Presenting UNREALITY NOW, a virtual exhibition featuring new works by students in the 2021 University of Alberta senior printmaking class. The exhibition features both print and digital projects created by students in the past months. Print works by the students will be displayed in the gallery windows starting May 8. Digital works can be viewed online below. Please click on the name of the artist to be redirected to their work below.
Ambar Azcorra
Print Details
Title: “exploraciones del ser/deshecha” & “exploraciones del ser/compuesta”
Medium: linoleum prints + collage work on digital print, rag paper
Size (hxw): 15” x 24” (both)
Ambar Azcorra is a multidisciplinary artist originating from Mexico, but based in Edmonton, Alberta. Through visual mediums such as illustration, photography, ceramics, and printmaking she explores the concepts of identity, intimacy, getting to know the self and consciousness, and the dreamworld. She frequently incorporates nature and the human body into her works as vessels to address these topics, both on a personal spectrum, and a global perspective. Her works have been exhibited in both University settings and in private showings, and she will conclude her BFA degree by the end of 2021. Ambar draws inspiration from her personal experiences, particularly addressing the realm of emotion and the human experience. A lot of her works aim to evoke the sensations she has experienced in her audience, thus creating a dialogue between the art and the viewer. The following pieces all pertain from different bodies of works Ambar created in different explorations during her undergrad at the University of Alberta, all of them touching on the concepts forementioned in attempt to address the intricacies of the human experience.
Andrea Larsen
Bio
Andrea Larsen is a visual artist in her 4th year at the University of Alberta in the Art and design Program. She is currently working in print medium and painting. Her focus is on portraiture and figurative art, focusing on representations from a feminist perspective. She works with the ideas of domesticity and the role of women in the 21st century and gender.
Artist Statement
This is a strange time in the realm of history, but for me it’s a time of great change and growth. Working from the feelings I want to express what I have felt for some time about motherhood and my relationship. Through the use of self portraits from a feminist perspective I am exploring the realm of domesticity and gender roles. Currently I am working with photographs I have taken of myself and carved onto 5×5 inch pieces of lino. Working from 4 different portraits I am repetitively carving and printing the progression of each image as it appears and disintegrates through carving. I’ve compiled these into a larger image revealing the transition and progress as the portrait comes together and then falls apart, it is a reflection of time passing. As time passes and prints are made, the image disintegrates, and the feelings and images are gone.
I have created 4 different prints, with 4 different patterns. Each one is patterned to represent its title. Monotony has a very robotic orderly appearance. Anguished is chaotic and has no reasonable order. Exhaustion represents the never ending and continuing and Frustrations pattern can at first be followed but then becomes unmanageable. Through this process of carving and inking it has been a cathartic feeling which opposes the feelings represented in my prints.
Print Details
Title: Exhaustion
Medium: Lino print
Size (hxw): 38”x 16”
Ariana Ozga-Reinecke
Ariana Ozga-Reinecke is a visual artist living in Edmonton, Alberta, located in Treaty 6 Territory. In 2021 she will receive her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alberta. She has received numerous scholarships including the Justine Angelina Carswell Memorial Award in Fine Arts and Natalka Horeczko Scholarship in Painting and Print Design. Her practice frequently begins with digital photography and video performance which she then interprets and responds to using a variety of traditional media. The distortion that takes place through filtering her experiences through different lenses whether aesthetic, humorous, or through translation from one medium to another which creates a space where weirdness and tenderness is able to thrive. Thematically she addresses relationships between herself and others and the bizarre quality of existing physically and mentally in this world.
Artist Statement
Identity formation is intrinsic to human development as we learn to understand, differentiate and evaluate ourselves in a larger societal context. In other words, I do not see myself as I am but as I am reflected back to myself through others. Spending a significant amount of time alone during this period of quarantine, I took videos and photographs of myself attempting to distort and defamiliarize my appearance. I then translated these images through lithography. The directness of the lithographic drawing materials and the sensitivity and touch required to make these drawings helps to articulate the fragility of these moments and removes them from their full performative context. Through the printed multiple I am able to clone myself and interact with myself outside of the first-person experience. In this work I am both alone and accompanied, echoing the strangeness of isolated living in a digitally connected world.
