2025-2026 PROGRAMMING — Galerie VAV Gallery

GALERIE VAV GALLERY

2025 - 2026 PROGRAMMING

SUMMER RESIDENCY

EXHIBITION: SEPT 2 - 12, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: SEPT 5

GROUP
RENÈE ROTHE
LEEN JAAFAR
FRANCOIS BOUVIER
MARIE KHEDIGUIAN
NOOR TARIQ
BLARE COUGHLIN

(Slide 1-2)
Renée Rothe, Come Wash Your Hands and Feet Upon Me (1), 2025.

Renée Rothe, Come Wash Your Hands and Feet Upon Me (1), 2025. Bar soap, fabric, rose; documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

Renée Rothe, Come Wash Your Hands and Feet Upon Me (1), 2025.

Summer Residency, 2025. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

Renée Rothe, Come Wash Your Hands and Feet Upon Me (1), 2025.

EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN

Absurdity and mortality, pleasure and labour, imagination and materiality, Everything Under the Sun encompasses the fragmentation and the duality of existence, oscillating betwen the fragility of the material realm and the resilience of our consciousness and the worlds we aspire to build around it.

The works engage with intuitive world building, reflecting on a spectrum of embodied experiences through organic forms, sensorial explorations, emotional & physical resilience and ultimately a naive absurdity.

EXHIBITION: SEPT 15 - 27, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: SEPT 18

GROUP
ANTHONY PARIS
JULIE SPERL
KAT SUN
GEORGIA MANSEY
AZIA DOLATA
ISAAC SMEELE

Azia Dolata, Everything Under the Sun, 2025. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

Everything Under the Sun, 2025. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

APERTURE

EXHIBITION: SEPT 29 - OCT 11, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: OCT 2

GROUP
ASIA MASON
WINNI-GRACE MELCHOR
VANESSA ACCARDO
NEGAR SAHEBALZAMANI
SOMIA SHARIF
ESTHER CLARKE
CHLOE CORBEIL

Asia Mason, Aperture, 2025. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

Negar Sahebalzamani, Aperture, 2025. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

SEPULTURE

Unknown: Body of the Universe & Beyond / Body of other / Mind of other / Spirit of other / Repression.

Searching for the Other outside the self, outside of temporality, in rituals, signs and absence. Sepulture opens the doors for transformation through rewriting narratives around identity, sexuality, religion & the power of images haunting our collective consciousness.

EXHIBITION: OCT 20 - NOV 1, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: OCT 23

GROUP
XIOMARA MONTSERRAT
CHARLOTTE SAULNIER
SABRINA PAIXAO
SYDNEY BOCKNECK
MARIA LUZ JARAMILLO
MOLLY LALONDE
ISABELLE MILLS
ALEXI DAUPHI

(Slide 1-6)

Isabelle Mills

(Slide 7-10)

Alexi Dauphi

Isabelle Mills, Sepulture, 2025. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

Isabelle Mills, Sepulture, 2025.

Alexi Dauphi, Sepulture, 2025.

Sepulture, 2025. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

A SPECTACLE OF SELF

EXHIBITION: NOV 3 - 17, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: NOV 6

GROUP
MAGGIE ROSSY-AULMAN
NAN WANG
MAYA PIERRE-CHARLES
JULIANNE COSTA
KELLY HALSETH
SONAM MAKI

A Spectacle of Self, 2025. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

CITY OF GLASS

Step into a micro-reconstruction of a city that evokes both alienation and familiarity. This exhibition explores the fragility of our modern cultural landscape to reflect on systems that constitute urban life, routines, labour and technology. Art steps out of aesthetic idealization and we collectively leave the glass box, leaving room for improvisation, creative transformation and innovations. Our surroundings, beyond function and beautification, become vehicles for material and spiritual transformation.

EXHIBITION: NOV 17 - 29, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: NOV 20

GROUP
NOLAN HENRY
ROSE MARTIN
HELENA ROBBINS
MAYA WOU
DAVID MORALES
JOSEPH FIEDER

City of Glass, 2025. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

Nolan Henry, City of Glass, 2025. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

Nolan Henry, City of Glass, 2025.

BODY-SUBJECT / LE CORPS PROPRE

Body-Subject / Le Corps Propre examines the body as a site of lived experience, shaped by encounters that leave traces beyond conscious recollection or verbal expression. The body is both the means through which we experience the world and the physical form in which those experiences take shape. Its presence is immediate, yet the experiences it carries are not always fully accessible or understood.

The exhibition explores the relationship between the visible body and the experiences that shape our sense of self. It considers how identity emerges through physical experience, and how the body can hold meanings that resist clear interpretation. Rather than defining what it means to inhabit a body, the works invite reflection on how we come to know ourselves through it.

Text by Joe Espada.

DOCUMENTATION
SAM LEE

EXHIBITION: DEC 1 - 7 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: DEC 4

SOLO
JOE ESPADA

(Slide 1-3)

Attention to Erotic Stimuli and Bodily Sensations: Nurturing Adults with Kinks, pastel on canvas, 60” x 120” in., 2024-25.

(Slide 4-5)
Autonoetic Consciousness as Mental Roleplay: Self-Portrait, 2025, triptych, graphite on canvas, 59" × 148" (overall dimensions).

(Slide 6-7)
Locally Sourced Bodies: Low-Waste Desire Initiative, pastel on canvas, 160” x 177” in., 2023-25.

(Slide 8)
[untitled], oil, pastel, and chalk on wood panel, 24" x 24", 2024.

(Slide 9-11)
Barriers, pastel, sheer curtains, and recycled fabrics on stretcher bars, 24” x 121”, 2024.

Attention to Erotic Stimuli and Bodily Sensations: Nurturing Adults with Kinks, pastel on canvas, 60” x 120” in., 2024-25. Documentation by Sam Lee. Body-Subject/Le Corps Propre, 2025. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

Attention to Erotic Stimuli and Bodily Sensations: Nurturing Adults with Kinks, pastel on canvas, 60” x 120” in., 2024-25.

Autonoetic Consciousness as Mental Roleplay: Self-Portrait, 2025, triptych, graphite on canvas, 59" × 148" (overall dimensions).

Locally Sourced Bodies: Low-Waste Desire Initiative, pastel on canvas, 160” x 177” in., 2023-25.

[untitled], oil, pastel, and chalk on wood panel, 24" x 24", 2024.

