Joya: AiR / Sarah Flack + Shilo Preshyon / CAN

photo Solomon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Sarah Flack + Shilo Preshyon / CAN

Sarah Flack:

“What brought me to Joya: AiR was a sense of curiosity and an urge for adventure. This stage of my practice was asking for change, for a shift of pace, for quiet focus and dedication, and Joya offered exactly that.

Before arriving, I imagined my time here would be rigorous and steadfast. It didn't take long to realize that what this space and my practice were actually asking from me was a deep slowness. The heat pressed down in the middle of the day and forced a stillness I hadn't planned for, and it was in that stillness that the answers I'd been chasing finally started to surface.

As I keep moving with my practice, my time at Joya: AiR will stay with me as a reminder to take a few steps back and let my art take the time it needs. I don't want to rush toward resolution just to have something to show. I want the work to stay genuine and true to the present moment, and Joya: AiR reminded me that this kind of honesty can't be forced, it has to be given room to arrive”.

Sarah Flack is a Canadian-based dance artist. She received her BFA in Dance from SUNY Purchase College in New York in 2020, where she studied alongside renowned dancers and choreographers including Manuel Vignoulle, Diane Madden, Doug Varone, Bobbi Jene Smith, Or Schraiber, Maayan Sheinfeld, Danielle Agami, Leah Ives, and Liat Tamar Waysbort, and performed reworks of Trisha Brown, Doug Varone, and Batsheva Dance Company. She also spent a semester abroad at Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten.

After moving to Montréal, Sarah co-founded SSIP Collective alongside Isabella Di Liello and Sylvia Berman. In 2022 she received her first Canada Council for the Arts grant, supporting the collective’s debut emerging choreographer performance, “When You Can,” at Festival Quartier Danses.

Sarah later relocated to Vancouver Island, where she has collaborated and performed alongside local musicians Shilo Preshyon and Finn Smith. She worked with choreographer Daina Ashbee at the Banff Centre in 2022 and returned in 2024 for the avant-première of “My Tale on a Fish’s Body.” In 2025 she co-founded a small sounder, a multidisciplinary collective with musician Shilo Preshyon. Together they have attended the LEÑA Residency on Galiano Island and Joya AiR in Spain, and performed at Sunk City Festival in Nanaimo, BC.

Shilo Preshyon:

“Making time to go to Joya: AiR was a decision rooted in a desire to focus more deeply on my work as a collage-based sound artist. Taking time away from the west coast of Canada, where I have a strong community built around my work as an audio engineer, as well as friend and family ties, meant heading to the Andalusian steppe highlands, which offered both sanctuary from those ties and a new, inspiring environment that helped open my mind. The pine-covered mountains, dry ramblas, and open sky of Andalusia, to me, offer an open canvas for the mind to begin new works and new forms. 

My understanding deepened around other artists' intimate experiences living in vastly different conditions around the world, both currently and across past decades. I became more attuned to the specific historical events and the ecological and political structures that directly shaped those artists and their communities: information that is close to being lost, information that has been hidden, and wave effects that ripple outward to touch us all as a global culture.

During my stay, art and creative work became a way to resurface and unpack the mysteries of our global past and present, through the projects we worked on by day and the conversations we shared each evening, at the group dinners that brought both peace and levity to experiences of beauty and trauma. 

Joya: AiR has set a standard for me in terms of the time and space needed to reset mind and body when approaching new work: a minimum of two weeks away, and a reminder of how reconstructing a new way of living assists a new way of creating. Among those new ways of living was Joya's ritual of always bringing forth creative, beautiful, and delicious dinners, each one new, offering another way of breaking the homogeneity of home life. Going forward, I want to find more rituals of newness in my own life, both in how I approach creative work and in continuing this experience of newness and novelty through gentle, approachable means. When these rituals extend outward, giving to community and beyond the self, I believe that is a kind of loving power that shifts change from the individual toward a gestalt of care for humanity and ecology, the same care needed to reverse engineer the global trauma and mystery we work to resolve during the day”.

Shilo Preshyon is a Vancouver Island-based sound artist, musician, producer, and audio engineer of mixed cultural heritage. A dedicated community builder, they connect artists across the West Coast through collaboration and mentorship. Their work reflects the natural and social environments that surround them, drawing inspiration from found materials, field recordings, technology, and the intersection of art, ecology, and healing.

Primarily self-taught in music, recording, and sound design, Shilo approaches their craft with curiosity and experimentation. Their background in community mental health and support work, including time at the Portland Hotel Society and the Garth Homer Society, informs their practice with empathy and a deep commitment to accessibility and inclusion in the arts.

Living with chronic migraines, autoimmune disorders, and PTSD, Shilo channels personal experience into creative expression and connection, using art to explore resilience and grounding in the contemporary world. They are currently the head engineer and host of Risque Disque Studios, an artist-run recording space in Yellow Point, BC, where they prioritize mentorship and recording opportunities for underrepresented artists and emerging engineers. Shilo is a founding member of the multidisciplinary duo a small sounder, and the collectives Soup Du Jour, Ba'as, and Tasty Palm Leaf, and creates ongoing sound design work for Bronfree Films.