March 7- april 19, 2025

Opening Reception: March 7, 7 pm

Underglazing Workshop: March 15, 1 PM (FULL)

Artist Q&A: March 29, 1 PM (drop-in)

(left) The Names of People Who Are Loved: Samantha, Tyler, Joshua, Matthew, Racquel, John, Brad, Mona, Jocelyn, Henry, Ian, Patsy, Clark, Rob, Bretland and Lenie, Oil and ceramic on canvas, 2025, 72” x 96”. (right) A Hope To Wish For On A Star, Ceramic, 2025, 8” x 8” x 2”

Translation is a focused and intentional metaphor that inhabits specifically the linguistic pursuit to connect communities. The English word translation comes from the Latin verb transferre, which meant to carry across, and in its early uses the word described the transfer of holy relics from one place to another. Today, it can still be boiled down to the practice of sharing symbols between people to connect communities.

A Hope to Wish For on a Star continues an ever-adventuring process of translation, where invented systems correlate colours to letters of the alphabet to re-write textual sources into a visual space. Every letter A is a stroke of cadmium red, every letter B cobalt blue, and so on, until what was once a written text exists only as a curling gradient line, or scattered ceramic shapes, relocated to a new dialect of abstraction and material. This movement of meaning from one language to another offers the painted space as a field of world-building, with surfaces taking on the roles of new and unknown cultures to house these invented lexicons. The contexts created around these translated writings—blended marbled backgrounds of accumulated and countless individual small brushstrokes—perform the labour of a devotional search for understanding within the flawed and slipping forms of communication that connect us.

This series of paintings and ceramic works are an anthology of texts, including personal writings, collected offerings from past rituals, and published literary works of poetry and prose, that consider themes of love, hate, hope and fear. Together, these collected and translated texts offer a space where the intimacies of intense and sincere feelings can be shared and cared for by one another. Challenging the structures of a contemporary world that impose isolation and separation, this work hopes to orchestrate an opportunity for genuine connection.

Presented alongside these meditations on love, hate, hope and fear is a participatory exchange that invites the public to take part in the ritual of translation. Visitors are asked to offer a love, a hate, a hope or a fear and leave it behind in exchange for a small ceramic star. The four-pointed star points to these four axes of feeling, asking that we consider all of them as balances between the tensions of intimacy. Whether these feelings are negative or positive, all of them exist in our world and what matters is that the way forward is to share how we feel with the people in our lives. In this ritual I am asking that we reflect deeply on what it means to give and to receive. This exhibition is offered as a contemplation of how our actions and words influence our communities in the constant economy of everyday conversations and social interactions. It seeks to create a space to share our sincerities, and have a meaningful exchange of thoughts and feelings, and to feel, and know and understand one another.

In this way, this artwork is intended not only to explore these ideas, but to activate them. These processes of exchange and artmaking in itself are the tools we have to create our communities, and so I would like those who are willing to participate to consider that this shared experience of ritual and exchange creates its own community of which all those who participate are a part of.

I want for all of us to take part in a sincere understanding of the instances of exchange that take place across our broader social structures, as well as at the intimate scale of our everyday lives that we share with strangers, friends and family.

You are invited to participate in a ritual of exchange.

To participate you must offer any of the following:

A love to give away

A hate to leave behind

A fear to face together

A hope to wish for on a star

Once you have selected a love, a hate, a fear, or a hope, please write it down. You may also offer a meaningful object that serves as a symbol for a hate, a love, a fear, or a hope.

Once you have prepared your offering, follow the line of stars and select one that you would like to keep. Remove the star from where it rests and replace it with your offering. Please only take a ceramic star and do not remove any of the offerings that have already been left.

Writing materials will be supplied in the exhibit to create your offering. Visitors are also welcome to bring meaningful objects with them that are symbolic of a love, a hate, a fear, or a hope to give as an offering.

Your offering of love, hate, fear, and hope will be collected and kept for ever expanding rituals and translations.

Erika Germain (she/her) is an emerging artist and writer working across painting, ceramics, print media, and social practice. She received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2018 where she was selected as undergraduate valedictorian and her MFA from Cornell University in 2022. Her practice has been situated within the contexts of Vancouver, BC, central New York, and New York City. In 2022 she returned to her home city Edmonton, AB on Treaty 6 Territory, where she currently works and lives.

Erika’s artwork and writing investigates themes of language, translation, community, religion, ritual, and exchange. Working across diverse mediums, she considers how we are able to form and share meaningful connections through language and art-making. Developing a process of translation through the systematizing of letters to colours, her work revolves around the balance of practices that are intuitive and inventive as well as structured and devotional. These material and conceptual explorations are used to construct the contexts for social practice-based events of ritual, exchange, participation, and collaboration. Immersed in the visual structures of language, the poetics of conversation, the economies of love and intimacy, and the rituals that surround these, she examines the ways in which we are able to genuinely create communities with one another.