Barriers, pastel, sheer curtains, and recycled fabrics on stretcher bars, 24” x 121”, 2024.

A Man Curled Tight as a Seed Rests by a Glowing Bloom, oil, acrylic, and pastel on canvas, diptych, 30” × 48” in., 2024.

I can love u to death and never speak to u again: self-portrait, graphite, colour pencils, acrylic, paper, nails, wood panels, thrifted frames, photographs, personal belongings from exes, and screenshots from iMessage, 2024.

Mugshots, photo-transfer on paper, acrylic gel medium and fixative, 2025.

Installation view, Body-Subject/Le Corps Propre, Galerie VAV Gallery, 2025. Documentation by Sam Lee.

(Slide 12-13)

A Man Curled Tight as a Seed Rests by a Glowing Bloom, oil, acrylic, and pastel on canvas, diptych, 30” × 48” in., 2024.

(Slide 14-18)
I can love u to death and never speak to u again: self-portrait, graphite, colour pencils, acrylic, paper, nails, wood panels, thrifted frames, photographs, personal belongings from exes, and screenshots from iMessage, 2024.

(Slide 19-21)
Mugshots, photo-transfer on paper, acrylic gel medium and fixative, 2025.

Joe Espada is a multidisciplinary artist whose primary medium is drawing. His practice extends drawing into video, performance, photography, installation, and writing, often allowing these mediums to overlap and speak to one another. Grounded in personal experience, his work explores the slow process of noticing inner experiences and finding ways to translate what is difficult to articulate into different materials and forms. Through this process, drawing becomes a starting point rather than an endpoint, allowing ideas and feelings to transform and take on new forms.

Joe is a recipient of the Lise-Hélène Larin Scholarship in Drawing and has exhibited his work in Montréal.

I have reached a point of exhaustion in my practice, or perhaps a point where its limits have become more apparent. Drawing remains central to my work, not only as a means of representation but as a way of observing and making sense of what I experience. I am drawn to the materiality of things, to the qualities of a surface, the behaviour of a medium, and even the way an image can exist within a space. I find myself returning to the act of looking, sometimes without a clear intention beyond understanding what it is that holds my attention. I have a particular satisfaction in working through it, in the time and labour required to bring something into form. The more I invest in my work, the more attached I become to its existence, even when its meaning is unclear. This exhibition gathers works that emerge from that investment, from experiences that are both lived and imagined. They occupy a space between what has happened or what might have happened, between the physical reality of an experience and the version of it that persists in the mind. I am interested in how something untouchable can be given a material form: a remembered touch translated onto paper, a sensation that remains after the body has moved on, or an encounter that returns through an image rather than as a complete memory. The softness of pastel, the weight of a drawn line, and the starkness of a scene that carries different forms of emotional tension. Some works approach closure, while others seem to reopen something from the past. Affection, desire, grief, and tenderness are not always presented as distinct or easily identifiable feelings. They often exist alongside one another, revealed in moments that might otherwise appear ordinary.

Through these works, I am attempting to establish a connection between myself and the viewer without necessarily determining what that connection should look like. The process begins with looking and eventually becomes a movement of the hand. What remains is an image: an imperfect record of attention, an experience filtered through perception and material.

Much of my work is reduced to black and white, interrupted occasionally by colour, as though certain details demand to remain visible while others recede. I am interested in this restraint, in the possibility that an image can be simple without becoming empty, or that its apparent dullness might hold a different kind of intensity. A portrait, for instance, can be little more than a face on a surface, yet it carries the possibility of recognition and misunderstanding. We look at another person and search for something familiar, often bringing our own experiences to what we see. In this way, the body (bodies or my body) becomes both the subject of the work and a means through which the work is encountered. I return to my own body and to the bodies of others to consider how we inhabit ourselves, how we become conscious of being seen, and how we allow ourselves to be known. There is a distance between an experience and its representation, just as there is a distance between one person and another, even in moments of physical closeness. Perhaps drawing occupies that distance rather than resolving it. It allows something personal to leave and exist elsewhere, where it can be observed. It becomes an offering, though not necessarily a confession; a way of making contact without fully explaining what is being shared. I am interested in what remains between the image and the person looking at it, and in how intimacy might emerge from that space, not as a complete understanding of another, but as the willingness to recognize something of oneself within it.

Autonoetic Consciousness as Mental Roleplay: Self-Portrait, triptych, graphite on canvas, 59" × 148" (overall dimensions), 2025.

There is a quiet, in-between moments where my thoughts start to spiral inward, most often during something as mundane as a smoke break. It's in these moments that a kind of unexpected self-therapy begins to unfold. The act of stepping away becomes less about the break itself and more about confronting the noise in my head. I've always had a tendency to internalize and process through silent conversations with myself that helps me make sense of my emotions and the world around me. These monologues aren't always linear or coherent, but they feel real, and at times more honest than any spoken dialogue.

These self-portraits are an attempt to give form to that inner space. It represents the line between mental simulation and tangible reality; the place where introspection becomes a scene of its own. Through it, I try to materialize those intangible thoughts, and offer a glimpse into the internal landscapes I often retreat to.

A Man Curled Tight As A Seed Rests By A Glowing Bloom:
Self-Portrait, Oil, Acrylic, and Pastel on Canvas, Diptych, 30” x 48”, 2024.

Born in a spiral of blue,
I inhaled the flower before knowing form.
Scent tangled with sinew,
petals threaded through my ribs,
I was the flower, the bloom,
the space between opening and being opened.

I can love u to death and never speak to u again: self-portrait, graphite, colour pencils, acrylic, paper, nails, wood panels, thrifted frames, photographs, personal belongings from exes, and screenshots from iMessage, 2023.

I have a habit of keeping things. Photographs and objects that probably should have been thrown away or forgotten. Things that once belonged to someone else now live with me, along with the conversations I can no longer have with them. In this work, I revisit past lovers through the very things they left behind, drawing over old messages and giving new context to words that once had the power to hurt me. There is something almost absurd about the afterlife of relationships: how someone can become a stranger while their belongings remain in your room or how love can turn into evidence. I don't think everything needs to be resolved or discarded to be moved past. Some things stay because we let them, some because we don't know what else to do with them. Either way, they become ours eventually. This work is made up of those things, and of the people I was when they were still around.

Autonoetic Consciousness As Mental Roleplay, graphite on canvas, 59" × 49⅓" in., 2025. Documentation by Sam Lee. Body-Subject/Le Corps Propre, 2025. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image

BLURRED REPOSITORY

EXHIBITION: JAN 19 - 31, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: JAN 22

GROUP
ANDRÉ BASTIAN IBARGÜENGOITIA
EMMA THAIS HOLLAND
MARIE KHEDIGUIAN
ASIA MASON
MONICA MALCOLM
WINNI-GRACE MELCHOR
CHARLOTTE SAULNIER

Blurred Repository, 2026. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

MIMESIS

Keywords: illusions, myth-making, symbology, metamorphism, dreams, representation, duplication, precognition, dual-nature, interconnectedness, queer bodies.

EXHIBITION: FEB 2 - 14, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: FEB 5

GROUP
ZOE SCHIRA-HAGERMAN
GEORGIA COREIA
VY NGUYEN
NEGAR SAHEBALZAMANI
LEO LOHNES

Mimesis, 2026. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

ONCE UPON A TIME

Once Upon A Time invites you to rethink of memories and how we rewrite them to reflect our consciousness. Beyond simple fabulation, the artists use their own stories of childhood, identity and dreams to reimagine themselves and their lives beyond linear narratives. Like a bedtime story or a fairytale, this exhibition carves a path for you to absorb images without trying to find absence or fill-in gaps.

EXHIBITION: FEB 16 - 28, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: FEB 19

GROUP
MATEO ALARIE
ROSALIE G. BEAUDOIN
CAMILLE DEROUIN
BREAGH GODIN
KAYLEN SCHUMANN

Breagh Godin, Once Upon A Time, 2026. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

Breagh Godin, Once Upon A Time, 2026.

Kaylen Schumann, Once Upon A Time, 2026. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

Kaylen Schumann, Once Upon A Time, 2026.

THE RISK OF COLOUR: ART MATTERS FESTIVAL

Colour is often treated as decoration, something secondary to form, structure, or meaning. In Western visual culture, it has frequently been associated with excess: emotional, superficial, bodily, or improper. Yet colour has never been neutral. It clings to bodies, marks differences, and signals belonging or exclusion. We “see red,” we “feel blue,” and when judgment enters perception, we say someone is “coloured” by experience.

Language reveals what culture often tries to suppress: colour carries value, bias, and power.

As artist and art historian David Batchelor writes in his seminal work Chromophobia,

“The notion that colour is bound up with the fate of Western culture sounds odd […] and yet colour has been the object of extreme prejudice in Western culture […]. And as with all prejudices, its manifest form, its loathing, masks fear: fear of contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable.”

The exhibition explores colour as a site of threat and the power that is derived from that threat.

The works are arranged in clusters, and each cluster reflects a recurring trope in a Western approach to colour:

Colour as excess

Colour as unsayable:

Colour as a threat to the self

Colour as exile

Together, these works ask viewers to reconsider colour not as surface, but as something that acts and disrupts. Colour is not a secondary consideration, but an intentional tool—one that can mark, unsettle, and wield power.

EXHIBITION: MAR 23 - 28, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: MAR 26

FACILITATOR
MARIE KHEDIGUIAN

GROUP
NEDJMA ZIARETI
HAILEY FRASER
BOIIKO
ANAIS BERZI
AYBUKE OZEL
LEEN JAAFAR
ARIELLE LONGO
FREYA ROTHERY
BREAGH GODIN

N/A

KEEPERS OF BEING

EXHIBITION: MAR 9 - 21, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: MAR 12

GROUP
FRANCIS ROBITAILLE
JULIA BELMORE
HAILEY FRASER
NOE ELBAZ
SABRINA MAISONNEUVE
ALEC TURGEON

Julia Belmore, Keepers of Being, 2026. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

Julia Belmore, Keepers of Being, 2026.

Keepers of Being, 2026. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

IDYLL AND LABOUR

EXHIBITION: MAR 30 - APR 11, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: APR 9

GROUP
RENEE ROTHE
KELLY HALSETH
GEMMA ELSE
LAURE-CHARLOTTE COTE

Idyll and Labour, 2026. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

RELICS IN TIME OF CORROSION

EXHIBITION: APR 13 - MAY 2, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: APR 16

DUO
CASSI CAMILLE
SIERRA KORITKO

Cassie Camille and Sierra Koritko, Relics In Time of Corrosion, 2026. Documentation by Asia Mason. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

OFFCUTS: ART MATTERS FESTIVAL

In celebration of CUCCR’s 9th anniversary, OFFCUTS is a joint exhibition between Art Matters Festival & CUCCR that celebrates sustainable art-making practices.

EXHIBITION: MAY 4 - 9, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: MAY 7

GROUP
N/A

N/A

COMMENCEMENT SHOW: GRADUATING STUDENT’S EXHIBITION

On behalf of VAV Gallery congratulations on a wonderful year and this important achievement. May your art continue to inspire and thrive wherever you go. Thank you and best wishes.

EXHIBITION: JUNE 1 - 19, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: JUNE 15

DOCUMENTATION
MARA ZAPATA

GROUP
NICOLAS LECLAIR
JANICE LAGIORGA
KALI CATERALL
ASIA MASON
ROSALIE G. BEAUDOIN
LUMI MUTTON
NEDJMA ZIARATI
TONG LI
MICHA PARADIS
ANNA DESROSIERS
DANICA OLDERS
ROSE MARTIN
CHLOE KIM MARCHAL
NOAH HIRAYAMA-RUBEL
TAYLOR CRAIG
JACOB MAHFOUD
MERIEM HADDOU
SAMUEL RISLER
NEGAR SAHELBALZAMANI
FISHER TALBOT-HILLS
CAMILLE MOTA
AKIVA SHANNON
RODRIGO D’ALCANTARA

Rose Martin, Sadly, we don’t have it in stock, Found wooden display, steel hangers, offcut pieces, cardboard, plastic packaging, 2025. Documentation by Mara Zapata. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

Rose Martin, Sadly, we don’t have it in stock.

Kali Caterall, Knight, Terracotta with engobe, underglaze and glaze, 2025.

Kali Caterall, Knight.

Asia Mason, ANTEATER, Bronze and Aluminium, 2025.

Asia Mason, ANTEATER.

Lumi Mutton, The Human Body, Stoneware Glaze, 2025.

Lumi Mutton, The Human Body.

(Slide 1-3)
Rose Martin
Sadly, we don’t have it in stock
Found wooden display, steel hangers, of -cut pieces, cardboard, plastic packaging

Rose Martin is an artist from Québec who now lives and works in Montréal. Her artistic practice is centred on sculpture and assemblage, often taking inspiration from objects that camouflage themselves in our daily lives. She is interested in how matter becomes invisible through its accumulation or loss of functionality. Fascinated by design, typography and architecture, she explores how standardization infiltrates our spaces and dictates the visible and invisible structures of the everyday.

Sadly we don’t have it in stock is an exploration of how objects carry traces of their standardization. Offcuts from the commercialization process and a study of hanging systems designs found across different manufacturers are presented in the installation. The artist is interested in the commodification of the everyday and how objects sold in big-box stores reflect our deepest wants and desires.

(Slide 4-7)
Kali Caterall
Knight
Terracotta with engobe, underglaze and glaze

I am a mixed-media contemporary artist based in Montreal, Canada. My work primarily focuses on painting and sculpture, driven by a deep-rooted interest in raw materials and organic forms. Through these mediums, I am able to express my connection with the natural world in a more direct and tangible way. My palette, predominantly composed of earth tones and various colors, reflects the natural beauty found in nature. This exploration is fueled by my desire to nurture my spirit, body, and mind through art, using a playful and intuitive approach. I work with a variety of materials, including paint, clay, papier maché, charcoal and India ink. My artistic practice is deeply influenced by the transformative power of art therapy. For instance, in my recent collection created during my residency at Casa Lu, I used papier-mâché to challenge perceptions of everyday materials, transforming them into pieces that have themes of resilience and reinvention. The abstract nature of my paintings reflects my interest in a playful and intuitive practice. With many works also inspired by my cats, my practice serves as a tool for meditation on the joy we can find within and share with ourselves, our animals, and the world around us As I continue to develop my practice, I am excited to explore new projects that delve deeper into the intersection of art and therapy. I am currently working on a large-scale piece made of papier mache to create an immersive, tactile experience, further investigating the calming and meditative effects of artistic creation. Additionally, Iam preparing for an upcoming exhibition that will showcase this piece alongside my previous works, providing a comprehensive view of my ongoing exploration of mental health and personal growth through art. My artistic journey mirrors my personal growth, and I hope to inspire viewers to embark on their own paths of self-discovery through creative expression. I hope to offer viewers an experience that invites us all to pause and reflect on our state of being and our relationship with the world around us.

This piece is inspired by a recent trip to Portugal, where I collected materials along the beach. This process of gathering objects became a meditative act, which also served as a practice to sharpen my eye as a visual artist. Incorporating these found elements, the work reflects my relationship to the ocean, which I've always felt a strong tie to since being a little girl. The piece also reflects a cultural tie to Portugal through my family, with my mom being born in Portugal and moving to Canada in her early adolescence.

(Slide 8-10)
Asia Mason
ANTEATER
Bronze and Aluminium

My work explores the similar and varied textures of dreams and memories. Moving through photography, sculpture, and installation, I investigate the ways in which we change each other with our stories and the unexpected lives they take on in their retelling. The oral tradition connects the past to the present, but it also erodes the barriers between direct and indirect experience. How can I bear witness to someone's life through their memories? What then are my responsibilities as the beholder? In my practice, I excavate stories from my own life that are real, imagined, untold, or forgotten.

ANTEATER she speaks to me but I cannot hear her She uses her words but they do not make contact I cannot hear them so I eat them I measure them, taking their weight and size colour and texture, their reaction to temperature shifts I preserve them in jars "here, I have them" I have them and I have them for dinner but she is quiet.

(Slide 11-13)
Lumi Mutton
The Human Body
Stoneware Glaze

Playwright turned Sculptor, Lumi Mitton came to pottery as a form of physical therapy for a disabled arm. She uses the physical tactility of multiple high fire clay bodies and glazes to translate the themes of medicine, horror, and surrealism present in her plays onto thrown forms. Her resulting works are an interpretation of the art object as Patient. The gallery is a kind of operating theatre, where an audience stares with the pathologic eyes of a resident on a double shift. This framing seeks to address the disparity of struggle experienced by doctors and patients in hospital settings. Informed by the imagery of Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and W. S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Her anatomical obsession uses sensorial organs to remind viewers of the perceptive though immobile nature of the forms, etherized yet consuming. The pieces create a suggestive horror as unwilling participants in their own observation.

Your Human Body is a modest attempt to rectify the impossibility of informed consent in a medical context. When one is diagnosed with an ailment. They are charged with becoming an expert in, not just the science of their disease, but advocating for their care as well. How are we as patients meant to begin that attempt? What do we do when we fail? This piece begins that journey with an introduction. Meet your tissues: Bone - Osteons Brain and Spinal Cord - Nervous Tissue Cardiac and Skeletal Muscle - Striated Skeletal Muscle Tissue Ear and Larynx - Elastic Cartilage Fat - Adipose Tissue Small Intestine - Epithelial Tissue Skin - Stratum Corneum Tendon - Dense Fibrous Connective Tissue.

(Slide 1)

Nicolas Leclair
L'Art du dernier soir
Court-métrage

Dans un contexte d'urgence de liberté, ce documentaire retrace mon parcours lié à la culture du hook-up au sein de la communauté gay. Il me mène à revisiter des lieux clés, depuis ma voiture jusqu'à cette chambre de motel. Ce qui, finalement, m'amène à reconnaître mon désir d'une relation stable et plus profonde qu'un simple one-night.

Dans ce film documentaire, le réalisateur revisite une période cruciale de sa vie, marquée par des one-night stands fréquents. En explorant les complexités liées à son orientation sexuelle et les dynamiques de ses relations interpersonnelles, le film nous plonge au cœur de l'ère des hook-ups, où l'intimité éphémère et la quête d'identité s'entrelacen

Nicolas Leclair, L'Art du dernier soir, Court-métrage, 2025. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

Janice LaGiorgia, A Love Letter to Montreal Burlesque, Documentary, 2025.

Rosalie G. Beaudoin, Upside Down, Oil on Canvas, 2025.

Rosalie Beaudoin, Upside Down.

Nedjma Ziarati, Garden of a Queen, Gouache and aquarelle, 2025.

Nedjma Ziarati, Garden of a Queen.

Tong Li, My Cat, Wool, 2025.

Micha Paradis, Interlocking Arms Makes A Barricade Stronger, Weaving, 2025.

Micha Paradis, Interlocking Arms Makes A Barricade Stronger.

(Slide 2)

Janice LaGiorgia
A Love Letter to Montreal Burlesque
Documentary

I am a burlesque performer, producer, and designer working between stage and screen. My practice explores how performance, storytelling, and design can create spaces of agency, intimacy, and collective memory. Rooted in my lived experience within Montreal’s burlesque community, my work is shaped by a desire to hold onto what is often fleeting: the rituals, labour, and relationships that exist beyond the spotlight. I am particularly interested in how visibility is negotiated — who gets to be seen, under what conditions, and at what cost. As social media platforms increasingly regulate erotic expression, I turn toward collaborative and community-based methods to document and share our stories differently. Through humour, sensuality, and care, I approach burlesque as both an art form and a methodology — one that resists erasure by centering joy, embodiment, and connection.

Burlesque lives in the exchange between performer and audience, but it also lives backstage — in rehearsal rituals, costume repairs, makeup brushes, and glitter-dusted mirrors. Yet many of these moments are filtered through social media platforms whose opaque moderation systems shape how performers document and share their work. This project brings together interviews, auto-ethnography, and participatory filmmaking with members of Montreal’s burlesque community to explore collaborative storytelling as a counter-archive beyond algorithmic censorship. Rooted in care, consent, and joyful resistance, the process invites performers to shape how their stories are told and preserved. The resulting short documentary centers process over spectacle, weaving together fragments of lived experience with intimate footage of the craft and labour behind the art form. In doing so, it proposes participatory filmmaking as a way to reclaim visibility and collectively document histories on our own terms.

(Slide 3-5)

Rosalie G. Beaudoin
Upside Down
Oil on Canvas

I am a Montreal-based artist whose paintings explore archives in the pursuit of understanding the formation of personal identity and the limits between memory and photography. My work always begins with an image from one of these sources: a photo album, the camera roll on my cellphone, or a post online. It is then compositionally modified through drawing before I paint from it. This last step is an attempt to represent the elements that often slip away in photography: emotions, connections, sounds, textures, and temperature, and to reintegrate them into the image. Through exaggeration and diminution of form, cropping, adding and removing elements, and altering colors and textures, I create works that transcend the tangible and represent the unseen.

My latest series of paintings explores the intimacy of comfort and discomfort. Working with archival images, mostly from family scenes, I started noticing how important it is for us to be portrayed with the things that bring us comfort: a favorite plush, domestic animal, cigarettes, alcohol, the people who surround us. I’m drawn to the symbolism of objects, and this repetition made me think about how much they say about us. At the same time, these elements are not purely comforting: they can also carry unease, dependency, or excess. Comfort and discomfort are not opposites, but exist together, often within the same object or moment. Photography reinforces this tension: moments can be staged, and people posed, making what is captured selective. Through painting, I rework these images by altering elements and composition, and by adding surreal elements to bring forward this ambiguity.

(Slide 6-8)

Nedjma Ziarati
Garden of a Queen
Gouache and aquarelle

My work starts from Persian miniature, but I don’t treat it as something fixed or historical. It’s more like a space I move through and reshape. I use it as a structure, but I let it shift, mix, and open up into something else. I’m interested in hybridity—things blending, overlapping, not fully belonging to one place or another. Different visual languages, different references, all sitting together without needing to resolve into one clear system. A lot of my work plays with non-linear narratives and strange spatial logics. There’s no single viewpoint, no clear beginning or end. Things unfold in fragments, in layers. Time doesn’t really exist in these works—it’s more like everything is happening at once, or outside of time altogether. I also bring women back into these spaces in a different way. In a lot of Persian miniatures, women are there but often seen through a male gaze. In my work, they’re not passive or decorative—they’re central, aware, and looking back. The gaze shifts. It becomes something else. Overall, I’m building an alternative world through this language—one that doesn’t follow linear time or fixed meanings, where forms and figures can exist in more fluid and open ways.

I selected three paintings for this exhibition, each centered on women and the female gaze, and unified by a highly ornamental visual language. The use of pattern in my work is partly decorative, but it also draws from traditions in Persian art, where repetition and ornament create a sense of rhythm, density, and immersion. By layering patterns, I build enclosed, almost self-contained worlds around my figures—spaces that feel mythological or spiritual rather than strictly realistic. The repetition allows the surface to become active, surrounding the subject and shaping how she is seen, not just as an image, but as a presence within her own environment.

(Slide 9-11)

Tong Li

My Cat

Wool

This work did not begin with a grand idea.

I was not trying to make something important, nor was I trying to speak about a larger issue surrounding animals or love. I simply wanted to make my cat.

This is my first felt work, and he was the thing I wanted to create most. I wanted to use a new technique I had just learned to record him in my own way. But as I slowly shaped him, needle by needle, the process began to feel more emotional than I expected.

In everyday life, many feelings pass quietly without being noticed. Through the repetitive and almost meditative process of felting, I found myself slowly returning to small memories of him.

When I come home, my cat follows me into my bedroom, jumps onto the bed, lies beside me, asks for affection, and slowly falls asleep. Even though I cannot understand his words, when he lies there purring, I always feel that he had been waiting for me to come home. When he looks at me with half-closed eyes, I feel as if he is quietly telling me that he loves me.

With each stitch and each step, I felt as if I was quietly weaving these emotions into the work itself.

The materials became an important part of the sculpture. The texture of wool resembles the softness of a cat's fur, while also carrying a certain fragility. Under the cushion where he rests, I incorporated old fabrics from my home and pieces of worn clothing. My cat has always loved lying on my clothes, and I wanted the sculpture to carry traces of that familiarity and comfort. I also hoped it would evoke a sense of peacefulness and the quiet warmth found in small details that feel uniquely connected to home. For many years, it has actually been my mother who has taken care of my cat the most. Recently, I have started noticing strands of white hair slowly appearing among her black hair. The mixture of black and white reminds me of the fur on my cat's back. I do not know when the signs of her aging began to appear.

In the past few years, I have been busy with my own life and often did not have much time to sit down and talk with her. Many nights, by the time I returned home, it was already dark outside. Sometimes I would see her sitting quietly on the stairs, watching the cat use the litter box. When she noticed that I was home and looked up at me, she still did not say very much. Yet in that quiet moment, I felt that she, too, had been waiting for me to come home.

(Slide 12-14)

Micha Paradis
Interlocking Arms Makes A Barricade Stronger
Weaving

Through installations and printed series, my work abstracts and deconstructs aspects of Queer life and subculture. With a practice rooted in printmaking, more specifically in woodcut-relief and screenprinting, much of my work is fundamentally formed from physical involvement. I take effort to show traces of medium, and prioritize variation in my projects. My inspirations are anchored in underground culture, folk art, and the notion of ‘otherness’. I have a strong urge to create for my community, and to capture its essence through metaphors and codifications formed from research and personal experience. I work mainly out of intuition, in tandem with reductive and stenciling practices. I have also taken great interest in fiber formats for my printed works, and enjoy the possible connections between the mediums. I aim to visually, textually, and texturally bring to life the essence of Queer existence in all of its splendor, messiness, and complexity.

Interlocking Arms Makes a Barricade Stronger is a weaving about structural systems of support and self creation. It is weaved of synthetic and natural wools, synthetic hair, and adorned with carabiners and bungee cords. Depicting two figures in embrace, and hung of its own wool, it references queer self actualization through connection and adaptability.

(Slide 1-3)

Danica Olders
Hay
Ceramics and paper and wood column

Space is treated as a lived and psychological condition, a territory between bodies, objects, and built environments. How is space held and inhabited? How do familiarity and routine produce a sense of belonging, and how do these experiences accumulate into systems of ownership and care? Danica Olders constructs objects and situations that examine the tensions that emerge in how space is shared and navigated. Sculptural concerns of mass, balance, and spatial awareness intersect with painterly strategies of composition and lighting, alongside theatrical approaches to scenography and narrative sequencing. Working playfully across sculpture, ceramics, textiles, painting and scripted elements, Olders’ work moves between singular forms and installations. Rather than resolving the conditions her work may expose, it holds them, foregrounding questions of access, power, and the quiet structures that shape everyday life.

The horse appears across the works as a recurring figure, shifting between freedom and restraint. In Productivity, it is small and brought up to the eye level of the inner demon figure surrounded by it's production. In Hay the horse is isolated and elevated and also on an oversized plinth. This disproportionate display both amplifies and destabilizes it, foregrounding how value and attention are assigned.

(Slide 4-6)

Anna Desrosiers
MARCELINE
Pencils, pens, markers and gouache on masonite

Desrosiers is interested in mark-making as a guide, finding shapes and figures within. The artist colours in small sections at a time, using gouache, pens, pencils and markers on large scale surfaces. These crowded environments blur the distinction between ground, figure, colour, and line becoming their own biological entities.

Starting as an intricate drawing, it got covered by the strokes of a singular brush in an attempt to obscure its colour palette.

Danica Olders, Hay, Ceramics and paper and wood column, 2025. Documentation by Mara Zapata. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

Danica Olders, Hay, Ceramics and paper and wood column, 2025.

Anna Desrosiers, MARCELINE, Pencils, pens, markers and gouache on masonite, 2025.

Chloe Kim Marchal, The DVD Cart (中国制造), Single-channel video installation, 2025.

Noah Hirayama-Rubel, Mask for the Third State, Patinated Bronze, Potting Soil, Found Desk Drawer, 2025.

Taylor Craig, Stones, Wood, mirror, mdf, foam, canvas, 2025.

Jacob Mahfoud, Massar - مسار, Digital and analogue, 2025.

Meriem Haddou, Armour Set, Steel, 2025.

(Slide 7)

Chloe Kim Marchal
The DVD Cart (中国制造)
Single-channel video installation

Chloe Kim Marchal is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal. Her practice, a mix of video art, painting, and web-based projects, tackles ideas of globalization, cultural imperialism, and mixed-race identity. By pulling from her studies in both anthropology and fine arts, Marchal’s practice remixes cultural theory with popular culture and humour. Marchal has worked as an exhibition writer, workshop coordinator, and editor for various student projects, and has collaborated with the Festival International du Film Ethnographique du Quebec (FIFEQ).

“The DVD Cart (中国制造)” is an ode to Chinese bootleg DVD carts and the low-quality copy as described in Hito Steyerl's text "In Defense of the Poor Image". Visual motifs such as pixelated images, bright colors, looping animations and PNGs stitched together to form half-remembered environments all speak to the artist’s experience of the internet as an amalgamated hybrid third space.

(Slide 8-10)

Noah Hirayama-Rubel
Mask for the Third State
Medium: Patinated Bronze, Potting Soil, Found Desk Drawer

My practice explores fantasy, post humour, and the abject human. Through a combination of drawing, metalworking, ceramics, and printmaking, I imagine vestigial objects and genderqueer monsters carrying a blend of passion, curiosity, and shame. My voracious desire to experiment with materiality burst into an interest in the science behind art. From applying patina on bronze to cyanotyped upcycled fabrics, chemistry is essential. My aesthetics derive from pop culture, neo-expressionism, and internet culture. My art also responds to music, especially the melodic patterns of jazz and concert music. For many years, I believed I must reclaim my inner child no matter what. I instead believe it's to honour the child I was and to cherish the person I'll become. My art chose to love the ridiculous, embrace the whimsical, and champion the goofy. Now, it also chooses to process shame and embrace the hardships that come with passionately feeling alive.

Mask for the Third State is an installation featuring a bronze cast of a face, surrounded by plant matter and potting soil in a drawer. Using a silicone mould, the artist moulded their face and casted a wax copy. The face was decorated with wax-sealed roses, grape stems, leaves, flowers, and the artist's hair. All the pieces were then cast using the lost wax process, welded together, and patinated. Biologists have discovered a “third state” for cells, a phenomenon where cells continue to adopt new functions even after an organism’s death. Taking inspiration, this mask adorned with organic life serves as a vessel for birth, death, and all in between. This mask juxtaposes the death mask, but does not fully reject the significance of death itself. In a celebration of the cells in dried plants, and to the flesh, this work blesses the third state.

(Slide 11-13)

Taylor Craig
Stones
Wood, mirror, mdf, foam, canvas

I am Taylor Craig, a recent graduate of Concordia University’s Bachelor of Fine Arts program, majoring in Sculpture. My work explores the intricate relationships between resources, consumption, and materiality, driven by a passion for craftsmanship and traditional techniques such as wood carving. Having a varied technical background in art and functional craft, my hands-on approach emphasizes the dialogue between form and material, creating sculptures that reflect the interconnectedness of humans, natural environments, and built systems. I am particularly interested in the provenance, lineage, and sustainability of materials, seeking to uncover knowledge, memories, and experiences through the tactile engagement of tools and materials. My practice is an ongoing investigation into how material interactions reveal deeper insights into our relationship with the environment and the objects we create.