Print Details
Title: Singular Embrace
Medium: Lithographic print
Size (hxw): 21″ x 32″
Audrey Gamponia
In this work I wanted to explore themes of created realities and constructed realities and how these are grounded by materialism and physicality. By taking things that are from our natural world and raw materials from our ‘physical reality’ and translating them through digital medium, I am conceptionally taking them out of their physical dimension and entering them into a void that we understand as technology.
I took dried up plants and raw canvas, scanned them and from there make imagery that respond to the shapes and colours that are present in the images. I combined “natural” shapes with geometric shapes in order to ‘replicate’ something that is ‘natural’ and to implicate space and dimensionality.
In these prints, I wanted to make imagery that reflects something that is recognizable and familiar in terms of what we can see and can pick up in our surroundings and translate them in a way that complicates how we understand how they act and how they sit in space through layering and ‘made up’ references to dimensionality.
Print Details
Title: Liberties
Medium: Digital Print on Coventry Rag, Thread
Size (hxw): 16″ x 12.5”
Elise Futoransky
Elise Futoransky is an artist living and practicing in Edmonton, Alberta on Treaty 6 territory. Her work is sourced primarily in printmaking and painting, and she draws on her Eastern European background for inspiration. Her practice often references folk practices, the narrow delineation between art and craft, and material culture, as well as utilising religious elements as visual shorthand. The tension between tradition and the contemporary is highly of interest to Elise, as such her practice is not only a celebration of her heritage but also an investigation of how culture is filtered through the passage of time and distance.
Artist statement
Berehynia is a lithograph print on washi paper that references the motif found on Ukrainian pysanky or Easter eggs, which is a held over element from early folk design generally understood to reference a goddess. By taking a motif intended to be stretched across the surface of an egg and flattening it into fractals, it is intending to reflect on the way in which cultural figures and motifs are modified over time and through the loss of information.
Print Details
Title: Berehynia
Medium: Lithograph print on washi paper
Size (hxw): 16” x 22.5”
Gabrielle Keiran
Gabby Keiran is a frequent daydreamer, who has always been the type of person to imagine herself in the positions of her favourite characters, travelling across fantastical lands, learning new skills, and accessing powers that she somehow always had hidden deep inside. Now, as a storyteller and artist, a lot of her time is spent trying to wrangle her hands into cooperating with the images her brain has been molding. For Gabby, character design has been a venue for these stories to take flight and come to life. Since she started drawing heads by tracing a pencil sharpener when she was 9 years old, Gabby has never seen the characters she creates as mere 2D images. She has always imagined their personalities and backgrounds, and sometimes their worlds become as real as our own. For Gabby, this is the struggle of every artist, to let people access these worlds and lose themselves in the fantasy we see so clearly. This is where she hopes her journey through art will take her, to a place where she’s able to invite viewers to see themselves and their struggles in the images of the characters she creates. Gabby hopes that through each story, she is able to resolve conflicts that viewers and participants may have been struggling with in their own lives as well.
Gabby Keiran is a Calgarian character designer and concept artist working in the genre of video game design and illustration. As a graduate from the University of Alberta’s class of 2021, she looks to a future in the games and entertainment industry in Canada.
Print Details
Title: There Is No Direct Link Anymore
Medium: Silkscreen on Digital Painting
Size (hxw): 17″x11”
Gina Pasaran Ugarte
Artist Bio
Gina Pasaran is an emerging visual artist in Treaty 6 Territory, so-called ‘Edmonton’. She was born in Mexico and immigrated to Canada at a young age. As an artist, Gina explores facets of personal identity, mental and physical wellness, as well as navigating close relationships throughout her art practice. She is interested in aspects of care and connection. More recently, she is merging her art practice with a printmaking aspect, interchanging the dialogues between the digital world and the analog. Gina is interested in the objects that surround oneself, as well as places and geographies, that can become a part of one’s identity.
She has completed a Fine Art Diploma from MacEwan University and is graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2021 from the University of Alberta. Gina has volunteered in local galleries such as the Mitchell Art Gallery and artist run centre Latitude 53 plus exhibited in group shows in independent spaces like Parallel Space in Edmonton. Currently, Gina is involved with artists Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed in their Edmonton/Treaty 6 project with the Mitchell Art Gallery and John A McDougall Elementary School
Print Details
Title: remedial (part 1)
Medium: digital and relief print
Size (hxw): 13″x24″
Artist Statement
My series of prints explore themes of relationships and ephemeral, fleeting moments in time. The time and spaces my prints are specifically dealing with is the time spent going outside on daily walks. I have created a series of layered diptychs combining digital printing, screen printing and relief woodblock printing. Over the course of the year, I dedicated myself to going on daily walks, or weekly walks, and I would take these walks with close family members and roommates. This passing of time without any distractions made me acknowledge my relationship with my surroundings and allowed me to be in the moment and tap into my own stream of conscious thoughts. These walks have become in fact a part of my everyday routines, as well as a meditative state for my body. The act of moving the body and becoming active within its surroundings has become remedial to me, which is the title of my print series.
During my walks, I have created a stream of thinking that influences the prints. I wonder “Who lives in the houses I am passing? What is my relationship with the land and the trees I am passing”? The images I am creating explore places of contemplation and exploration. They communicate my relationship to the act of walking during a time of isolation and distancing. The places depicted in my work are intended to feel dreamy and perhaps familiar to the viewer, who I hope can resonate with the sense of walking and reflecting on oneself.
Jennifer Fernando
Print Details
Title: Echoes
Medium: Screen Print on Inkjet Printed Image
Size (hxw): 18” x 12”
Kamei Lim
Kamei Lim is a visual artist living in Edmonton, Alberta, located on Treaty 6 territory. Her practice involves mainly printmaking and painting, often making use of bright color palettes paired with flower imagery and meanings to communicate her thoughts and ideas. Her recent print works explores the relationship between the topic of death in accordance with her childhood memories and perspectives. Kamei finds particular interest in the juxtaposition of the rather eerie nature of death and its portrayal through colourful and light-hearted imagery, as well in the shifting attitudes from childhood and adulthood.
Artist Statement
It is not necessarily dying that I am afraid of, but more so the loss that accompanies it. By immersing myself in the topic of death repeatedly, I thought I could build a tolerance and finally come to terms with the idea that it will come for me and that’s okay. It’s just protocol. I live to make memories, only to never remember them in the end. As my aversion of death started in childhood, I thought it would be a good place to start. My childhood, that was riddled with superstitious beliefs and ghost stories, painted death as something much more than the somber occasion that I think of it now. I find particular interest in the contrast of the harrowing nature of death and the positive memories and associations I have of it in childhood. More than loss, death was colour and vivid childhood memories, and this is what I aim to portray in my works.
Print Details
Title: Visitors
Medium: Lithographic print
Size (hxw): 19.5” x 14”
Kayla Bleoo
Kayla Bleoo is a fine artist and tattoo artist currently working in Edmonton, Alberta on Treaty 6 Territory. Throughout her Bachelor of Fine Arts, Kayla has been exploring topics surrounding sexual assault and trauma with predominetly digital and printmaking mediums. Her work aims to talk about serious topics in a more accessible fashion using approachable imagery which is commonly a cartoon ghost like figure. Her artistic practice carries from paper to living canvases as well, as she reinstates much of her style and ideas into her tattooing practice.
“Self Care” uses a ghost figure to discuss the healing of trauma we do in the bathroom, a space where sometimes it is the only place we find ourselves alone. When dealing with hardship, this concept of “self care” is always reiterated as an important part of healing, but often it feels impossible to do simple care tasks when it feels like your world is ending.
Print Details
Title: Self Care
Medium: Digital, screen printing
Size (hxw): 17×22.5
Kev Liang
Kev Liang is an artist based in Edmonton, AB, Treaty 6 territory, originally from secluded rural Alberta. Graduating with a BFA in Intermedia and Printmaking at the University of Alberta, Kev uses photographic and videographic means with a DSLR to create narratives in the form of print media as well as digital film, put into a contextual space that all encapsulates his feelings and grasp of “identity”. He is interested in tackling existential anxieties of feeling lonely and minuscule, thoughts that are particularly fuelled by being present within modular, homogenized, systematic, urban spaces and having an anthropocentric outlook on everything. After growing up in a very secluded and rural environment, Kev attempts to dissect the different cultural and philosophical aspects of his gay, second generation Chinese-Canadian identity as a means to try and understand why he necessarily has those existential fears. With the use of photo and video, he hopes to showcase his perspective and what he is FEELING, as well as what he is DOING in the present as a way of coping. By taking into consideration the traditional, cultural, and philosophical Chinese expectation of continuing one’s family lineage and Kev’s inability to do so as a queer body, as well as the idea of Chinese-Canadian immigrants relying on labor and prosperity as a means of survival and presence, Kev asks himself and others: How much is at stake in terms of ensuring a long term presence or settled lineage for queer and diasporic identities? Will someone like himself ever find their own sense of kinship or family? Where do these certain individuals lie within an incredibly labor and wealth focused society?
Print Details
Title: Untitled
Medium: Photo-litho and inkjet chine-collé
Image Size: 30″x15″
Sarah Sceviour
Sarah Sceviour is a visual artist born in Fort McMurray and raised in Bonnyville, Alberta. Her work is sourced primarily in painting, drawing, and printmaking and she draws inspiration for her work from her pets. Her prints are created around the themes of loss, with the passage of time, and the creation of memories. She uses her pets as the subject matter because they become companions and family members, and dealing with the loss of one can be difficult, and is something that many people have experienced. Working with this subject matter and theme became a way for her to cope with the loss of a pet in September of 2020. She was struggling with feelings of emptiness, and her house felt different no longer having the presence of a dog around, as though it was missing an integral part of what made it feel like home. Her cat and more recently her puppy, have played a role in helping her cope and so she has included them as central figures in her work as well. Working in layered images allows her to make reference to the passage of time and memories made, as well as the feeling of nostalgia and a sense of home. She is currently attending school in Edmonton, Alberta, on Treaty 6 territory at the University of Alberta and working towards obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Art & Design in 2021.
Sydney Rusnak
Sydney Rusnak, an artist born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta. In 2021 she will obtain her Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the University of Alberta. She utilizes painting, printmaking, multimedia as well as found material to address topics centered around the environment. Sydney’s body of work is dedicated to the nature found within the Kootenay valley to the Purcell mountains. In these areas, lies a beautiful juxtaposition of destruction, regrowth, as well as the untouched. Through her work she aims to create awareness of the impact of natural disasters, as well as human impact, whether indirectly or directly, in order to pay tribute to this natural environment that has aided in my own personal growth. Within these ecosystems she focuses on an eternal cycle of health, destruction and regrowth that is highlighted. Her work provokes viewers to empathise with this environmental destruction by highlighting the beauty in these isolated areas that have once been jeopardized while also depicting parts of the journey to get to them. Through this journey of memories and documentation, the viewer arrives in each space where she captures her feelings toward each area which may have succeeded for the time being to be protected from human impact for now. Sydney intends to focus on the repreciations of apathy and inaction and provoke the question “what will be left”?
Healthy is one part of a three part series looking at cycles of healthy, fire, and regrowth of trees. Here the change in the trees is documented through three trees created through relief printing which are the focus of the print. This series looks at the forest fires that have occurred many times over the years which is becoming an eternal cycle of heath, destruction and regrowth.
Print Details
Title: Healthy
Medium: Relief print on paper chine colled to plywood
Size (hxw): 17″x52″
