (2015) and the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts VIVA Award (2020). She has designed scenography, illustration and animation for performing arts companies including Little Onion Puppet Co., Veronique West, Rumble Theatre, Theatre Replacement, Dream Walker Dance Company, Lisa Mariko Gelley, Theatre Calgary and the Arts Club Theatre. She received her MFA from the School for Contemporary Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies.