ANA RUIZ
Ana Ruiz Aguirre is a Cuban-Canadian research-based multidisciplinary artist. Ana's doctoral research at Queen’s University examining the role of contemporary art in North American cultural diplomacy was awarded a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and she was a Mitacs Globalink Research Scholar at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Ana was part of the Public Diplomacy and the Economy of Culture Research Group (PDEC) at Queen’s University, and has worked at Fondo Cubano de Bienes Culturales, and the Art Gallery of Alberta. Most recently, she co-edited and contributed an essay to Beyond the Gallery, a Laberinto Press bilingual anthology (English and Spanish), with the support of the Edmonton Heritage Council (EHC) and the Alberta Public Interest Research Group (APIRG), as part of her ongoing multidisciplinary project YEG, Inked.
Artist Statement
Only a handful of images of tattoo studios can be found in local Edmonton archives. This significant gap in the historical record illustrates the lack of interest in this artistic and caring practice that has characterized local hegemonic groups, and obscures the rich history of tattooing in the city. In an effort to address this gap, I photograph exteriors of tattoo studios operating in Edmonton as part of my ongoing multidisciplinary project, YEG, Inked. I take the photographs with a Diana camera and 120mm film. The Diana is a contemporary version (2007) of the classic 1960s camera, made completely of plastic (including the lens) and prone to leaks of light and soft-focused images; the 120mm film allows for the creation of square images - less immediate, analogue versions of an Instagram tile. My goal with this series is to create a local historical memory of tattoo studios as meaningful, artistic and caring spaces, as lieu de mémoire.
ASHLEY BEERDAT
Ashley Beerdat is a visual artist and community arts faciltator of Guyanese descent who grew up in Missisauga, ON. She graduated in 2019 from Western University, completing a BA in Criminology and Visual Arts and Art History. Beerdat is primarily self-taught and uses oil paint to construct fantastical worlds from her imagination. She explores themes of mythology, folklore and storytelling to navigate the world around her. Storytelling is intrinsic to her culture as Guyanese-Canadian. In 2020, she completed an artist residency at Visual Arts Mississauga Riverwood. Her work is held in Mississauga`s permanent corporate art collection and has been featured at PAMA and Artscape.
Artist Statement
This body of work explores the tenderness I feel in nature. Enjoying the natural wonder that surrounds me and basking in the warm sunlight. I take walks to feel grounded and listen to nature compose its greatest opus. The smell of blossoming spring flowers and sight of rich hues awakens my senses. In these gentle moments I am reminded to plant and nourish the seeds that will soon grow into a beautiful garden.
ASHNA JACOB
Ashna Jacob (she/her) is a visual artist, designer and printmaker from Kerala, India. She currently resides in amiskwaciwâskahikan or so-called Edmonton on Treaty 6 Territory. She works primarily in printmaking and often uses video, installation, and performance. Her recent works explore the themes of social relationships, media, and consumerism.
Artist Statement
The breaking of bonds between people evokes loneliness and loss. Drawing text from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this artist book discusses the guilt of wilful separation and the resulting sense of longing from the space that we once occupied in the life of others.
The Wall juxtaposes short lines from the novel Frankenstein with images of a home, taken from the outside. The words and the images correlate to form a dialogue between two voices, of which one is implied to be the voice within the house, and the other, looking in. The perceived timidity of the ‘outsider’, the hesitation at the door, and the tempting light pouring from within the house emphasize the longing for contact between the two.
Please wash your hands before handling the book. The pages are unbound, and for the best reading experience, lift the pages with both hands and stack them in the same order.
CHEYENNE RAIN LEGRANDE ᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ
Cheyenne Rain LeGrande ᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ is a Nehiyaw Isko artist, from Bigstone Cree Nation. She currently resides in Amiskwaciy Waskahikan also known as Edmonton, Alberta. Cheyenne graduated from Emily Carr University with her BFA in Visual Arts in 2019. Her work often explores history, knowledge and traditional practices. Through the use of her body and language, she speaks to the past, present and future. Cheyenne’s work is rooted in the strength to feel, express and heal. Bringing her ancestors with her, she moves through installation, photography, video, sound, and performance art.
Artist Statement
It’s so difficult for me to try and find the English words to express how I feel. How it feels to grieve. How it feels to grieve with the land.
When I think about my Nehiyaw language, I think about how it might be to speak it. To be able to fully express my feelings, from my heart and spirit. But for now all I have is the English words that I piece together:
Grieving with the Land
The land holds me
Watches over me
Surrounds me with it’s loving waters
The trees and wind move through me
The sun brings hope, brings healing
They dance until dawn
They tell me it will be okay
DANA JUSTINE BELCOURT
Dana Justine Belcourt is a twenty-two year-old Métis/Cree artist based in Amiskwaciwâskahikan (so-called Edmonton). Through paintings, zines, and media-based art forms, her work deals with the themes of love and being someone of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry. She explores many mediums of art to showcase an intensive writing practice that explores the intimacy of her relationship with herself and love.
Her main focuses are producing and self-publishing zines featuring poetry and art (mainly watercolor paintings), of which she has produced seventeen. Another focus is painting murals showcasing stories of the city, and has so far collaborated on eight murals. She graduated from MacEwan University’s Fine Arts Diploma program in April 2021, and is currently finishing it into a BFA at Emily Carr.
Artist Statement
“Doppelgänger” is a crochet re-creation of the artist’s body; with accurate measurements to the actual body, it serves as an uncanny self-portrait. As a medium, crochet speaks to the nature of time during quarantine, and how long stretches of time without distraction allow for long-term projects, growing more self-aware, and exploring the relationship with the self. To learn about ourselves intimately is an uncomfortable eprocess, and being confronted with who you are is even more difficult. Furthermore, while the measurements were accurate, the medium created bumps and imperfections instead of an idealized version of the body. Literally floppy and lacking a spine, “Doppelgänger” is manipulable in nature, without agency to do things on her own. It is mouthless and docile; a vulnerable body that requires assistance and care, and it forces the artist to take care of an unideal version of themself.
DARRELL SPEARMAN
Darrell Spearman (he/him) is a multidisciplinary Black artist from New York City, currently practicing in New York City. Darrell’s writing practice is an unraveling of self, an exploration of the impacts of grief, conforming, and creative deprivation on one’s personality and life, as well as a way of capturing his own personal experience of returning to self to inspire and encourage other bodies and hearts to listen closer to themselves. He also uses his writing to give his imagination a chance to live before it becomes real—being a performer—like he has always done since he was a child, always imagining and making.
Darrell also uses media to provide space for other artists to tell their own stories with his web series “A Little for The World,” where he tenderly expresses himself with other bipoc artists, as a way to shed, open their hearts like peonies in the sun, to breathe together, and to create freely. He shares lots of his personal creative writing on his writing page on Instagram, @written.withlove, and with people around the world, whom he meets through social media, workshops, art shows, and with other writers.
Artist Statement
Tending as Pink Mountain is a collection of my writing, about a place that is home, a place that is supportive, a place that I’ve created on my own, growing up in environments that lacked creative support for
black men to be open and expressive. ‘Pink Mountain’ is, although perceived as a fictional place, where I am truest to myself, my dancer, my singer, my performer, and my writer.
“Tending as Pink Mountain” is about the past decade of abandoning myself and my authentic dreams and passions—my pink mountain— to fit into the ‘big suit’ that’s given to most bipoc people growing up in a place where there is not enough creative support and strict ideas are projected onto black youth, and the unraveling of returning home to the sense of endless possibility of what will be for me through the art of staying true to myself. Included in this book is a piece titled “big suits, tiny bodies” that identifies detriment and many broken pieces of people swarm from the self-abandonment that has been taught and braided into generations.
These stories are ways to re-develop a sense of self, and to express what a revival truly feels like, while expressing the tug-a-war of actively choosing to live a truer life, as the true being I am meant.
What could have remained my life has become my prologue, inspiring me to trust the home I’ve built for myself on pink mountain as a child, and to become what I have always known. How long has it been since you’ve been on your mountain? Who and what experiences helped you abandon your mountain?
