Strange Companions: Bramble Lee Pryde & Steve Pi
Strange Companions is a collaborative residency by Bramble Lee Pryde and Steve Pi, working together as The Dooms. Expanding from Pryde’s long-term project The Existential Dreadlings, the residency brings sculpture, sound, text, participatory tools, and installation together to examine how people use objects, rituals, systems, and stories to live alongside uncertainty. Rather than offering resolution, the work considers companionship, attention, and what it means to remain present with experiences that cannot be neatly solved.
Throughout the residency, Pryde and Pi will transform the gallery into an evolving environment shaped through sculptural figures, constructed spaces, field recordings, composed sound, an artist deck, and its accompanying field guide. The sculptural, sound, and installation elements will develop in close response to one another, allowing the exhibition to change through experimentation, construction, and live use of the space.
The residency will also include two barrier-free public workshops: Create Your Own Dreadling and Create a Coping Altar; inviting participants to engage with the project through making. The gallery will operate simultaneously as an exhibition, active studio, sound environment, and site of ongoing collaboration.
Bramble Lee Pryde
BRAMBLE LEE PRYDE IS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST, CURATOR, AND FOUNDER OF ARTIST-LED SPACES, BUILDING WORK AND EXPERIENCES FOR PEOPLE LIVING THROUGH THE PRESENT MESS.
Bramble Lee Pryde (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice exists at the intersection of installation, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, and adornment (under the moniker Subject Object). Their work teeters at the precipice of fine art and high craft, leveraging dry, sardonic wit to make space for the things we are usually expected to quietly tolerate. Their work unfolds in immersive iterations, offering multiple entry points into societal unease, dissonance, and lived experience.
Pryde’s practice shifted toward long-form, iterative bodies of work following a 2023 residency at the Berlin Art Institute. Their work is shaped by grief and loss, translated into tangible forms and environments that can be held, entered, and confronted. Their ongoing body of work, The Existential Dreadlings, personifies contemporary anxieties through strange companions that serve as witnesses, extending across sculpture and participatory formats, including an art deck, zines, and collectible ephemera.
Selected projects include the solo exhibition I’m Fine, It’s Fine Art (The Underground Gallery, 2024) and public commissions, including Parasocial Paradox (Contemporary Calgary, 2024) and EPHEMERA for Chinook Blast (2023). Pryde’s curatorial practice spans exhibitions and group shows, sustained artist support, and the founding and direction of artist-led spaces and public-facing programming, including White Rabbit Atelier (2019 – 2024).
Steve Pi
Steve Pi is an art director, creative collaborator, and member of The Dooms. His practice spans fabrication, installation, sound, visual direction, and creative problem-solving, with a particular focus on translating conceptual work into physical and immersive experiences. He has contributed to every public art project undertaken by Bramble Lee Pryde, supporting fabrication, technical development, material innovation, exhibition design, art direction, and curation. As part of The Dooms, Pi contributes original music, guitar, field recordings, and experimental sound, while also helping shape the spatial and immersive qualities of installations and exhibitions. Moving between conceptual development and practical construction, his collaboration is integral to both how the work is built and how it is experienced.
