At the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, we acknowledge that we are situated on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Attawandaron people. We acknowledge the immense harm done to First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities throughout Turtle Island, and respect and affirm the Treaty Rights of all Indigenous peoples. We are committed to the ongoing processes of reconciliation and decolonization that result in meaningful work on this site. In recognition of a history that precedes us, we bring great care to the processes of creating, innovating and expressing that we undertake at the School.
In our commitment to moving beyond supremacy in all its forms, we honour the knowledge carriers, water protectors, the land and all living entities—past, present, and future—that impress upon this space. We invite you to consider one thing you can actively do today to participate in making necessary change.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the Chair of Visual Arts, Amanda Burk, for supporting our students, and Professor Donna Szoke, who taught the first section of the 4F06 capstone class. In addition to inspiring the studio work and enhancing the students’ intellectual life, Donna invited Walker Cultural Leader Series speaker Camille Turner, who generously gave her time to meet our students through studio visits, a workshop and an exhibition.
Throughout the semester, the fourth-year students managed to create strong bodies of work and learn the critical theory and histories surrounding the practice of visual arts through essays and writing assignments. These critical engagements strengthen artistic growth and give students the confidence they require in an increasingly competitive world.
Guest curator and writer Corinna Ghaznavi helped guide the students to their final exhibition, fostering learning with great care. In addition, she was instrumental in editing the text of this catalogue and, on numerous occasions, discussed topics specifically related to everyone’s studio practice and ideas. I also want to mention the visit from Glenhyrst Art Gallery curator, Matthew Ryan Smith, who advised the students on curatorial writing and provided valuable insights during studio visits. Smith’s visit was funded by the Faculty of Humanities Dean’s Discretionary Fund, and we are exceedingly grateful. Apart from many external partnerships forged over the year, I would be remiss if I did not thank VISA Gallery Coordinator Sonya de Lazzer, who did a fantastic job organizing the Marilyn I. Walker Fine and Performing Arts space for the exhibition. Preparators Matthew Caldwell and Alex Janecek were instrumental in ensuring the success of the exhibitions at the VISA Gallery and Niagara Artists Centre.
Since 2021, Niagara Artists Centre has partnered with Brock University to exhibit our students’ work in the downtown centre of St. Catharines. For over 50 years, NAC has been a professional gallery that reinvigorates our city and brings together creative practitioners, from theatre professionals to visual artists and musicians. NAC co-directors Stephen Remus and Natasha Pedros gave their time and energy to make sure our students felt welcomed and valued.
Designed by Brock University’s Gilgun Doran, this catalogue boasts the quality and range of our students’ abilities. Most of the photographs were taken by student Cleah Fast, who worked diligently to ensure that student works were well-represented. The design concepts and background for the exhibition catalogue and poster were created by student Kearah Holmes, who was able to distill the exhibition’s overarching theme by listening to her colleagues and featuring all their work in one image—not an easy task. Finally, I would like to mention the Marilyn I. Walker School technicians, Arnie McBay and Max Holten-Andersen, who assisted the students whenever needed.
Over this last semester, it has been a pleasure to teach and work alongside students who understand the value of allyship, collective strength and the importance of friendship and common purpose. Their energy and commitment gave rise to this exhibition, and I do not doubt that they will continue to nurture the field of visual art as they continue their professional careers.
Troy David Ouellette Assistant Professor, Visual Art
Mindfulness in the Making
By Troy David Ouellette
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, and in this spirit, the 4F06 capstone class collectively paid homage to the site’s origins by focusing on themes of labour, family and the virtuosity of craft.
Founded in 1884, The Canadian Haircloth Company, where the Marilyn I. Walker School now stands, was used to manufacture cloth for tailors to line and pad garments and furniture. According to Alicia Floyd, the archival collections technician at the St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre, “horsehair cloth was made by putting single strands of hair from a horse’s tail into a loom, one at a time and weaving it into cloth.” She remarks, “as the company diversified before the Great Depression, they began making draperies, hat and coat linings, and silk and upholstery fabric.”1 For the students in the 4F06 capstone class, this spirit of labour drew them to the handcrafted processes fueled by intergenerational motivation and energy. The collective energy encapsulated in these histories was not lost on the students, who produced their work in relation to their pasts, creating a dialogue with the contemporary world. However, instead of the more prescriptive technology used in the hair cloth factory, the students embraced what scholar Ursula Franklin once defined as holistic technology. In Franklin’s view,
“holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft. Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metal-smiths, or cooks, control the process of their own work from beginning to end. Their hands and minds make situational decisions as the work proceeds, be it on the thickness of the pot, or the shape of the knife edge, or the doneness of the roast. These are decisions that only they can make while they are working. And they draw on their own experience, each time applying it to a unique situation….Using holistic technologies does not mean that people do not work together, but the way in which they work together leaves the individual worker in control of a particular process of creating or doing something.”2
In this exhibition by the 4F06 honours students, we can see how their work emerges from poesis (thinking through doing and doing through thinking).3 That is to say, work is produced with no specific goal regarding monetization. Artworks, instead, are made for us to marvel at and ponder and, in turn, mirror the act of creation itself. In Anthony Clarkson’s work, we see marks as traces, almost mimicking the scrapes and scratches on the studio factory floor as they meander through the works. In Trace of a Maker, a commercial pallet is used as a substrate, prompting us to think of distance in a world where goods travel by drop-shipping and on-demand supply. In another work, a print is created on a consumer-ready-made printer with the text repeating, Anthony Clarkson did not make this. Using conceptual tropes combined with the age-old struggle of representation and authorship, Clarkson makes a technological declaration of sorts. The work questions how much we know about how things function and are developed. In other words, they speak of thresholds: are we at a technological threshold where we can no longer take pride in our personal competencies? Now that artificial intelligence has been introduced, are we standing in a doorway, ready to enter a capitalist misadventure?4 The escapist desire to leave one space to enter another is part of the art historical tradition of spatial illusion and perspective; moreover, popular culture with depictions of gateways and portals to alternate universes populate the contemporary imagination. Clarkson turns the illusion on its head by challenging viewers to decide where to go from here as they stare into an empty space. The work Remnants (Archway) demands patience and contemplation from the audience. Clarkson admits, “in the absence of figures within the archway, the viewer is invited to project their psychological perspective into the void, thereby altering the more literal viewer-artwork dynamic.”5
In contrast to Anthony Clarkson’s more minimal and technological works, Cleah Fast creates image overlays that often use intimate themes. Populated by expressive marks on canvas, these works elicit a response from the viewer in a different way. Inspired by artist Jenny Holtzer’s poetic light tapestries of intertextual elements, Fast creates
1 St. Catharines Museum, Alicia Floyd. “Museum Chatask Alicia – Canada Hair Cloth Co..” Museum Chat, May 25, 2016. https://stcatharinesmuseumblog.com/2016/05/20/ask-alicia-canada-hair-cloth-co/#:~:text=Museum%20N%2D3181-,James%20 A.,and%2padding%20garments%20and%20sofas.
2 Franklin, Ursula M. “The Real World of Technology”. Toronto: CBC Radio One, 2007. pp. 18-19.
3 Apart from the emphasis on the functional, one can see a direct relationship between the Swedish Slöjd educational system and that of art schools mainly geared to material production, namely Arts and Crafts and the early Bauhaus curriculum, which emphasized making and process.
4 Of course, this nervousness about technologically autonomous systems and control is not new. In Charlie Gere’s text
work like Pillow Talk. She stated in a recent paper, “I explore how light, shadow and text can mirror someone’s thoughts, mental state or memories. For example, within the pillow projection, I’ve played with these elements to communicate something intangible. The pace of the text reflects a train of thought, moments of realization and derealization. The space on which the text is projected is an intimate space that, for many, is sacred and safe. This piece speaks to the personal histories that spaces can hold and how sacred it is to share a space with another person.”6 These works speak not only about the power of art but also about the divide between public and private. We can see how Fast’s work examines these in great detail. In her photograph This Must Be the Place, a young crowd gathers at a concert venue historically situated in the present, identified by their use of technology and style. The contrast between this work and Pillow Talk is striking, and it’s not just the mediums that Fast employs; it’s how the aggregate crowd is positioned as consumers of a spectacle in what one imagines to be a cacophony of sounds and circumstances. In Pillow Talk, we are invited into a quiet interior monologue or, as Cleah Fast more aptly reflects, a “train of thought.”7 Over the course of her career, Cleah has chosen to work in multidisciplinary ways, acknowledging that youth culture is dynamic and ever-changing. Her interests are wide-ranging, illuminating intimacy and detachment. The colours reflected in her paintings stem from the rapidly changing themes and overlays we see in popular culture, and they not only reference “street art” but draw on the many overlapping visual disciplines of illustration and graphic design, a mashup of styles fueled by market forces beyond our control.
Concerning Cleah Fast’s work on reflection and the details of the human condition, we see reciprocal themes play out in Sabrina Luckasavitch’s practice. In her work, objects take on the role of affect. As thrifted and used, the objects convey the powers of historical association. This is also evident in the historical figures referenced, where viewers are inadvertently tasked to do further research and discover the clues given to them by the artist. As her artist statement attests, objects take on a “new life where their imperfections become symbols of celebration.”8 I
think this is especially true when installations are combined with the paintings, exemplified in Amelia “Mollie” Maggia from the “Living Room Installation”. Her interdisciplinary way of working is necessary for examining domesticity and trauma. With titles like In Another Life or Living Room, the viewer becomes a guest invited to explore the symbolic relationships between things as they have existed and been conceived in each generation. In a photographic work entitled The Garden, from the same installation, the artist depicts herself in a forest, creating a story through choreographed recorded movement. Using these various collected objects, she attempts to reconstitute or at least comment on lost narratives and convey ideas of presence and absence within an installation-based memento mori. It shows us that what has come before is as important as what exists now, for what is now is expressed through the past.
We can see this in various ways within the installation, from the paintbrushes atop a tube TV that extend the tree trunk (from the video) to the object as an expression of personal growth. The tree motif is also used in her Abandoned photograph, where a white picket fence is split, showing how nature has the final say where borders (at least how we conceive them) are lost to biological processes. This attention paid to a process rather than something fixed is evident within the photographic works where they are only partially (chemically) “fixed” and frozen in time. Even in partially fixed black-and-white photographic works like Copium, we see connections with Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, where impermanence and dematerialization share a kinship with mortality.
In every work within this exhibition, students explore the notion of mindfulness. More important is the connection to social history, especially concerning labour. Kearah Holmes’ work comes to mind when I think about how practice becomes almost like an investigation in epigenetics insofar as one’s behaviour is shaped by familial influence. In Kearah’s work, the textile organ forms she creates become a way to speak of how bodily systems rely on one another to function, just as family and social supports become a way to stabilize society. Speaking with the Niagara Handweavers and Spinners Guild members, Kearah recounts, “What I
appreciated about talking to these women was the very welcoming environment where everyone wanted to share knowledge and resources. As someone who regularly attended craft shows growing up, I saw that everyone was always so excited to see a child taking an interest in fibre arts.”9 In their recent paper, “Embodied craft practices: Mindful flow, creativity, and collaboration as drivers for well-being”, Kristina Niedderer and Katherine Townsend make a strong case for mindfulness and well-being manifested through artistic practice:
“Whether undertaken as sole or collaborative practices, craft and design require practitioners to learn and employ body-based knowing: skills developed through working with materials as an intrinsic part of building their experiential knowledge. Such knowledge relies on embodied cognition (Johnson, 2015; Varela et al., 1991), a paradigm which recognizes that bodily actions play a significant role in how we engage with the environment and, thus, how we make meaning. In his material engagement theory (MET), Malafouris (2013) argued for an ontological process that situates thinking in action, influenced by the enactive signs and practical effects of the material world on the extended mind.”10
Visiting with students each week, I was struck by the intense concentration exhibited in the studio as they were working out details and refining their work. Artists and creatives everywhere know when you are in the “zone” while perfecting techniques, threading one idea with another. Two things are simultaneously at work when this happens: firstly, concentration creates the skill-building necessary to innovate in terms of techniques, and secondly, the conceptual frame in which one works shifts as the mind considers new connections. Additionally, the educated imagination can leap from one thought to another, weaving a web of entanglements and connections that enrich the work, give rise to further inquiry and promote thoughtful investigation.
This mindfulness plays out in Daniella Alexander’s work, where time is combined with numerology, personal motifs, mysticism and folklore. Alexander goes beyond what some deem contemporary art by combining illustration and animation with publishing and zine culture. For her, disciplinary distinctions seem arbitrary and
restrictive. In Il Mondo, Alexander links music notation, numbered frames and drawn elements. The swirling motifs in these animations exemplify the chaos within our lives and the things beyond our control: mortality, aspirations and many other life choices that are sometimes out of reach. The animations that utilize these swirling forms are set in forward time and then reversed as a wish to turn back the clock. Rather than concluding that something is good, evil, or black and white, the humour in Alexanders’ work complicates any reading we deem fixed, deploying everything from parody to paradox.
Many students in the 4F06 class use humour to speak about predicaments, situations and free will. In the work of Karen Guichelaar, she expresses the connection with creativity and being playful to keep things fresh and alive. Guichelaar begins her process by recounting personal relationships. The almost Fauvist-like colourful faces that populate her works are created from the impressions of people who have influenced her life. Indeed, the connection between the work’s fabrication in relation to wellness cannot be understated. The sweaters and gloves invite us to think of the relation of textiles to protection and warmth, while the safety pins within the compositions create a node for attachments. As the pins interact with the stitch, the knot, they create dynamism. The safety pin is not fixed like other fasteners: with its spring mechanism, it can be repositioned and reconfigured based on the user as a temporary way to suggest a fold, a hem, or a dashed line that is permeable and more fragile. As Guichelaar states, “When I begin to create, there are times when I start with a concept, only to have the works say something else at the end. I also often begin creating work without knowing the concept or meaning of what I am creating. This is why, as I create, I continue to analyze the work and remain open to the meaning of the work potentially changing or developing.”11 Guichelaar sees a visceral relationship between the colours embroidered, the style of stitching and the personality of the individual she is trying to portray. This suggests care and mindfulness of the process, simultaneously expressing well-being in the making. In each case, the artists of the 4F06 class express a need to think through their work by combining processes and memories.
In Christie Hoang’s compositions, the details become immensely important—not only in terms of concepts but also in the way materials, histories, scientific discoveries and uses are presented. The porcelain material was not chosen by accident. In a recent essay, she recounts, “porcelain’s significance is especially prominent in China, where it reflects the blend of regional and cultural influences, forming a unified artistic identity.”12 In Hoang’s work, feelings of otherness and alienation are depicted by the subjects and materials that act as symbionts for one another. Emptiness is magnified in the stark whites of the mirror frames. Even the reflection is a type of encounter with oneself mediated by the artist in terms of the frame. The Vietnamese zodiac animals surrounding the mirrored frames suggest a fragile transformation of the viewer as new experiences shape us in uncertain futures. Hoang regards working with porcelain as
“transformational”: as we shape materials, they shape us. As she suggests, “through this hands-on approach, I’ve realized that the work evolves at every step, with the process itself becoming integral to the meaning of the piece.”13
When I first met the students in the 4F06 class, I was amazed at their creativity as a group. Taped on the studio floor were the outlines of their bodies, as if they connected to the past marks on the factory floor. Through this action, the students have risen from the floor, awakened by a sense of urgency to tell their own stories foregrounding their interests. Through their work, they have enriched our lives. Their virtuosity of practice, coupled with their interests in labour, process and the affective potential of materials, have produced an exhibition filled with ideas and new possibilities that give us time to pause, challenge our assumptions and breathe life into everyday experience.
Through the Archway: Connection, Transformation and Impermanence
By Corinna Ghaznavi
If one understands a factory to be a place of making, then an artist’s factory is the studio: a place where things are conceptualized, made, sewn, drawn, remixed, cut up and remade. It is an apt metaphor for a group of young artists graduating from four years of research, exploration, experimentation and honing a craft. Being a small cohort and sharing an open concept space inevitably leads to exchanges and intersections. Although the works and inspirations differ widely, some striking similarities knit this exhibition together: portraiture, recovering stories, how we connect, and an interest in the intangible, liminal and transient. Most works in the exhibition display a tension between presence and absence, trauma and resilience, found and made. Stories focus on the self, family, history, legacy and social constructs.
There are portraits of self and others, often presented only partially. Kearah Holmes honours and carries forward the legacy of four generations of women in her family; Karen Guichelaar captures the expression of friends with whom she shares emotional experiences; Sabrina Luckasavitch bears witness to women ignored or forgotten; Daniella Alexander recuperates family histories; Cleah Fast highlights youth in urban crowds; Christie Hoang explores identity. Anthony Clarkson probes the idea of the artist and what that looks like in a world increasingly driven by technology.
The stories are intimate, overlooked or nestled in the subconscious. Guichelaar’s stitched images are glimpses into the psyche of those portrayed: sewn, pinned and threaded onto found articles of clothing, the images appear personal and provisional. The threads on the fabric create contours that highlight certain aspects of a face but refrain from creating a fully formed image. Safety pins hold the image together but also suggest
scarring or wounds precariously stitched up. Rather than a finished portrait they suggest a fleeting look past the outline and into the emotional state of the person beyond. This look is denied us in Hoang’s painted figures, where the subjects seem locked away. They are introspective, eyes cast down, visible but closed off. The egg-yolk yellow represents an integral self that is, however, surrounded by an isolating white space. This element of white is extended into the mirrors’ frames and porcelain glaze where white symbolizes emptiness, a blank canvas or white noise. Mirrors reflect those who stand before it, and are therefore subjective and provisional. Like the space around the portrait, they can also be empty. Hoang’s stories are both intimate and apart, seen and unseen, in a space where figure and abstraction, self and environment, east and west meet but do not necessarily configure into something cohesive.
Vulnerability and social contexts also emerge in the work of Fast. Sleep is a most vulnerable state. By projecting a text that imagines the sleeper’s train of thought, Fast attempts to delve beneath the surface in order to tap into her subject’s dreams and how they are fed by a waking reality. Fast also creates paintings and photographs of participants in music and fashion events, subjects who are young, radical and ordinary: individuals who are part of a crowd. Juxtaposed with these images, her Pillow Series plays out a tension between private and public, single and multitude, movement and stasis. What does it mean to be close to someone ? What does that interior energy look like? And how is it manifested when it is charged with the energies of others experiencing the world together with strangers?
People and events remain only if their stories are noted, chronicled and told, however small. Alexander sifts through family photographs to recuperate certain images that she transforms in order to relay the story that is closest to her own memory and experience. Alongside passed-down family tales she highlights elements that live within her own story, invisible to us but for her vividly present in between the still images. The time stamp on her animation reminds us of subjective memory and experience: while time marches on it is also experienced
as flying by or standing still, depending on what is occurring. Alexander reworks family photographs to remember, celebrate and overcome grief.
Holmes wants to commemorate her family matriarchs, as well as those makers who came before her. She includes small felted works that she made as a child, and a large body made of textiles created by four generations of women and herself. The guts of the body are literally visible, so that the interior makeup of the anatomical body reflect the internal workings of the female body that performs the task of crocheting, sewing, rug hooking, embroidery and other textiles. Bringing the process to the foreground is important to her because textile work is labour intensive. Embroidered hands shown still in embroidery hoops become portraits of family members: hands that made, and guided, Holmes’ learning process, one now culminating in her own art practice and embedded in community.
The stories that Luckasavitch presents in her still life are meant to both bear witness and create a safe space for the women she remembers: Rosemary Kennedy, who was forcibly lobotomized, Mollie Maggia, a ‘radium girl,’ and Blanche Wittman, who publicly ‘performed’ hysteria as a woman diagnosed with non-epileptic seizures. Luckasavitch also shows figures who are in a state of barely-there: photographs of a woman partially obscured by brush are accompanied by text typed on an old typewriter; the words appear blurred and repeat, enhancing the precarious nature of being. There is a desire to hide and also an attempt to be seen, something an image with only a fence and the words ‘try again’ underscores. This guarded confrontation is shown also in her unfixed darkroom self portraits: recognizable but protected because although we see a figure, the image is printed on paper that is already in the process of decay.
Clarkson’s narratives are intertwined with making, production, creativity and skill. Clarkson posits himself as an artist in the space between his three works: the drawing created by the artist’s hand, the printer mass-produced and reconfigured as a
readymade in a gallery, and the relief that is the result of skilled labour. The carefully rendered drawing shows the artist’s hand, and the relief the artist’s skill, while the printer is working endlessly to churn out a document on which the words “Anthony Clarkson did not make this” are repeated ad nauseam. This is a history not only of the readymade but also of the conceptual, a legacy that becomes ever more complicated in our current moment when tools like Photoshop and AI have infiltrated almost every aspect of our lives, complicating what is created, manipulated, authentic, or merely an outcome of random effects.
What is striking about these artists is their interest in returning to materials. Clarkson posits the machine against the drawing and demonstrates a well-executed trade. Guichelaar and Holmes work with textiles to illustrate the creativity and acumen required to stitch, sew, felt and embroider. Juxtaposed with her paintings and readymades, Hoang also makes porcelain objects, carefully molding and shaping these in a process requiring patience and skill. Even when using digital media, all the artists in this exhibition leave evidence of their hands in the process: Luckasavitch produces 35 mm black-andwhite photographs before manipulating them, Alexander re-renders photographs into drawing and animation, and Fast uses her own photographs to create painted scenes or projections. In each case, the students face their subjects directly to create tension between them and the figure, between the viewer and the artwork. What has been retrieved from the studio floor are stories of process, social connection, identity and living with impermanence. Stories that remain provisional because, for this group of artists, the work of making has only just begun.
Il Mondo (2024). Digital drawing, 8.5” x 11” in Il Mondo page 8
DANIELLA ALEXANDER
My exploration with digital media is one method I use to portray feelings of grief. Searching through photographs and videos of my family, taking those images, tracing over, and transforming them is a way for me to process family loss. It allows me to continue remembering family members I have lost while expressing the difficulties of such events. Through the use of animation and zines, this body of work exemplifies the power of storytelling to bring the past to life and to bring forward the importance of remembering.
The practice of collecting printed or digital images of the past is like an archive that allows me to develop a story. The first story I created, “Timeless”, used old printed images of my family when my siblings and I were much younger at my grandparent’s house in Sarnia, Ontario. As the story progresses, the time stamps, digital renderings of old photographs and digital drawings with missing elements allow the presence of time to become more fragmented. The intentional pauses between the figure and object drawings are meant to play into the looming nature of time. For example, experiencing the death of a loved one (to me, at least) feels like time stands still. To draw attention to the presence of time, I created an animation of my grandpa’s 150-year-old pocket watch. I created an animation of the clock accompanied by sound where I wanted to draw parallels between the story and the animation in the gallery setting.
The second story I created, “Il Mondo”, was heavily inspired by my Nonna and Nonno’s relationship. My Nonno passed about about 8 years ago, and my Nonna constantly tells us stories: about, when he was younger, his life as a singer, and the love they shared. One of my favourite stories she recounts is how they first met. Before immigrating to Canada in the 1960s, they lived in Sicily, where she describes their relationship as a love like Romeo and Juliet’s. I decided to use digital photographs of the last big family event that celebrated their love, my Nonna and Nonno’s 50th wedding anniversary. I wanted to take a different approach and exemplify notions of acceptance of loss. I decided to use colour in my digitized drawings, using red and blue to create purple to represent that remembering my Nonno required both him and my Nonna. It was very important to include some parts of my Italian heritage, and I decided to use the piano sheet music to one of my favourite Italian songs called, “iI mondo” by Jimmy Fontana. I felt it fit with the theme of this story because the song reminds me of the love story between my Nonna and Nonno.
(2025). Animation still, dimensions variable
Clock
Il Mondo (2024). Digital drawing, 8.5” x 11” Il Mondo page 10
Timeless (2024). Digital drawing, 8.5” x 11” Timeless page 10
Timeless (2024). Digital drawing. 8.5” x 11” Timeless page 7
Remnants (Archway) (2024). Charcoal on Stonehenge, 148” x 42”
ANTHONY CLARKSON
My art practice is rooted in exploration and adaptability. I believe, like Picasso, that “to find is the thing.” The medium I use depends entirely on what the message demands. It’s not about rigidly defining my work but about discovering how to express an idea and how it needs to be said. My work reflects on societal systems, cultural norms and how we construct meaning in a contradictory world.
One of my pieces, Anthony Clarkson, did not make this, for this exhibition is a conceptual sculptural installation that examines authorship in the age of automation. A store-bought printer endlessly prints out paper with the repeating text: “Anthony Clarkson did not make this.” The work blurs the line between creator and machine, calling into question the role of the artist in an increasingly automated world. Does the use of AI or mechanical tools undermine the legitimacy of creation, or does it open new possibilities? The repetitive, mass-produced nature of the printer also evokes a sense of hyper consumerism, a conveyor belt that keeps going until resources are depleted.
In contrast, my other works draw attention to the labour of the hand and the human connection to creation. The series Remnants, rendered with precision and care, faces the viewer directly. Yet, within its boundaries lies a blank void. This juxtaposition of intricate effort and emptiness invites questions about the purpose of human labour and what we’re heading toward. These themes are also evoked through my series Trace of a Maker, where the two pieces emphasize the human hand and the role of the artisan in creating the world that surrounds us.
Through these works, I aim to challenge and provoke. My practice prioritizes questions over answers, allowing viewers to reflect on their interpretations. Whether addressing the intersections of technology, authorship or societal systems, I’m more interested in creating dialogue than dictating meaning. My approach often relies on a clean, minimal aesthetic to leave space for interpretation and a space for the viewer to wrestle with complexities, just as I do in the process of making.
Remnants (Archway) (detail) (2024). Charcoal on Stonehenge, 148” x 42”
Anthony Clarkson did not make this, (2024). Canon printer TS3720, printer paper, ink,
6” x 17” x 13”
Trace of a Maker (2025). Drywall, Wood, Screws, 70.5” x 48”
For You My Love (2024). Acrylic on paper, 9’ x 15’
Trace of a Maker (detail) (2025). Drywall, Wood, Screws, 70.5” x 48”
I Was Here and You Were Next to Me, (2024). Acrylic on Canvas, 36” x 48”
CLEAH FAST
As a multidisciplinary artist and photographer, I explore intimacy within private and public spaces, examining the energy exchanges and interpersonal connections that shape urban environments. Drawing inspiration from photos taken in city centers like Toronto and New York, my paintings offer a glimpse into the social dynamics of youth culture— particularly the communities forged within the music and fashion industries. They translate memory and energy into vivid colours and lines.
My scope of work is rooted in a dedicated observational practice, noticing moments that often pass unseen. From projection mapping to photography to painting, each medium carries its own meaning, working together to share untold stories and personal narratives. My projection mapping plays with the notion of balance; more specifically, what’s hidden and revealed is manipulated through the play of shadow and light. This further proposes questions such as: What is illuminated within us? What do we keep in the shadows? What does it mean to be truly close to someone? What happens within us when we share space with another—emotionally, mentally or physically? These questions drive much of my work, often incorporating emotionally charged, text-based elements through phrases and words that explore context and memory where personal experience is foregrounded.
Overall, my work seeks to illuminate our interconnectedness, exploring how moments of intimacy and connection unfold within both the private and public spheres. In this exhibition, I seek to analyze how human memories and experiences build our identities and shape our lives as I invite viewers to reflect on their own experiences by strategically paying attention to the environments I create.
I am Everywhere, Everyone, Everything, I Have Ever Loved, (2025). Acrylic on Plywood, 11” x 14”
Song Bird, (2024). Embroidery on Cotton, 25” x 14”
KAREN GUICHELAAR
This series comprises five pieces crafted using diverse fabrics, embroidery thread and safety pins. Each piece captures a different expression and intersection of experience and human emotion. By presenting an incomplete face within this body of work, there is a suggestion of something missing or damaged. These pieces aim to capture the internal struggle and wrestle with life’s complexities and traumatic incidents, and the desire to overcome them.
Each piece was crafted in relation to a friend with whom I have shared a similar experience. The textile I chose highlights an aspect of each individual depicted; however, it also contributes to the overall experience embodied within each piece as it was composed through the process. The use of thread speaks of ties to people’s circumstances and emotions. The wounds we experience and what we overcome will shape our character and form another stitch in the overall picture.
The use of safety pins within the design was an intentional and significant choice, which hints at the idea of holding things together while creating concepts of safety and vulnerability. Safety pins hold things together but require a piercing of the surface to be used. If fabric were flesh, there would be pain involved. To me, they are symbolic of personal efforts to overcome the trauma and pain of the past. Safety pins signify resilience and overcoming challenges, holding things together despite difficult circumstances.
I am a firm believer that painful experiences happen to all of us. We try to hold the broken things together and often end up with painful forms of coping and self-protection. This series has become a reflection of myself and the experiences I have walked through. Each piece reflects a different element of my story, including experiencing fear, anxiety, difficulty trusting and grief, as well as great grace and forgiveness.
By sharing my experiences with others, I aim to express and acknowledge the different sides of myself and to bring hope and healing to others.
Twitch, (2024). Embroidery on Knit Sweater, 22” x 42”
Twitch, (detail) (2024). Embroidery on Knit Sweater, 22” x 42”
Grace, (2024). Embroidery on Burlap, 33” x 22”
Handmade, (2025). Embroidery on Kevlar Gloves, 20” x 10”
My Great Grandmother was a Dressmaker, (2025). Thread on Muslin and Batting, 12” x 12”
KEARAH HOLMES
My great-grandmother, Gwen Revill, was a seamstress, and I learned everything about her from the textile work she left behind. She worked at the Spirella Corset Company, where the Bird Kingdom in Niagara Falls, Ontario, now stands. After she got married, she stopped working in the factory to have children, as many women did and made an income from the textiles she sewed and mended within her home. I never met my greatgrandmother, but every textile work she left behind brought me closer to learning about who she was, stemming from knowledge passed from generation to generation. This genealogical connection ultimately inspired my interest in textiles.