I hope these two questions lead you back home, to yourself.
GABRIEL ESTABAN MOLINA
My name is Gabriel Esteban Molina and I’m a first generation Canadian of Chilean descent. multidisciplinary visual artist with a lens-based practice based in Edmonton, Alberta. I graduated from the University of Alberta in 2013 with a BFA in Fine Arts and completed my MA:Fine Art at the Chelsea College of Arts in London, UK in 2015. I’ve had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Edmonton, Alberta and London, UK. I completed The Emerging Artist 2018 residency at The Banff Centre for the Arts and the ArtsIceland Residency in 2019 with an exhibition at The Outvert Space. In 2020 my work has been featured online via artfromhere.ca by Latitude 53, Dyscorpia 2.1, as well as on Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, and in 2021 my work was featured at the Art Gallery of Alberta and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. In 2022, my next project will be presented as a solo exhibition at Latitude 53.
Artist Statement
My lens-based practice is concerned with the influence of technology on our perceptions of the natural world and what it means to live in a digital age surrounded by screens. Through a process-based exploration of materiality and physical interactions between various types of digital devices and inspired by observation and the unintentional, I seek to engage with the unconscious and conscious need to find meaning in randomness. My work creates a hypnotic and highly somatic experience of seeing by playing with pixels, focus, and scale, leading to a variety of output including photography and digital print, video and GIFs, and sculpture and installation.
HOLLY AUBICHON
Holly Aubichon is an artist working in two-dimensional mediums. She identifies as Métis, Cree and mixed European ancestry, born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan. Her Indigenous relations come from Green Lake, SK and Lestock, SK. Aubichon’s practice is laboriously reliant on retracing familial memories and connections. She uses painting as a way to foster personal healing. As an extension of her practice, she has begun a traditional Indigenous tattoo mentorship to acknowledge the memories that bodies hold, support the healing, grieving and the revival of traditional tattoo practices. She has recently graduated from the University of Regina in the Spring of 2021 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts, minoring in Indigenous Art History. Aubichon is the 2021 BMO 1st Art! Regional winner for Saskatchewan.
Artist Statement
Art is healing. Aggressive assimilation and its aftermaths have had a devastating effect on my family. Members are dispersed and deceased. My paintings symbolically recovers and restores them to my circle. Before painting, I process memories, reconnect familial relations and navigate my place within those renewed connections. I am devoted to art-making as a way to document and preserve my paternal lineage while placing myself as the leading matriarch within these painted narratives to connect to who my matriarch was. The painting shows an intimate urban interior. I want to show how Indigenous people do their best to continue our traditional ways while adapting to contemporary reality. The paintings are representational but include subtle shifts in perspective and are dimly lit to suggest memory recall, emotional stress, spiritual presence, ceremony, tenderness, and the weight of intergenerational trauma.
ILSA
Ilsa is a Pakistani-Canadian emerging artist based in amiskwaciwâskahikan. Their art practice explores the mechanics of memory, connections and intersectional identities.
Artist Statement
A-212 tends to joy, longing and lost memory. The images are screenshots from processed family VHS tapes, further altered digitally and printed on rice paper. Working with moments of forgotten joy, I attempt to connect with lost memory through weaving, crafting a space where they can exist together, closer.
JONI CHEUNG
Snack Witch aka Joni Cheung is a grateful, uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Stó:lō, Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh, and Kanien’kehá:ka peoples. They are currently working towards their Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Ceramics at Concordia University and hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction in Visual Art (2018) from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. She has exhibited and curated shows at the CRES Media Arts Committee, Vancouver; the FOFA Gallery, Montréal, Centre A: the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Vancouver; the Audain Gallery, Vancouver; and has been featured in CBC Arts; and the Canada Line Transit BC Public Art Program, among other spaces and platforms.
They are a recipient of numerous awards, including the British Columbia Arts Council Scholarship (2020) and the Dale and Nick Tedeschi Studio Arts Fellowship (2019). She was waitlisted for the SSHRC - Joseph-Armand Bombardier: Canada Graduate Master’s Scholarship (2020).