The piece consists of roughly 1,000 stones carved from a variety of wood species that were saved, gathered or gifted to me. Some of the stones have been left with their natural finish, while others have been stained using a combination of tea and a solution of steel wool and vinegar. For this exhibition, my plan is to shrink the installation from the size of a river bed to something more akin to a sandbox. The stones would be installed on a 32"x32" mirror mounted on a 40"x40"x3/4" mdf base. In my previous installation of the work the audience was allowed to interact and play with the stones - in this case there would be no order to the placement of the stones onto the base. However, if it is preferable for the sake of the exhibition for the piece to be inactive, the stones would be set onto the base in a gradient from lightest to darkest.

(Slide 14-16)

Jacob Mahfoud
Massar - مسار
Digital and analogue

I move through the porous territories of memory, exile, and shifting identities. Examining the liminality of marginalized spaces and bodies, I look for invisible traces left by displacement, rupture, and migration.

Through intimate portraiture, I approach creation as a reparative space one where the image becomes a cathartic gesture. One where vulnerability is rendered into presence.

I create images shaped by both trauma and resilience where identities in flux can be reimagined through poetic and political forms.

I seek to open spaces of recognition, where memory, embodiment, and resistance quietly converge.

Fragmented, doubled, suspended between two geographies, this project explores the rupture of an identity torn across irreconcilable spaces. It emerges from a moment of deep fracture: Lebanon under bombardment, neighborhoods erased, loved ones displaced, while in Montreal, indifference persists within a broader structure of complicity.

To exist in both places at once is to inhabit two simultaneous presents held apart by forces beyond reach. The work materializes this in-between space, tracing the unstable terrain between distance and proximity, memory and immediacy, belonging and estrangement, through shifts in image, material, and atmosphere.

By pairing digital images of my village in Lebanon with analogue images of Montreal, the project creates material and formal gaps that invert expectations, suggesting a split between drift and anchoring, imagination and embodiment, as consciousness fluctuates, and proximity and distance are continually reconfigured.

Through overlooked back alleys and liminal urban spaces, the work traces sites of passage whose emptiness suggests both absence and suspended presence. Drawing on AbdelMalek Sayad’s concept of double absence, Massar embraces rupture rather than resolving it, inviting viewers to inhabit the in-between, where fragmented identity seeks coherence through memory and place. Yet within these gaps, unexpected intersections emerge, opening space for a quiet gesture of connection.

(Slide 17-19)

Meriem Haddou
Armour Set
Steel

Meriem Haddou is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tiohtià:ke, “Montreal”. Her work draws from and centres around ideas of the embodied experience; the feminine, the intersectional, performativity and intimacy. Patterning is a pertinent tool in developing these facets in her work, treating patterns as coded, visual language, through their inherent ties with lineage and interwoven cultural narratives. She aims to explore what is intrinsic or embedded in our individual makeup and nature, and what must be developed. Either by interposing motifs over corporeal figures in her painted works or, more recently, through her metalwork, she plays with the dualities and contradictions in materiality and symbols. Through archival research on patterning related to her heritage, its political implications become apparent, as no symbol is neutral. The presence of patterning serves as a bridge to explore these cultural and personal histories through her artwork, a simultaneous form of reconcile and resistance.

Armour set is a part of my current body of work titled Of Skin and Steel l exploring the dualities present in material, it’s function, and patterning. Lace is such a sensuous and coded material, a process that is incredibly laborious and meticulous, primarily passed down by women. Replicating these patterns through rigid and industrially coded metal, particularly steel brings a lot of questions about industry and traditional masculine/ feminine labour and it’s recognition as such. Its simultaneous covering and revealment of the body has always been a means to represent agency to me. As we stand in front of what is essentially a disembodied body, our presence is in question. Who is allowed to be close enough to see these lace patterns that hold and embellish the most intimate parts of the body, who is granted permission?

(Slide 1-3)

Negar Sahelbalzamani
What Am I If Not Flesh
Oil and yarn on canvas

Negar Sahebalzamani is an Iranian artist who explores the fluid, rhizomatic nature of identity within the diaspora. Drawing from her cultural heritage and lived experience in the West, she creates figurative portraits that center resilience, resistance, and self-reflection. Through confronting hegemonic and colonial gazes, her work challenges discursive norms and reclaims narrative agency. Her figures often exist in liminal spaces, caught between memory and displacement, the imaginary and the tangible. These spaces desire to blur and fade the boundaries between spiritual presence and material absence. Sahebalzamani’s practice aims to be both a personal reckoning and a collective exploration, offering a space where marginalized identities can feel seen, represented, and empowered.

What Am I If Not Flesh explores the projection of objects onto bodies through object-oriented ontology. It fuses fibres with the canvas surface, evoking the longstanding association of West-Asian female bodies with sensuous fabrics, rugs, scarves, and more. This piece confronts the dehumanization of unidentified Iranian female bodies and those erased from the media. Snapshots of body parts exist in states of in-betweenness, dissolving into the surfaces while confronting and shielding themselves from the viewer. It demonstrates the reduction of bodies to flesh through such projections, flattening personhood into an abstract, universalized entity, made legible through constructed narratives.

Negar Sahelbalzamani, What Am I If Not Flesh, Oil and yarn on canvas, 2025. Documentation by Mara Zapata. © Galerie VAV Gallery. Click to expand the image and swipe for additional views

Negar Sahelbalzamani, What Am I If Not Flesh

Samuel Risler, Self Subjugation, Bronze, steel, cement, 2025.

Samuel Risler, Self Subjugation

Samuel Risler, Self Subjugation

Fisher Talbot-Hills, The Mantis Project, Earthenware, stoneware, engobe and clear glaze, 2025.

Fisher Talbot-Hills, The Mantis Project

Camille Mota, Comfort Object, Natural dyed and mordant printed canvas, poly-fill, rope, and pins, 2025.

Camille Mota, Comfort Object

Akiva Shannon, Detail 05, Detail 04, and Detail 08, Inkjet print, 2025.

Rodrigo D'Alcântara, Sinfonia Lunatique, Video, 2025.