This series is not just about looking backward at what was but forward at how it continues to grow and live. I use embroidery hoops as a framing device to show that the work is never finished, an unending work-in-progress. Making textile art requires time, attention to detail and physical labour. More than the labour, it often comes with a repetition that seeps its way into your muscles and bones. In this way, I see textile art as an extension of my body beyond any other art form. This thought of how the work becomes a part of the body made me imagine a body literally made from textiles, one that is both made by others and made by its own hand, referenced in the works entitled My Great Grandmother was a Dressmaker and Generational Crafted Body. In this series, I blend my work with that of my mother, grandmother, great-aunt and great-grandmother. They all unite to make me who I am, literally and metaphorically.
Beyond the generational lineage is my lived experience. More broadly, there is a connection to the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, which grew from the Canada Hair Cloth Company, where I completed this work. As my technical proficiency grew, I wanted to respond to the work I had created as a child through my own history of making, which reveals itself in the work aptly named Kearah Age 7 By Kearah Age 22. It’s easy as an artist to write off your old work, but I wanted to give it a place of honour, as it was a necessary step on my road to get where I am today.
Generational Crafted Body, (detail) (2025). Multimedia on Heritage Quilt
Generational Crafted Body, (detail) (2025). Multimedia on Heritage Quilt
Generational Crafted Body, (detail) (2025). Multimedia on Heritage Quilt
Kearah Age 7 by Kearah Age 22, (detail) (2025), Needle Felting and Screen Printing on Muslin
The Garden (Living Room detail), (2024). Digital video on 1970s Tube TV, 35 x 18.5” x 29.5”
SABRINA LUCKASAVITCH
My work explores feminine narratives, both past and present, through painting, photography and video. Working with themes of mental illness in relation to femininity, I use my work as a form of meditation and reflection, aiming to foster a sense of belonging and visibility for those who have felt like outcasts simply for existing as they are. By amplifying women’s voices lost to time and under erasure, I challenge the patriarchal structures that have hidden them while also creating a space for introspection, inviting audiences to consider how past women’s lives intersect with their own. By extension, in examining the lives of others through objects, I explore my own experiences to dismantle social stigmas surrounding trauma. Incorporating found objects throughout my work amplifies this notion, giving discarded objects new life, where their imperfections become symbols of celebration.
Much of my work focuses on the figure’s presence and absence, playing with ideas of its existence within space and time; I foreground how the mind processes such experiences, leaving an imprint on objects.
In my installation work, the spaces become heavy with historical weight despite their vibrant presence, prompting the question: What other spaces carry such weight of being abandoned and forgotten?
Through my art practice, I wish to create a dialogue about the complexities of being human and the transformative power of reclaiming one’s narrative, inviting audiences to empathize, reflect, and find strength in shared stories.
Amelia “Mollie” Maggia (Living Room detail), (2024). Acrylic on mylar in thrifted clock, 16” x 16”
Living Room, (detail) (2025). Mixed media installation, 6.5’
x 10’ x 10’
Abandoned, (2025). 35mm photographic prints with typewriter text, 12” x 8”,
Copium, (2025). Resin-coated partially fixed black and white photographicprints, 10” x 12.5”
Garden of Eyes (2024). Oil on Canvas, 30” x 40”
CHRISTIE HOANG
Mirrors do more than reflect. They distort, absorb and shift with every movement. Porcelain is fragile until it is fired, then it becomes something permanent. Oil paint resists control, pushing back against precision. These materials are not passive. They hold memory, tension and transformation.
The sculptures and paintings I create focus on human perception, stripped of certainty and familiarity, and articulated through shifting forms and reflective surfaces. I work with the human form, suspended between recognition and abstraction. Some faces emerge fully, others dissolve. Figures wrap around mirrors, stretching and twisting at the edges. They do not sit still. They change depending on who is looking.
On the surface, my work is about the physical—ceramics, oil paint, reflection. Beneath the surface, it explores perception, identity and the space between presence and absence. These images ask questions without answering them.
When you stand in front of my work, you might recognize something or nothing at all.
Garden of Eyes (2024), detail. Oil on Canvas, 30” x 40”
Helen Charlotte, (detail) (2025). Porcelain Clay on Vintage Mirror
Helen Charlotte, (detail) (2025). Porcelain Clay
Serpentis, (2025). Autodesk Maya, (3D model rendering)
I. Walker School of Fine & Performing Arts
Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts
15 Artists’ Common St. Catharines, ON T 905 688 5550 x4765 brocku.ca/miwsfpa
Niagara Artists Centre
354 St. Paul Street, St. Catharines T 905 641 0331 nac.org