Aside from researching and writing, Joni likes doing snack and beverage reviews, medium length walks at the beach, being wrapped into a blanket burrito & cinnamon bun , and her perfect first date involves a thorough walkthrough at multiple grocery stores + Costco, getting bubble tea, and breads + pastries from all the bakeries.
Artist Statement
I am a Canadian-born Hong Kong-Chinese person investigating the interdependent relationship between objects, place and identity through an interdisciplinary research-based practice. I use my lens as a woman of colour to navigate discourses of transnationalism, migration, and diasporas. My early family memories function as a point of departure to reflect and respond to global contexts and (hi)stories. I collect and reference still and moving images, texts, audio and soundscapes, objects, places and spaces, popular culture, and digital media. This research presents itself as installations, sculptures, performances, texts, photography and video, as well as accumulations of ephemera that bring attention to things often overlooked. My favourite materials are banal, everyday objects that hold significant cultural weight and through their sheer existence, they are documents of the shared lived-experiences and memories between individuals within and outside of my communities.
KIONA CALLIHOO LIGTVOET
Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet (she/her) is a mixed Cree, Métis, and Dutch-settler artist coming from scrip land, and descending from Michel First Nation. Kiona is currently practicing in amiskwaciwâskahikan, exploring stories of grief and tenderness. Her practice uses a non-linear telling of memories through narrative work as a form of personal archiving. It draws from feelings of loss, displacement, and enfranchisement, but also from moments of deep belly laughter.
Paired with her studio practice, Kiona has also been working alongside other artists in initiatives of community care, co-organizing Making Space in partnership with Sanaa Humayun, and co-curating the soil between plants. She is a capricorn sun, with a sagittarius moon, and a leo rising.
KYLA YIN JAMES
Kyla Yin James (she/they) is an illustrator and designer whose work is inspired by mythology, the unconscious, subcultures, sociopolitical systems, and their own mixed heritage. They love exploring their connection to intergenerational experiences. Kyla’s work is filled with symbolism that creates surreal and speculative scenes questioning the status quo.
Through their work, they explore the ways they approach the different thought worlds they grew up in. Kyla describes their practice as thinking and feeling out loud, sorting through the symbols and ideas they’ve encountered.
Artist Statement
Tender explores relationships during a time when the artist was examining their own more closely. Despite endless list making, navel gazing, swimming through thoughts and feelings - relationships will always involve intuition and perhaps something beyond that.
Tender can be interpreted as both tender, the state of vulnerability, and tend-er, someone who cultivates. Tender looks at the softest moments and says, this is where all forms of love come from. This piece is a love letter to friendships, platonic love, queer love, and romantic love.
MADELINE LEBLANC
My work explores abstract expressionism and automatism, looking into states of mind and how to depict that visually. This interest began in my fascination with the visual work of children. These early scribbles deserve more attention as they reveal to us the world of a child. There is an evident moment and rhythm in the artwork of children. This movement attracts their attention and appears in their work, from the movement of an arm, in broad strokes across the page - written off as simply “scribbles”. And so I am interested in how different states of mind affect the creation of a work in that they reveal to us different “worlds” or the visual product of a personal reality. My goal is to explore and create challenges to create works exploring different states of minds: emotive states, physical states, developmental states, sensory states of freedom, and states of restriction.
Artist Statement
The bed is a place of human dignity: a place where we are born, a place of procreation, a place to rest, to dream, and to die. The bed and the bedding that houses it is symbolic of our inner world. Lorraine and Vera, is a piece within my body, The Mother. In “The Mother” I take used-bed sheets as my canvas, these sheets hold an unseen time and narrative of the inner worlds of those who have used them. Because the sheet is linked to the most intimate moments of our lives there is a stigma around used bed sheets as being permeated with unfamiliar dirt and our past personal narratives. By raising the sheet up onto the wall as art I seek to disrupt sophistication regarding preconceived notions of what constitutes art. The use of hanging a sheet on the wall is an allusion to the repurposing of sheets to cover windows in ghettos. Having experienced homelessness using sheets as canvas is reminiscent of a time when I sought creativity with the tools I had: dollar store paints, pencil crayons, and sheets of paper. The Mother is about creating in a place where there are limited means to create. Finding ways to create when the resources and space allow otherwise. I use pencil crayons and wax crayons on the sheet to create large scale works despite financial constraints.These works were produced by exploring various automatistic processes: I would have no ultimate image in my mind but as I was drawing shapes would emerge and it was a surprise. Standing back away from the work during creation I’d see my lines connect into birds, fairies, flowers, and The Mother. These unexpected images are woven with life. Elevating these sheets, these domestic objects, into depictions of transformation.
MATIAS MARTINEZ
Matias Martinez is a Latin Canadian artist based out of Calgary, Alberta whose work revolves around the ideas and expressions of love in all of its forms; romantic, friendship, family, for your fellow humans and animals. A focus on the idea that our commonalities between feelings and emotions are all connected in some way shape or form. Martinez grew up in Medicine Hat, Alberta where his creativity and extrovert-ness was developed through this south american indignious mother and his socialist political father who both had creative focuses growing up from fiber, to murals, and leather work my parents had a good mixture of knowledge which has helped shape me as a person and artist.
Artist Statement
Matias Martinez is a glass artist out of Calgary, Alberta who’s artistic practice revolves around the concepts of LOVE in all the ways that it can affect us as humans. Martinez’s Glass blowing process is largely based on experimental and rhizomatic ways of creating where failure may occur but the success is a burst of emotions like fireworks in the sky filled with excitement! Martinez explains his processes like being on a hike where you can see all these beautiful spots you can reach and experience, then you just start walking through the beauty picking different paths/directions until you end up at this beautiful view point on top of the mountain (the finished artwork). I am aiming to show the commonalities between us as humans through our emotional growth/responses within situations in our lives that martinez’s puts into perspective through relating human emotion to plantlife and the biodiversity within all of them; such as how humans might be feeling down(blue) but still keep growing and thriving in these situations can be represented through a mysiteria flower growing so tall and outward that it looks like a beautiful spire of butterflies.
MICHELLE CAMPOS CASTILLO
Michelle Campos Castillo is a Salvadoran visual artist living in Edmonton. She has been the recipient of several public art commissions from the City of Edmonton, including Platanos, a set of three sculptures on permanent display at Belvedere Transit Centre, and is currently producing artwork for the LRT Valley Line in the west end of the city. Michelle is a frequent collaborator with artist Vivek Shraya; she has provided art direction and photography for Vivek's Trisha photo series, graphic design for her Lambda Literary Award-nominated book, What I LOVE about being QUEER, and VS. Books, the artist's imprint with Arsenal Pulp Press.
Artist Statement
My work is a tribute to my Salvadoran culture; one that I tried to hide in order to assimilate after migrating to Canada as a child. Finding my way back to the flavours of home has helped me feel less fragmented while living so far away.
PAXSI
Paxsi (they/jupa) is an Aymara and Welsh-Irish multidisciplinary artist and musician based in amiskwaciwâskahikan. With beadwork, illustrating, and songwriting as their primary practices, Paxsi’s work centres Indigequeer celebration and resistance. Paxsi is the 2021 recipient of the JRG Society for the Arts’ Emerging Artist Award, which provides grants to disabled artists and filmmakers from coast-to-coast. They currently have a publication in Hungry Zine and have previously exhibited in Nelson, BC, with Ociciwan Contemporary Arts Collective. Most recently, Paxsi was awarded funding from the Student Undergraduate Research Fund in the Faculty of Fine Arts at MacEwan University for an upcoming illustration project. You can find their work and more on their Instagram, @paxsi__.
Artist Statement
The Perfect Skipping Rock is an ongoing exploration of caring for the spirit in moments of grief through play and connection to land and water. Through various mediums, The Perfect Skipping Rock invites
introspection and reflection upon the memories
tender memories, thoughts, and feelings in light of displacement from home and family.
by reflecting upon tender memories, thoughts, and feelings.