Rodrigo D'Alcântara, Sinfonia Lunatique

(Slide 4-6)

Samuel Risler
Self Subjugation
Bronze, steel, cement

Samuel works primarily in drawing and painting, but also expands to sculpture. He is interested in the conception of the human form, particularly the shift in existentialism and the loss of meaning arising from the growth of dependence on AI. His work dealing with this concept creates macabre, existentialist visuals through body alteration, disruption and reassembling, fragmented figures, the loss of self, and the failure to become a unified self. He combines this with gestural textures on sculptures, showing the labour of hands and creating an impression of a human presence, and in drawing and painting through sketch-like visuals and through spontaneity. Keeping the focus on the human presence, Samuel also explores human experiences, contemplation, and observation as acts of aesthetic consciousness. It comes from the contemplation one may find as a result of their own alienation. It is a contemplation of human life, of everyday solitude, and nostalgia, all sentiments that are our own. Because no one can yearn in your place but you; no one can live in your place, but you; and no one can be you but you, it is important to keep a firm grasp on what makes us truly human: our emotions and experiences.

SelfSubjugation (Working title) is a bronze sculpture which primarily addresses the current existentialist human condition and contrasts of being. The human presence, as I call it, encompassing both the body and expressions, is a recurrent exploration in my artistic practice. It emphasizes the process of creating and of human imperfection
instead of showing a perfected state of being, as well as to convey a fracture in the human self and its loss of meaning. It is the same in Self Subjugation, where the fracture of the self is seen through its precarity, vulnerability, and contrasting elements. To better explore my interests and what I wanted my sculpture to stand for, working with my hands was the logical decision. Hand gestures and the visibility of human work were deeply necessary for the concept of the piece: human presence had to be not only seen but felt, too.

(Slide 7-8)

Fisher Talbot-Hills
The Mantis Project
Earthenware, stoneware, engobe and clear glaze

Growing up in rural Massachusetts, I was constantly surrounded by forest, greenery and, of course, the insects that inhabit them. While most people dislike bugs and other small critters, I have always been inspired by them. Throughout my Bachelor's degree, I started paying closer attention to their symmetry, structure, and the complex details. I immediately became fascinated by an insect's structural intricacies that feel intentional yet chaotic at the same time. This fascination has become a central part of my work. Art speaks, and so does nature, and I like to think of myself as a translator of their quiet conversation. Aside from technical considerations of research and important retouches, I put very little deliberation into my process. Instead I listen to the piece in my hand, allowing it to guide me towards the final product. I do hope that when people view my works, they can hear the same ballad the was sung to me as I created them.

This project is based on an experiment testing different ways to treat the surface of a clay body. Simultaneously it is an exploration of four of my favorite Praying Mantis Genera. They are all original drawings referenced from close up photographs. Shown from top to bottom are: Ghost mantis (Phyllocrania paradoxa) Conehead mantis (Empusa pennata) and Dragon mantis (Toxodera beieri) Dead leaf mantis (Deroplatys desiccata) Mono printing on clay, is the technique used in all three pieces. This process is essentially painting a picture onto a sheet of paper with engobe, which is then transferred with water and pressure, shifting the image onto the clay. If you look extra carefully into the Dead Leaf Mantis, I used a laser cut stencil based on my drawings to press engobe onto clay, in order to achieve a very delicate and deliberate outline of a Mantis! Fun fact about the Ghost mantis-- At the Insectarium in Montreal they have a specific habitat for these miniature Insects, and while I make them look big and quite menacing in my art, the actual size of a ghost mantis head is about 4mm, making my drawing approximately 62 times its size!

(Slide 9-11)

Camille Mota
Comfort Object
Natural dyed and mordant printed canvas, poly-fill, rope, and pins

Camille is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice interrogates the abject and the feminist intersection between the personal and the political through the mediums of sculpture, installation, print, and video. Her work stem from
experiences and reflections on her neurodivergence, childhood, family, relationships, and their connection to wider social histories.

This piece renders an object of comfort and rest into one of discomfort. It aims to highlight the artist's sensory experience with everyday objects and spaces by eliciting disgust and discomfort in the viewer. The printed pattern imitates the one from the tiles of her bathroom floor, a sensory safe haven, while simultaneously eliciting skin and hair follicles when paired with the needles, invoking the body's sensory reaction of hair raising on one's skin in response tosensory stimuli.

(Slide 12)

Akiva Shannon
Detail 05, Detail 04, and Detail 08
Inkjet print

Akiva Shannon’s familial history is the central focus of his research-based approach to image making. He studies themes of displacement, identity politics, immigration, and postmemory through an examination of archival material relating to his grandfather’s survival of the Holocaust. Shannon’s recent work is concerned with investigating systems of power, utilizing archives and photography. He visually explores the discourse that occurs when documentationbecomes challenged by personhood.

Szjinzicht - Shannon (2024) sequences materials from multiple archives to follow the story of my grandfather’s imprisonment during the Holocaust, and map the ways in which various systems of power have imposed, shaped, and altered a perception of his identity throughout his life. The project brings forward discrepancies in names, birthdates, identification numbers, and photographs from his time in various concentration camps as a prisoner, in England post-liberation, and after his immigration to Canada. It exists to question historical narratives by looking at the crossroads between testimony, personal archive, and public archive. Ultimately, through visually complicating imposed markers of identity with photographs, this work is meant to represent a life lived past the documentation while still recognizing the realities and conditions in which they were created. .

(Slide 13-15)

Rodrigo D'Alcântara
Sinfonia Lunatique
Video

I am a multidisciplinary artist working across video, performance, drawing, painting, and installation. My work explores ancestral memory, spiritual syncretism, and diasporic identity through layered visual languages. Rooted in my Brazilian mestizo and queer experience, I develop “techno-syncretism,” intertwining spiritual traditions, speculative futures, and contemporary media to challenge fixed identities and colonial histories. Collaboration and dreams also inform my practice, shaping narratives that resist linear time. Drawing on Brazilian popular culture, dissident futurities, and science fiction, I create spaces where mythology, history, and radical imagination converge to propose new ways of being.

Sinfonia Lunatique is a Latinofuturistic video art that takes place on a hypothetical tropical island without a spatio-temporal location. Hero I and Hero II (Pavão and Rodrigo D’Alcântara) perform in a state of rage while searching for each other on the lost island. The Divinity, interpreted by a 3D model inspired by the Drag Queen Uhura Bqueer, watches and comments on the heroes' patriarchal behavior.