2026 RESIDENTS

• Austin Gardner (Chicago, USA)

• Elise Boudreau Graham (Montreal, Canada)

• Wing-Hung Lit (London UK, Hong Kong)

• Kiran Niet (Ottawa, Canada)

Possible Worlds is pleased to host a second summer of micro-publishing residencies in 2026.

These self-directed micro-publishing residencies are intended to help artists who would benefit from dedicated time and space toward the development of a DIY or small press publishing project (zines, artists' books, comics, etc.) that they have in mind. Micro-residencies are one week in duration at our studio in downtown Ottawa. There is also an option for artists to publish their project in zine form with Possible Worlds. These residencies are funded by Possible Worlds, with additional supports provided in-kind by Possible Worlds and programming led by Director Melanie Yugo.

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AUSTIN GARDNER

Austin Gardner (they/them) is a Chicago-based artist, educator, curator, and kink community member. In their art practice, they assemble found and original media to create video, digital, and paper collages, publications, public programs, and more. Their work explores themes of Afrofuturism, worldbuilding, identity development, belief system formation, and unrefined joy and pleasure. As an educator, they are trained in learner-centered pedagogies with an MSEd in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University. Austin has presented art and kink workshops, lectures, and presentations across the Midwestern US and Texas; their artwork has been shown at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU, the Intuit Art Museum, and Comfort Station Chicago; they served as staff art curator for the MIR International Rubber Weekend from 2022-2024; and they formerly held the title of Midwest Rubber 2024.

Residency Project Description

During this residency, Austin will write and publish under their kink persona, “Magnus.” Their goal is to explore and expand on this persona as a site of real-life worldbuilding, belief-system formation, and affective knowledge creation. They are currently working on a series of short stories entitled the “Multiverse of Magnus.” This series blends science fiction, fantasy, Afrofuturism, and pastiche to recontextualize kink and the relationality between kink community members as superhero powers, alien belief systems, and treasure-hunting adventure stories. Each short story is inspired by and built around Magnus’s relationships to their partners, friends, and chosen family. They will complete one of these short stories during this residency and translate it into a blend of visual and written media for publishing. They hope that this publication will support others in considering how kink challenges evidence-based knowledge systems and creates beautiful and expansive opportunities to dream and reimagine society.

ELISE BOUDREAU GRAHAM

Elise Boudreau Graham is an artist, arts worker, and teacher born in the Maritimes and based in Montreal. She makes sculptures and installations that combine repurposed materials, imagery, and text to create new context for old objects. Working across techniques including welding, woodworking, flocking, screen printing, and assemblage, her practice looks to the house as a site where emotional, material, and structural pressures accumulate. Having entered adulthood during the 2008 financial crisis and an ongoing housing crisis, Elise is interested in how housing behaves under precarious conditions: what is upheld and what starts to yield. Her work explores ideas of generational affect and aesthetic inheritance through peripheral components, provisional systems, and evidence of daily living. Elise is currently an MFA candidate in Fibres and Material Practices at Concordia University. She holds a BFA from NSCAD University and an MA (Teaching and Learning) from McGill University.

Residency Project Description

During my residency at Possible Worlds, I will develop a book that unfolds into a freestanding model of a house. Drawing from the forms of the dollhouse and real estate listings, this project will focus on the house as a space shaped by both personal desires and larger economic conditions. I will construct a miniature interior through an assemblage of text and imagery that explores physical and conceptual thresholds: doorways, windows, walls, and property lines organize domestic space while also shaping how it is accessed and valued.

WING-HUNG LIT

Wing-Hung Lit is a visual artist based in London and Hong Kong. Working across sculpture, installation, and performative photography. Her practice explores the material and social conditions of care, solitude, and bodily resilience within contexts of global mobility and contemporary crisis. Through site-responsive research, artist residencies, and collaborative projects, Lit investigates how material processes can articulate experiences of displacement, adaptation, and collective memory, situating embodied experience at the intersection of art and the humanities. Lit graduated with an MFA in Arts & Humanities from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2026, following a BA in Fine Art (Sculpture) from RMIT University. Her work has been presented internationally and developed through residencies across Japan, Germany, Portugal, Canada, and the United States. Alongside her artistic practice, she works as an art director, scenographer, and Cheongsam tailor, practices that inform her sustained engagement with material knowledge and spatial composition.

Residency Project Description

The proposed publication is a special edition of Everyday Resistance Series, an ongoing artist's zine that documents wearable inventions developed through daily observation, self-imposed prompts, and material experimentation. Structured as a portable archive, it traces the transformation of ordinary encounters into wearable sculptural propositions, revealing the iterative relationship between making, reflection, and lived experience. Rather than functioning as an exhibition catalogue, the zine foregrounds the creative process by reinterpreting everyday gestures of adaptation, negotiation, and quiet resistance. Interweaving personal observation with speculative inquiry, it considers how wearable objects emerge through encounters with domestic routines, public space, cultural expectations, and the body as a site of lived experience.

KIRAN NIET

Kiran Niet is an artist who can't pick a medium, an event host, a zine-maker, and an accidental academic. Above all, Kiran is fascinated with community-building and storytelling, whether through research, art, or organizing. Independently, and as a volunteer at the Ottawa Trans Library, he regularly curates public events centering queer and trans community. Kiran is a recent graduate from Carleton University, with a Bachelor’s degree in Global and International Studies, specializing in Communications and Journalism. In his free time, he recklessly consumes unhealthy amounts of queer theory, and sings in a choir. He can often be found making zines and tabling at art markets with his friends.

Residency Project Description

Homeland Tourist // Coming Home is an archive of my shifting relationship to my Japanese Canadian identity, through the lens of my grandfather Arthur Nishimura's photographs. I use collage to explore the contradictions and resonances between his artistic practice and mine. In the space between them, I explore how the stories we tell about our diasporic histories manifest themselves in our bodies and our families. Homeland Tourist // Coming Home began as an academic research project into Japanese Canadian political consciousness, including oral histories recorded with my grandfather. This zine reflects the emotional/affective resonance of my "academic" work: Attempting to rebuild a relationship to my diasporic identity when the personal and political meaning of that identity is constantly evolving.