RANEECE BUDDAN
Raneece Buddan is a Jamaican artist who moved to Alberta in 2015. She completed her BFA in Art and Design at the University of Alberta in 2020. In her work she focuses on her cultural identity as a Jamaican woman of Afro and Indo-Caribbean descent. She depicts the merging of these cultures by replacing her skin tone with fabrics meant to represent each. Her process is based on material exploration and finding figures within the material, the grains of the wood and mounds of clay.
Artist Statement
For this body of work Raneece experimented with casting molds of bantu knots and braids, familiar hairstyles, as transparent resin copies which she has integrated into her paintings and sculptures. Throughout her childhood and adulthood hair played a major role in defining her beauty and fitting into spaces. This is relayed through the use of synthetic hair and now small resin sculptures as well. Inspired by the labels that come on African Dutch-wax fabrics Raneece has made labels of her own of resin braids, thirteen that signify the thirteen ethnicity DNA matches of world regions she received from Ancestry DNA.
These pots are a continuation of her research on traditional pottery making in Ghana and India. The focus of these pots started off as purely process based as it's a way for her to reconnect with unfamiliar cultures. They however have transformed over time as she has incorporated prints and designs visible on various Indian fabrics. These two pots in particular are from her practice with Indian Pottery making. Tending to the part of herself that yearns to learn more and reconnect with lost history.
SHALAKA JADHAV
Shalaka Jadhav (they/she) spent their childhood between cities in India and in Dubai, before moving to a neighbourhood spitting distance from Ontario’s largest mall. They now join from the Block 2 of the Haldimand Tract, entangling a long-time curiosity about art-based methods, and their role in enabling unusual connections and collective futures. In their day job, Shalaka designs and facilitates curriculum and workshops that support young people in moving towards just, climate-resilient futures. Trained as an urban planner, Shalaka is following the advice of an aptitude test to pursue Curatorial Practices at the University of Winnipeg. As Shalaka explores and builds on their curatorial ethic, they see it to be guided by a walking methodology, carrying forward the work of their ancestors in tending for the land, and woven together by conversations over cups of tea. In 2021, Shalaka was the Curator-in-Residence at the Centre for Art Tapes and as of fall 2021, Shalaka will be an Emerging Curator as part of the inaugural University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery Visiting Curator Program.
SANAA HUMAYUN
Sanaa Humayun (she/her) is the child of Pakistani immigrants currently living and residing in Mohkintsis, on treaty 7 land. She is an artist, writer, & curator, with a practice that thinks about non-narrative story telling, and the histories held within objects. Her art is a tender exploration of dominant narratives, and how they can be re-written in order to make space for herself and the people she loves. She primarily works in textile and paint, and is an avid weaver. She is passionate about fostering community, through means of food, laughter, and an unapologetic love of gossip.
SUNNY CHEN
Too many grown men tried to take Sad China’s life away, but she survived! She’s still here, healing, and their ancestors are watching. Sunny Chen AKA Sad China (they/she) is a queer nonbinary settler immigrant on Katzie, Kwantlen, Matsqui, and Semiahmoo lands, colonially-known as “Langley”. They moved out at 17 to stolen ancestral lands belonging to Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Stó:lō, Səl̓ílwətaʔ, and xwməθkwəy̓ əm Nations. Despite being targeted by abusers in their local music and arts scene, they released their dreampop debut EP in 2016, and continues to make music and films while healing. Their debut studio album ilyimy dropped on October 22nd, featuring supersonic collabs with Kerub, pseudo-antigone, Khamisa, and more. This bilingual hyperpop album croons for solidarity between Black, Indigenous, and Asian communities. Above all, Sad China wants to love, belong, and be respected.
Artist Statement
To convey where it hurts, we must locate the source(s) of pain. As a survivor, I pay for counselling, incorporate self-care and self-soothing techniques into my schedule, and seek tangible and emotional support from community to live a functional and fulfilling life. Social media apps like Instagram and Twitter cannot tangibly support us - they are perverse, capitalist forms of (dis)connection. Phone calls and Zoom calls are better options in our fast-paced, physically-distanced world. Healing happens when we choose to express ourselves truthfully and when our community bears witness to our lived experiences. Ancestors are part of our community, and when we feel alone or have no one to turn to, we can ask our ancestors to witness and guide us too.